CON GAMES: The Full CondiNope—not me, no way, no how was I going to leap to my feet in the Benedict Music Tent here in Aspen for any one of the multiple standing Os which the putatively liberal crowd was giving away to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: one for yakking with Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson, the other for playing Brahms and Dvorak on the Steinway with four worthies from the Aspen Music Festival and School.
I know, I know: either I should have stood for something or I should have stood in bed.
I should have stood for the music part of an afternoon of “Words and Music,” because surely even an unreconstructed liberal like myself could admire the mastery she showed at the piano in a town where she had once been a student (dreaming of playing Carnegie Hall) at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Surely a political palooka like me could at least enjoy the delicious unlikelihood of a young black woman playing classical music in the Deep South, gaining admission to the hoity-toity festival in Aspen—and then somehow, miraculously, growing up to become United States Secretary of State and who knows what else.
Instead I stayed on my fat whining butt—Seat 827, Row N, Section 800, for the record—for the Vulcan the Secret Service calls “Falcon” because I have come to absolutely hate the way everyone loves Condi. She’s charming all right: she loves to cook Cajun like her Cajun grandmother taught her; she wants to be commissioner of the National Football League (NFL); and she plays chamber music with her friends when the world allows.
Charming: I’m sure she’s kind of animals and fond of little children, too, for a person who has blood on her hands. You probably know she called the Presidential Daily Briefing that warned President George W. Bush about Osama bin Ladin by name “a historical document” and that she conflated bin Ladin with Saddam Hussein in her famous “mushroom cloud” pronouncements. But did you know as a board member at Chevron the company named one of its oil tankers the S.S. Condoleezza Rice? Did you know one of her co-authors, Phillip Zelikow, was the executive director of the 9/11 commission that all but gave her a clean bill of health despite her abject cluelessness about jihadism in the days and months before September 11, 2001?...
http://www.aspenpost.net/2008/08/03/con-games-the-full-condi/