Blumenthal: Delicious Rhetoric (Condi flatters her prez with empty words)

[kskiska]

Condoleeza Rice flatters her president with empty words as the war on terror loses all direction

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 7, 2006

About two weeks after the 2004 presidential election, on November 13, the British embassy held a surprise 50th birthday party for Condoleezza Rice. On her arrival, Ambassador David Manning presented her with a red Oscar de la Renta gown. When Rice changed into the dress and emerged like Cinderella, she was met by her Prince Charming, dressed in a tuxedo, the man she once called "my husband", President Bush.

The following week, Bush appointed his national security adviser as his secretary of state. Bush's relationship with Rice is perhaps the strangest of his many strange relationships. The mysterious attachment involves complex transactions of noblesse oblige and deference, ignorance and adulation, vulnerability and sweet talk. Like his other female enablers - Karen Hughes, his political image-maker and undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, and Harriet Miers, his legal counsel - Rice is ferociously protective. She shields him from worst-case scenarios, telling him to ignore criticism, and showers him with flattery that he is a world-historical colossus.

As national security adviser, before 9/11, Rice protected Bush from warnings by the counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, about al-Qaida attacks - and demoted Clarke. Before the invasion of Iraq, she lent her imprimatur to the disinformation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and peddled it to the media. She did not demand an Iraq postwar stabilisation plan. Nor did she object to the Pentagon's seizure of Iraq's civil governance responsibilities from the state department. Before Israel's attack on Lebanon, she did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure against Hizbullah. She was party to the decision to lend full war materiel and intelligence support to the effort if Israel would undertake it.

In the beginning, the didactic academic lectured her pupil that he stood at a crossroads like in 1947, at the making of the cold-war policy. After 9/11, she inculcated in Bush the notion that he was a world-builder and could imprint his design on a scale to match the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the sovereignty of nation-states.

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1866264,00.html

[LuckyTheDog]

1. Blumenthal rules (nt)

[rubberducky]

2. Makes you kina wonder about "the rumors"!!!!!!!!!

I wonder if Laura sits around telling the chimp how wonderful he is??;-)

[gumby]

3. This article is so scary on so many levels.

So far, I find Blumenthal trustworthy.

WHO is in charge of this out-of-control government already? Is it Cheney? Is it Rummy? Is it Rice? Hughes? Miers?

WHO is in charge?

Probably those who calls W 'husband.'

[Matilda]

4. What will this woman do for a job when Junior goes?

She really isn't equipped for work in the real world.

Perhaps she'll get a job at the ranch.