An ode to Ms. Rice, from the Guardian:

[motocicleta]

She's the most powerful black woman in the world. Why can't I stand the sight of her?

Candace Allen has spent her whole life cheering on fellow African-Americans who have battled their way to the top. Yet the extraordinary career of Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, fills her only with revulsion and anger. Here she explains why

Wednesday December 5, 2007
The Guardian

I am African-American. We are a sentimental people in the main and we tend to track our own. We are aware of others of colour who cross our spaces. We look around asking: "How did she/he come to be here/there? Is his/her story extraordinary, coincidental or totally banal?"

At 80 years old, my dentist father has been a desegregator all of his adult life, both professionally and domestically. Although raised in Richmond, Virginia, he chose to rear his family up north, first in Boston, then in a Connecticut suburb of New York. When I call him to ask how things are going during the first week of the US Open, he tells me that the Williams sisters are doing fine, as is James Blake, and there are a young boy and girl playing in their first Open who won't get too far this time but are looking mighty good. Unsaid, I know the nature of the report he's going to give; unsaid, he knows what I want to hear: stories about black people coming on to traditional white fields of play and not just holding their own but kicking ass and taking names. Smiles, pride, a fist in the air.

So why the viscerally negative reaction, my gut literally roiling with distaste and disappointment, when I look at Condoleezza Rice, the first African-American female to be secretary of state of the world's one remaining superpower?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2222067,00.html

So much for the legacy, Ms. Rice.

[goclark]

1. Sad but I feel the same way nt

[motocicleta]

3. Ms. Allen makes a strong case. nt

[Lord Helmet]

2. she's a waste of brain cells.

[DURHAM D]

4. A very good read - thanks for posting. n/t

[jaysunb]

5. Powerful Indictment !

Allen, lays out in plain terms what most black people think.

[Olney Blue]

6. This is an amazing article. Thank you for posting.

I have to confess that I have been baffled by the obvious adoration of Rice for someone so intellectually inferior to her- this helps explain it.

[motocicleta]

7. Isn't it a great read?

It certainly crystallized my thoughts.

[motocicleta]

8. My favorite bit:

"I am sure he has done his homework, and he is bound to have heard many tales of those horrible weeks in 68 during the course of his young life, but not having been around then he cannot know in his gut how the death of Dr King had such a visceral impact on Americans, both black and white, who weren't spawn of the devil. To claim more concern for an unknown foreign people thousands of miles away when, regardless of your family's political notions, you have heard this man's eloquence in defence of your freedom and personhood, when all around you people are heaving with grief, anger and despair, bespeaks a dishonesty of colossal dimensions."

snip

"Or maybe she is being truthful and thus displaying a lack of human empathy that is even more disturbing, indeed smacks of the sociopathic."

There's the choice, America: our Secretary of State is either colossally dishonest, or a sociopath. Not that the latter excludes the former, but I suspect the latter is the dominant feature.