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April 11, 2004

It's Not About Rice

I have yet been unbusy enough to read Rice' testimony or read Clarke's book, but I'm rather perturbed on how questions about Rice' competence have risen to the level of chatter without any real smoking gun. I've heard talk about her 'performance', which all sounds to me like stupid expectations which will second guess whether or not she is 'intelligent and articulate'. Given that there's only so much that can come out in a couple hours, I expect that she would find a way to defend the White House and her good family friend, GW Bush, half of which is her job.

I don't think anybody is going to say that Condi Rice is the world's best CT expert, but it is important to know whether or not her personality is or is not a barrier to get the the best CT experts to work for the President. So I don't care so much about Rice' future outside of that context.

Again, all of these people we elected to do something other than fight AQ, so all of them will have been caught flat-footed at some point. If there's going to be some political fight about it, I don't hear anybody from the Bush Lied crowd saying the names of other CT people who should have been heeded. If Clarke hadn't stepped forward, nobody would be hounding Rice. So calls for her head are disingenuous from the perspective of lacking evidence of others more competent.

Think about it this way. Have a commission investigate the American public's political pressure on the Bush CT strategy. They've had since nine-eleven to come up with people better than Tom Ridge, Ashcroft, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld. Who are those people? Not even Kerry knows.

So Rice is a poor friggen NSA compared to who, and for what reasons? Sure she's flacking for Bush, that's her job. But what specifically did she do wrong in the prosecution of her duties, and who on the planet is leaking the stories to the media about what royal fuckups she's made? Nobody is leaking stories, so perhaps she's not such a goofball after all. Nobody has the names of people saying she has done anything which rises to the level of the Valerie Plame matter.

So this is not about Rice, it's just another litmus test on the Bush 43 White House.

Yet and still, there are details which ought to be pursued in the interest of getting our country better prepared to deal with the ghost of terrorism yet to come, rather than the ghost terrorism past. Clarke has written a book. Anybody else?

Posted by mbowen at April 11, 2004 05:28 PM

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Posted by: Caol in California at April 11, 2004 06:19 PM