Condi holds her own
After the star chamber she went through last spring during the 9/11 commission circus, today's confirmation hearings for the SecState nomination of National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice must to her have seemed like a walk in the park:
Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice told senators on Tuesday that a U.S. exit strategy from Iraq is "directly proportional'' to Iraq's ability to defend itself against terrorists after this month's elections. Stepping out from her largely behind-the-scenes role as President Bush's national security adviser, Rice said she could not give Congress a timetable for American disengagement.
"The goal is to get the mission accomplished,'' she said. "We're right now focused on security for the (January 30th) election.''
Seems like an obvious answer, doesn't it? But with Dr. Rice's confirmation in no genuine doubt (barring a Donk filibuster, which these days can never be ruled out), the minority party's priority was to play to its wingnut base, and that meant rehashing all the same tired, discredited anti-war propaganda from last year's presidential campaign in the form of questions to the SecState designate.
Not that it wouldn't still be tiresome to have to sit through it all for the umpteenth time:
[Senator Joe] Biden [D-DE] said the Administration must "level with the American people'' over an exit strategy and whether U.S. troop levels there are adequate.
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who has been skeptical of the Administration's Iraq policies [which makes him a media favorite], pressed her further on an exit strategy.
Senator John Kerry, D-MA, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, challenged Rice's claim that the right number of troops were in Iraq and criticized the Administration's postwar policies. [Or, in other words, he continued his campaign for the 2008 Dem presidential nomination.]
A brutally frank answer would have been that we cannot "exit" until Iran and Syria have been liberated, since both will have to be done in the very near future and Iraq is the perfect staging area for military action against both enemy powers. But there was no need to get the proverbial cart ahead of the horse, and the beauty of that is that had any of the Dems tossed out a question in that direction, they would have sounded even more loony than Barbara Boxer did already when she all but called Dr. Rice a liar to her face.
Dr. Rice also had to put up with the "what are you going to do to mend fences with all the allies the President has alienated" nonsense. Biden's version was that, "relations with many of our oldest friends are quite frankly scraping the bottom right now.'' Rice pledged to make that a priority, but really, it's Old Europe that pissed in our faces for the past three years, not the reverse - which Biden, to be fair, acknowledged when he added, "I have one simple message: Get over it. Get over it. President Bush is our President for the next four years. So get over it and start to act in your interest, Europe.''
This isn't to say that Condi pitched a shutout. As David Frum reports:
The story is going around Washington that Senate Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar handed Condoleezza Rice a list of names of “neocons” he wanted blacklisted from the Department of State – and that Rice assented. If the story is true, you can see how it might signal unscrupulous present and former CIA officials to go even further – even to the extent of jeopardizing secret missions.
I cannot for the life of me fathom why Dr. Rice or the Bush White House would cave to such a demand. I find it impossible to believe that Chairman Lugar would have bottled up her nomination in committee, openly and publicly defying a freshly and robustly re-elected president of his own party on the eve of his second Inauguration. Foggy Bottom has needed a complete fumigation of careerists and "realists" and their replacement by "neocons" for decades. It defeats the whole purpose of substituting Rice for Colin Powell at the top to pre-emptively acquiesce to her undermining before she even takes over.
Hopefully it's just a "rumor" and nothing more. Otherwise it signals that, as Frum discusses at considerable length, the legions of the President's fair weather friends are as legion on Capitol Hill as they are in his own bureaucracy.
And there's not much that even Dr. Rice will be able to do about that.
Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice told senators on Tuesday that a U.S. exit strategy from Iraq is "directly proportional'' to Iraq's ability to defend itself against terrorists after this month's elections. Stepping out from her largely behind-the-scenes role as President Bush's national security adviser, Rice said she could not give Congress a timetable for American disengagement.
"The goal is to get the mission accomplished,'' she said. "We're right now focused on security for the (January 30th) election.''
Seems like an obvious answer, doesn't it? But with Dr. Rice's confirmation in no genuine doubt (barring a Donk filibuster, which these days can never be ruled out), the minority party's priority was to play to its wingnut base, and that meant rehashing all the same tired, discredited anti-war propaganda from last year's presidential campaign in the form of questions to the SecState designate.
Not that it wouldn't still be tiresome to have to sit through it all for the umpteenth time:
[Senator Joe] Biden [D-DE] said the Administration must "level with the American people'' over an exit strategy and whether U.S. troop levels there are adequate.
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who has been skeptical of the Administration's Iraq policies [which makes him a media favorite], pressed her further on an exit strategy.
Senator John Kerry, D-MA, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, challenged Rice's claim that the right number of troops were in Iraq and criticized the Administration's postwar policies. [Or, in other words, he continued his campaign for the 2008 Dem presidential nomination.]
A brutally frank answer would have been that we cannot "exit" until Iran and Syria have been liberated, since both will have to be done in the very near future and Iraq is the perfect staging area for military action against both enemy powers. But there was no need to get the proverbial cart ahead of the horse, and the beauty of that is that had any of the Dems tossed out a question in that direction, they would have sounded even more loony than Barbara Boxer did already when she all but called Dr. Rice a liar to her face.
Dr. Rice also had to put up with the "what are you going to do to mend fences with all the allies the President has alienated" nonsense. Biden's version was that, "relations with many of our oldest friends are quite frankly scraping the bottom right now.'' Rice pledged to make that a priority, but really, it's Old Europe that pissed in our faces for the past three years, not the reverse - which Biden, to be fair, acknowledged when he added, "I have one simple message: Get over it. Get over it. President Bush is our President for the next four years. So get over it and start to act in your interest, Europe.''
This isn't to say that Condi pitched a shutout. As David Frum reports:
The story is going around Washington that Senate Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar handed Condoleezza Rice a list of names of “neocons” he wanted blacklisted from the Department of State – and that Rice assented. If the story is true, you can see how it might signal unscrupulous present and former CIA officials to go even further – even to the extent of jeopardizing secret missions.
I cannot for the life of me fathom why Dr. Rice or the Bush White House would cave to such a demand. I find it impossible to believe that Chairman Lugar would have bottled up her nomination in committee, openly and publicly defying a freshly and robustly re-elected president of his own party on the eve of his second Inauguration. Foggy Bottom has needed a complete fumigation of careerists and "realists" and their replacement by "neocons" for decades. It defeats the whole purpose of substituting Rice for Colin Powell at the top to pre-emptively acquiesce to her undermining before she even takes over.
Hopefully it's just a "rumor" and nothing more. Otherwise it signals that, as Frum discusses at considerable length, the legions of the President's fair weather friends are as legion on Capitol Hill as they are in his own bureaucracy.
And there's not much that even Dr. Rice will be able to do about that.
posted by JASmius at 4:05 PM
<<< Home