{"id":199471,"date":"2007-07-25T01:07:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T06:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/25\/why-did-we-think-she-was-competent\/"},"modified":"2007-07-25T01:07:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T06:07:00","slug":"why-did-we-think-she-was-competent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/25\/why-did-we-think-she-was-competent\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Did We Think She Was Competent?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is an interesting article on Condoleeza Rice.  It appears that a view months ago, <a href=\"http:\/\/sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2007\/07\/22\/INGDFR1UV512.DTL\">she wrote an article about Lebanon and how public\/private partnerships might help in rebuilding the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Problem was, no on was willing to publish it.  It came back from the &#8220;<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">Wall Street Journal<\/span>, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Think about that.  A <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">sitting Secretary of State<\/span> could not get a paper to publish her OP\/ED because it was so hactacular.<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. &#8220;I kept hearing the same thing: &#8216;There&#8217;s no news in this.&#8217; &#8221; Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush&#8217;s wise leadership. &#8220;It read like a campaign document.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The author goes on tho show how Bush politicized the State Department, as his administration has every other bureaucracy that they could get their hands on.<\/p>\n<p>This misses the real point.  The real point is that Condoleeza Rice is a complete incompetent who, much like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, has an unbroken record of failure.<\/p>\n<p>This failure exceeds my wildest imagination.  The fact that an academic, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">who was secretary of state<\/span> was unable to write an article of sufficient quality for publication is a truly pathetic statement.  In the publish or perish world of academe, this is inconceivable.<\/p>\n<ul><\/p>\n<li>In the 1980s, she was lecturing troops in then West Berlin, and when someone wanted details, she did no know what a unit honorific in the Soviet army was.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>In 1991, she was adamant that Boris Yeltzin not be given head of state protocol, because the USSR was going to reconstitute itself.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Throughout her career, she has been the only Sovietologist who did not recognize the sickness of their economy and society.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>In 2001, she told Clinton&#8217;s natinal security team that she wasn&#8217;t worrying about al Queida, that the real threat was a resurgent Russia.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>She is a fraud, elevated through right wing affirmative action, because it was convenient to have someone with a PhD in Sovietology to parrot right wing talking points.<\/p>\n<p>No doubt her position as a double minority, black and a woman, has also served to elevate her stature in the party and with the pundits too.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans believe that government is stupid, so they leave the stupid to govern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is an interesting article on Condoleeza Rice. It appears that a view months ago, she wrote an article about Lebanon and how public\/private partnerships might help in rebuilding the country. Problem was, no on was willing to publish it. It came back from the &#8220;Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[991,964,978,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-foreign-relations","category-politics","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}