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Showing posts from January 23, 2006

How to say that Condi Rice is not very bright -- without using these exact words...

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Sebastian Mallaby teaches us how to do that: Rice's Blind Spot Monday, January 23, 2006; A15 Nobody doubts her star power. She speaks Russian and talks football, wears dominatrix boots and plays Dvorak, weaves her segregated Alabama childhood into speeches about geopolitics. But the strange thing about Condoleezza Rice is that, when it comes to the stuff that a professor-politician should be really good at, she can be oddly flat-footed. This was true when she emerged as George W. Bush's fitness buddy and foreign policy tutor seven years ago. It is still true now. In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic "realist" position: American diplomacy should "focus on power relationships and great-power politics" rather than on other countries' internal affairs. "Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of de