Great Piece On The Fall of Condi Rice

Not too long ago, Condoleezza Rice was being touted a possible GOP candidate for president, which I found to be pretty funny given how consistently shitty her job performance has been over the last six years.

Well, the times have definitely changed (from Joel Brinkley of the San Francisco Chronicle):

A few months ago, [Rice] decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, 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.

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. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document." * * *

As George Bush so famously said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."