When I Grow Up...

I want to be Condoleeza Rice. She has got to be one of the smartest women I’ve been privileged to set on eyes on and listen to in this new century.

I caught her on CSPAN last night doing one of those “press relations” gigs at the ASNE 2005 Convention (see C-span website for clip) where everyone sends their reporters to a big conference and a notable person stands up and talks then gives them an opportunity to attack…er…ask them questions en masse.

This lady can cut the legs out from under her adversaries and beat them with the bloody stump, all the while smiling benignly behind the pulpit.

I didn’t catch the whole thing, but the ending was great.

The last question of the event was from the usual culprit, asking why the President would seek to appoint John Bolton as ambassador to the UN when he “so obviously holds disdain for the institution”. I believe that is a direct quote. I remember it because I was thinking, “How many times does this have to be explained to you morons?” I think Condi was thinking that exact same thing.

Paraphrasing Condi in Kung Fu Kat speak:

Look, you moron. The UN is all fucked up. Everybody knows it’s fucked up. Even the UN knows it’s fucked up. John Bolton is good at explaining to people, in terms they can understand, that they are fucked up and need to do something else. He’s our “fixer”. It needs fixed. He knows how to get the job done. He fixed the nuclear proliferation agreement with Russia, got other countries to chip in on the cost of destroying Russian surplus nukes, and a whole list of other things you morons seem to yell about, but ignore when it’s getting done.

Of course, you’re a moron so maybe things like rape in the Congo, Food For Oil scams, and people telling the UN IAEA to go take a flying leap, letting Sudan chair the human rights council and Iraq, pre invasion, chair the WMD proliferation council is all good with you, but, to normal people, it’s fucked up. In which case, we are going to send in somebody who can get the job done because it’s obvious that the morons up at the UN, based on their recently released reports and recommendations, are just going to keep doing the same fucked up shit.

So, stop asking me moronic questions and let’s get on with fixing the UN.

Of course, she said it much better and with a smile, but the guy was still standing their with his head down, knowing he had just gotten a lecture from the professor about being a moron in her classroom.

She then went on to close with a little elucidation about her experiences as the expert on the USSR at the end of the cold war.

In short, she said that it was not by her power, nor efforts that they were brought down. Everything that happened was because very good decisions had been made in the past that set the foundation for the future fall of the Soviet (Evil) Empire. She further explained in her best professorial lecturing mode that, in 1947, 1948, ’49, etc, with the fall of China to the Communist, the division of Berlin and subsequent crisis, the fall of the last free government in Czechoslovakia to the Communist and any number of events would seemed to have precluded any hope the United States and other democratic entities had of defeating the spread of Communism and toppling the Soviet Empire.

But, they still planned for it, they still acted on that belief and they still set the foundation by establishing anchoring democracies like Germany and Japan, then South Korea, etc, right on the borders of Communist countries, establishing an opposite ideology that focused on freedom and democracy to counter the ideology of Communism.

We know what happened to the major Communist power in the world. Gone. Finished. Finito.

We’re still working on China and North Korea.

She went on to point out that there is nothing in Islam or the middle east that precludes democracy nor demands its fate to be that of the extremists. We have dared to set out on our own anchoring actions, building the foundations of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to directly counter the destructive ideology of extremism.

We took a page right out of the old Cold War playbook and turned it on our newest enemy. For all those naysayers out there, stop looking up all the stupid piddly crap about “America did this wrong and this wrong, here, here and here” and got on board with the big strategy.

Failure to do so will make you the funny people in history we laugh at today who insisted that the Communists couldn’t be defeated and that we should learn to live with them. The ones that insisted they weren’t a threat to us. Why I didn’t vote for John F. Kerry amongst other reasons; he was wrong on the most important events in American history. Was I supposed to trust a moron with our future against terrorism and extremism?

They’re the same folks that are telling us that Islamic terrorists don’t really exist, aren’t a threat, it is part of a culture we should learn to accept.

Paraphrasing Condi in Kung Fu Kat speak:

Fuck that!