Israel Matzav

Please, not Condi Clueless!

Posting for the next few hours will be a bit less frequent, since I am attending the funeral of my friend R. Yisrael Landsman zt"l (may the memory of the righteous be a blessing). I am setting up posts in advance. The actual funeral is at 6:45 pm (estimated) from the Shamgar funeral home to the Mount of Olives.

**********

The possibility of Condoleeza Rice being Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential candidate was raised last week at the meeting with Ari Fleischer and Matt Brooks, and Fleischer dismissed it out of hand. That was right before I started to hear a lot of talk about it.

We here in Israel don't feel very fond of Condi (hence the name at the top of this post). We have memories of Annapolis and of her comparing the 'Palestinians' to the blacks in the Jim Crow south of the '60's and of her ambivalent (at best) response to the Second Lebanon War. We recall that from the time that she became Secretary of State, George W. Bush seemed a little less pro-Israel right up to his last year in office. And it was she who seemed to be constantly fighting opposite the neocons who seemed so much more on our side.

Selwyn Duke has some more traditional conservative grounds for rejecting a Rice candidacy.

Then try this Rice comment on for size. She also said when defending Iraq policy that it is the kind of people who "once believed that blacks were unfit for democracy" who say "that the people of the Middle East, perhaps because of their color or their creed or their culture or even perhaps because of their religion, are somehow incapable of democracy."

Now, we know it was Rice's job under George W. Bush to defend his administration's policies, but the above simply was not an intelligent defense. How can you conflate an inborn physical characteristic such as skin color with creed, culture and religion, which involve belief? Does Rice not understand why John Adams stated, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other"? If a people's beliefs don't influence its compatibility with democracy, what does?

Following Rice's logic out, we'd have to say that a people imbued with Nazi or communist doctrine couldn't be unfit for democracy, either, as such things are simply "creeds." Translated, her comment means that beliefs simply don't matter. Of course, I don't think this actually is her belief; she surely just didn't think things through. But is it intelligent to make public pronouncements on matter of import without thinking things through?

Add to this the fact that Rice described herself as "mildly pro-choice," wishes the U.S. would have signed on to the global-warming scam treaty the Kyoto Protocol, and was so enthusiastic about Barack Obama's 2008 win that it indicated she might have voted for him, and what kind of profile emerges? She simply is not a conservative -- except maybe in the European sense of the term. And, we have to ask, is this an intelligent political ideology?

Read the whole thing.

Shmuel Rosner notes that his Israel Factor panels have discussed Rice in the past.

Anyway, in the past we did ask the Factor panel a couple of questions ‎about Rice, and the verdict was not very favorable. In 2008, when we ‎asked the panel to identify the better candidates to be “special peace ‎envoy” for the Obama administration, Rice was at the bottom of the list:

And even lower regard was saved for the person now running the ‎peace process - Condoleezza Rice. The view of this panel is quite ‎clear: Those who want a more vigorous process think that she’s ‎just not up for the job, those who think it’s a waste of time will ‎generally consider here to be too much into it. Thus, Rice gets low ‎marks from almost all panelists. ‎

In 2006 and in 2007, when Rice was included in our survey of ‎potential Presidential candidates, her ratings were also not very high, ‎and for similar reasons:‎

Various panelists gave different answers about what’s bothering ‎them, so there is no alternative but to assume that Rice is just a ‎miserable victim of circumstances. The panelists who are worried ‎by the possibility of American pressure on the Palestinian issue ‎lowered her grade because they believe that some of her ‎statements show she is over-committed to the establishment of a ‎Palestinian state. Others, who really have no diplomatic problem ‎with Rice or with a certain amount of American pressure, lowered ‎her grade because their estimation of President Bush is very low ‎and her loyalty to his policy causes them to doubt her intelligence.‎

Labels: Campaign 2012, Condoleeza Rice, Conservatives, Mitt Romney

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:23 PM