There are plenty of editorials to choose from this morning to describe Condoleezza Rice’s
testimony at yesterday’s 9/11 hearing. (Here’s the complete transcript.) We made our snap judgment about the Condi context yesterday
while the hearing was still in progress: “She may well be remembered as Condoleezza (“Cover
Your Ass”) Rice.”
Today’s New York Times editorial called her “utterly
unconvincing when she tried to portray Al Qaeda as anything approaching a top concern for the
White House.” The
“unconvincing,” notes that she “didn’t add much to the administration’s previous explanations,”
remarks that she was “both contradictory and implausible” and deplores the fact that Rice could
not accept the idea that “mistakes were made and more could have been done. It’s a shame that
President Bush and his top national security aide haven’t offered that honest accounting.”
In his quick piece yesterday, political analyst Howard Fineman
wrote in Newsweek: “Stylistically and tactically she was serviceable.”
He too pointed out Rice’s unwillingness to take responsibility: “Asked at the hearing why she
hadn’t pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn’t know, about domestic terrorist
threats, Rice acted as though the question was an odd one: it wasn’t her job.”
As to our Maximum Leader’s whereabouts on the day of the 9/11 attacks, Fineman
writes:
Remember the picture of the president in the classroom, being told of the
attack by chief of staff Andy Card? The American people thought they were seeing a man
suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated. That won him enormous
sympathy and patience from the voters. But what if he was literally on vacation—at the ranch in
Crawford—when he should have been making sure that someone was ringing alarm bells
throughout the bureaucracy?
Which brings us to this morning’s Times column by Bob Herbert, who comments on the
fearless Leader’s whereabouts yesterday: “The president called Ms. Rice from his pickup truck on
the ranch to tell her she had done a great job before the panel. It doesn’t get more surreal than
that. Mr. President, there’s a war on. You might consider hopping a plane to Washington.”
How about we retire him to his ranch permanently, where he can ride around in his pickup
truck to his heart’s content?
Postscript: Wading in the Velvet Sea blogger Ryan McGee says he put on
his “investigative hat (the one without the beer straws in it) and waded through the actual
testimony transcripts.” His exclusive analysis deconstructs Condi’s pop-cult
context.
