Rice eats Bush

A forthcoming biography of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, excerpted in Newsweek (and linked to by Think Progress) includes the following, um, tasty tidbits. . . .

. . . Rice was drawn to Bush. "First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around," she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. "He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it."

Digging into what? Huh? [cough] Sorry. OK. . . .

Bush was also a bad boy. And Rice, according to friends and family, had a thing for bad boys. . . .

Boy? Bush is a “bad boy” you say? More like a petulant child. . . .

Rice's friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. "He fills that need," Hamberry-Green decided. "Bush is her feed.”

Wha-a-a-a. . . I think I just swallowed some of my own vomit. I guess that’s how she keeps her girlish figure (remember: Bush “feed” is part of a balanced lifestyle that includes diet and exercise. . . and lying for your husband boss.)

[Says Rice’s] stepmother Clara Rice: "she just can't say no to that man."

(This) White House sex scandal aside, the issue that has Rice steamed this week concerns the release of a book by former CIA chief George Tenet where he accuses the then-National Security Adviser of dismissing his urgent warnings, back in the Summer of 2001, about an imminent attack on the US by al Qaeda terrorists. Specifically, Tenet says he told Rice, “We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.”

When confronted with that quote this weekend on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rice gets quite hot and bothered, and her response is really something wild:

The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.

So many things to parse, so little time. . . . Last first: What you were supposed to strike? Uh, I think his name sounds something like OSAMA BIN LADEN! Second, Rice seems taken aback by the suggestion that they launch a preemptive strike. . . because she has some sort of deep-seated opposition to preemptive force?

But the thing that really pricks my ears: “this is a new fact.” What a strange construction. Rice doesn’t say, “Tenet is lying,” she doesn’t say, “That’s not true,” or, “That didn’t happen,” she says Tenet’s revelation is a “new fact.” True. . . but new.

New to whom?

Worth “digging into,” don’t you think?


(By the way, Happy “Law Day.”)