The GOP hasn’t many people who have an international standing, frankly, and even less that aren’t notoriously disliked and mistrusted abroad.
If they really wanted to pick the worst, they should get Michael “Savage”, but he’s not a pol, just a wingnut talk-radio guy.
I think they should just give Chalabi US citizenship and pick him. Or even funnier would be Netanyahu; at least, they’ll stop pretending.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Nov 15 2004 15:41 utc | 4

Does Powell have a book coming out? hmmmm?

Posted by: beq | Nov 15 2004 16:10 utc | 6

this purge is one of the more alarming recent events. I have no love for CIA, but some people there are at least rational pragmatists — deficient in conscience, perhaps, but at least in touch with reality. looks like the RBC is being purged and CIA is likely to slip its moorings and drift off into lala land as it did under the Brothers Kray, oops, I meant Dulles.
what this all is like… it’s like having worked your way up an ice slope foot by foot and inch by inch for gruelling hours, only to lose a piton and do an uncontrolled slide right back to the base. 30 years of desperate effort went into reining in the Secrecy State, exposing the high crimes of the Nixon gang, bringing some kind of moderation to US policy, breaking the zombielike trance of the postwar period, bringing just a wee whiff of internationalism to US culture. all gone in the blink of an eye. back to the Planet of McCarthy, almost overnight.
if you knew all that I knew / my poor Jerusalem…

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 15 2004 17:19 utc | 8

Sorry – me above.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Nov 15 2004 17:27 utc | 10

Just heard on BBC radio……….. according to an excellent source………
It’s drumrollsssssssssssssssssssssss
Condi Rice.
Oh fuck

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 15 2004 18:11 utc | 12

b
911 cover/cock-up gets her the ticket methinks.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 15 2004 18:53 utc | 14

Now for a good laugh –
As Loony Tunes as wittle georgie “winning” on Forbes-Heinz///Kerry’s landslide victory….(is there something wrong w/me that I’m missing the comedy there)
Is that 9/11 Whitewash was nominated for National Bk Award in Non-Fiction, ….While, happily, the underwriter for WTC has just issued a report saying Sorry Nazis, but that steel wouldn’t burn from those minor fires!!!!!
(Sorry, I don’t have link handy. It’s @Rense & truthout, I think.)
People trying to put tog. coalition, hopefully – go to donotconcede.com. Shoulda called it ConcedeNowGeorge.com. If anyone wants to join me in suggesting that, email away.
Maybe we could get Carter Center to say they wouldn’t certify the election NOW. Anybody know about that. In ’00 they issued report way after the fact.
I’d bet Georgie’s Diaper Changer @Nat. Security, was eased out to put Wolfie in.
We need some new names. One for America, which if election fraud stands is no longer America; or do we just follow the German example & call it Nazi2 America? By any miracle, does anyone know the name of the NYT of Weimar Germany? And maybe anything about them & how they handled the takeover?

Posted by: jj | Nov 15 2004 21:23 utc | 16

You don’t really believe these folks will “resign”, as in retreat to the pond and fester in isolation? No, this is all a giant game of musical chairs.

Posted by: Lupin | Nov 15 2004 21:43 utc | 18

Wolfowitz unbound. The idea is terrifying.
Killing Hope
“[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It’s not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It’s that they just don’t care … the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren’t happening to them or people close to them … then they just don’t care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.” William Blum

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 16 2004 2:30 utc | 20

Full Spectrum Bush Doctrine
2001: “If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”
2001: The Bush administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review”, directing the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries- China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria-and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations.
2002: In September, the White House issued its “National Security Strategy”, which declared:
Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States…. America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed…. We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed…. We cannot let our enemies strike first…. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
Preemptiveness is essentially the rationale imperial Japan, without being overly paranoid, used to justify its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and which Nazi Germany, asa sham pretext, used to justify its invasion of Poland in 1939.
To one observer, the meaning of the “National Security Strategy” was this:
It dashes the aspirations of those who had hoped that the world was moving toward a system of international law that would allow for the peaceful / resolution of conflicts, through covenants and courts. In place of this, a \, single power that shuns covenants and courts has proclaimed that it intends to dominate the world militarily, intervening preemptively where | necessary to exorcise threats…. Those who want a world in which no | power is supreme and in which laws and covenants are used to settle conflicts will begin a new debate-about how to contend with imperial America.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 16 2004 2:38 utc | 22

Actually, at this point, no one in the rest of the world cares who they name. That person will have no credence. Helluva way to run a State Department.

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Nov 16 2004 2:52 utc | 24

Comments on Rice and her new position.
Rice and No Beans

That illusion is gone. Rice’s face is the game face of the Bushies, bony with Unwavering Resolve, eyes fanatical, mouth tensed. She has shown herself to be not a listener but a dictation machine on playback. “The President believes…” “The President has always said…” “The President has very consistent in arguing that…” “The President has said all along…” And now the dictation machine is in a position to dictate to other nations how they can fight terror and help make America a bigger, better empire. It’ll be the President wants this, the President wants that, the President is firm in his belief that…
But her incompetence precedes her, as does her presumptuous statement that for their failure to support the U.S. in Iraq, France should be punished, Germany ignored, and Russia forgiven. Punished, ignored, and forgiven for being right in the first place and refusing to take part in this debacle?–such nerve.

Europeans wary of Rice replacing Powell

PARIS – The appointment of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state is bad news for the already fragile American-European relationship, European experts and commentators said Tuesday.
Newspaper editorials and interviews with specialists in U.S.-European relations lamented the departure of Colin Powell and predicted more tension between the Bush administration and European countries as a result.
In Spain, the newspaper El Pais said, “The White House has lost its moderate face,” while the Kommersant newspaper in Russia went further: “Now the hawks will attack us.”
…
Not everyone was convinced that Rice’s appointment is all bad. While predicting that a U.S.-Europe partnership is going to be difficult in the next four years, Victor Bulmer-Thomas, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, said there was a silver lining for Europe.
“Europe also wants to develop a unified security and foreign policy,” he said. “Paradoxically, a bad relationship with the United States is an opportunity for Europe. Coming up with a unified European policy will be made easier by not having a sympathetic person” as secretary of state.

Politics Prevails Again In Rice’s Appointment

Until the very moment when the White House announced Colin Powell’s resignation by “mutual” agreement, worried friends of the United States around the world hoped that the Secretary of State would somehow linger to argue for a realistic, multilateral foreign policy. Those friends knew that Mr. Powell was ineffectual in making those arguments more often than not, and they regarded him as sadly discredited by his participation in the fakery that led to the Iraq war. Still they cherished him as a symbol, at least, of an America that sought to lead rather than merely dominate and to listen rather than just dictate.
…
In the months to come, Ms. Rice can be expected to enforce whatever purging of State Department professionals is required of her. That means throwing out the diplomats who correctly warned of the difficulties and complexities inherent in pacifying post-Saddam Iraq. Those patriotic bureaucrats will soon pay dearly for trying to forestall disaster.

THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL WOMAN

IF THERE were a monkey in the White House – and many reckon there is – then his trainer would be the world’s most powerful person.
In the case of George W Bush, almost everything he knows about foreign policy has been learnt from Condoleezza Rice.

This is all for today, still got some work that needs to be done.

Posted by: Fran | Nov 17 2004 19:02 utc | 26

Another on Rice and her position
NY Metro – Intelligencer Briefing

At a recent dinner party hosted by New York Times D.C. bureau chief Philip Taubman and his wife, Times reporter Felicity Barringer, and attended by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Maureen Dowd, Steven Weisman, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb—” and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.” Jaws dropped, but a guest says the slip by the unmarried politician, who spends weekends with the president and his wife, seemed more psychologically telling than incriminating. Nobody thinks Bush and Rice are actually an item. A National Security Council spokesman laughed and said, “No comment.”

:-]

Posted by: b | Nov 17 2004 19:31 utc | 28