Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
Of course you recognize the quote. The glib and unflappable Renault has become a metaphor for the unabashedly self-serving and corrupt official who really doesn’t care whether you know it or not.
As quoted in the New York Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that the United States had failed to understand the depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime leaders. Well, I’m shocked; and in the same way and to precisely the same degree that Captain Renault was shocked to find that there was gambling at Rick’s.
"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Doctor Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.” Ms. Rice pointed out that the election results surprised just about everyone. "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing."
Rice should talk to people outside her circle of sycophants. The chorus of jeers and smears, high fives and hot air from the Great Uneducated Right hasn’t completely drowned out the voices that have argued that Iraq would freely vote for someone far more inimical to the West and its interests than was Saddam. And so they may have done, and so now have the Palestinians.
Perhaps if Rice should stop to consider her failures to see, failures to report, failures to anticipate, failures to investigate, she might produce shock enough to start a tsunami – but she won’t. It’s not in the script and after all. We still don’t know why she sat on the warning about an al Qaeda attack, why she didn’t see that the invasion would not go exactly as it did, that we would not be welcomed, that the oil fields would not produce - that Saddam had no weapons or plants to build them or materials to use nor any way to deliver them. Of course the Administration hardly has to justify its gross failures here and abroad while it can count on blind, flag waving, Budweiser swilling patriotism. I’m quite sure my mailbox will again fill with quasi-literate, misspelled, ungrammatical hate mail, filled with references to communism, New York, Cindy Sheehan, Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore and all the other demons of the demented despot loving losers of the Starboard wing.
Martin Indyk, who was a top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, says: "But on the American side, the conceptual failure that contributed to disaster was the president's belief that democracy and elections solve everything." That’s an understatement.
5 comments:
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that Condi Rice is shicked! What is she a doctor of anyway? She's a doctor like Dr. Pepper was a doctor.
shocked not shicked. Although she could be shicked too.
She's a DD - Doctor of Deceit. I don't blame her, that's her job, but I do blame the people who overlook each contradiction because they want so badly to believe their side aren't crooks.
American politics is like watching a car crash.
In slow motion
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