Soft face of the hard line (Condi Rice)

The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | March 18,2006

[AmericanMade1776]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE represents some of the very best of America, and some of the worst. Her own life demonstrates the extraordinary possibility that America's great meritocracy offers.

She told her story to 300 university students in Sydney, who had turned out with evident scepticism to listen to the US Secretary of State, on Thursday.

"I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the United States at a time when my family couldn't go to a restaurant or stay in a hotel, when I went to segregated schools," she told them.

"I didn't have a white classmate until we moved to Denver when I was in the 10th grade. I was born into the Birmingham of police dogs and church bombings and of white supremacists and of the Ku Klux Klan and crosses burned on lawns."

And when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in a racist attack in 1963, two of the four girls killed by the blast were Rice's friends.

Her father taught her to use a gun at the age of eight, for her own protection; in the same year Rice decided she would one day work in the White House.

[AmericanMade1776]

the high priestess leading the prayers for the democratic transformation of the world.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice deplanes after she touched down in Sydney, Australia, Wednesday, March 15, 2006. Rice is in Australia to attend the Trilateral Strategis Dialogue with Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, POOL)

[Slip18]

Oh, I so hope Condi changes her mind and runs for POTUS.

[AmericanMade1776]

I sure like her Style, and her clear cool intellect.

[yoe]

I've great respect for this lady, but it is on her watch that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi was given a student visa to attend - part time- Yale. This isn't just a little thing falling through the cracks, this is appalling.

[LZ_Bayonet]

"Oh, I so hope Condi changes her mind and runs for POTUS.

"Condi would be great for 2008!"

[LZ_Bayonet]

"In sum, Rice does not represent any gentler foreign policy than the President she serves. In the most important ways, Rice is the policy. Where she differs is that she is a better salesperson for US policy than anyone else in the Bush Administration."

I think, from the context, that the author meant for us to take this negatively, but - Where is the negative!?