Posted on 03/31/2006 6:03:54 PM PST by blam
Anti-war protests fail to dampen Jack's date with Condi
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor and Suzanne Finney
(Filed: 01
/04/2006)
Condoleezza Rice breezed into Blackburn yesterday, evidently relishing the prospect of a good rowdy protest against her presence.
Condoleezza Rice shows off a special Rovers shirt at Ewood Park
A local mosque had withdrawn an invitation because of threats by extremists to disrupt the visit, and anti-war activists had vowed to dog her every move during her two days in the north-west of England with Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary.
But for Miss Rice, the US secretary of state, this was a perfect way of enlivening her homilies on the joys of democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
"People have a right to protest. That's what democracy is all about," she said, starting her day with an early morning stop at a factory making components for the Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.
"If we have different views, it is best to express them rather than bottle them up. If it were not possible for me to encounter people of different views, I would not be doing my job."
The police, however, were clearly doing their job. They made sure she had no close encounter with the clusters of protesters that occasionally turned up to shout "Condi Rice! Terrorist!" as she made her way around Blackburn and Liverpool, where last night about 2,000 turned out for the main anti-war demonstration.
Miss Rice may be the most powerful woman in the world, but she came dressed like a princess in a mauve trouser suit, pearls and metallic bronze stiletto shoes.
Anti-war protesters demonstrate in Blackburn Her trip was ostensibly an attempt to see the real country beyond the government offices of London. In an intriguing political courtship, Miss Rice last year went out of her way to take Mr Straw and his wife Alice to her home town of Birmingham, Alabama. Now it was their turn to show off his constituency of Blackburn, Lancashire.
The Foreign Secretary tried to draw on the slaving connection between the two places. He pointed out that cotton produced by slaves in the American south was exported to Liverpool, turned into textiles in Blackburn's mills, and re-exported across the world. But such interest in history did not answer the nagging question of what she was doing in the land of the dark satanic mills.
British rolling news stations reported her trip as if it were a royal visit. But for the Americans it was pure tedium. "My editors don't want anything on this," muttered one correspondent from Fox News.
Occasionally, the two secretaries turned to matters of state. At one point they expressed condolences for the victims of an earthquake in Iran. At another they condemned the latest Palestinian suicide bombing.
But much of the day was a strange form of tourism. Instead of trying to get away from the crowds, they attracted them in the shape of journalists and protesters.
In the short drive from the BAE Systems military factory at Samlesbury to the Pleckgate school in Blackburn, Miss Rice saw two different faces of the country.
At the military factory managers had put up a banner heralding the enduring Anglo-American alliance: a Union Flag bound seamlessly with the Stars and Stripes.
But at the school, the 100-odd protesters denounced what those allies had done in Iraq and held up the flag of Palestine, universal symbol of western oppression of the Arabs. "Hey! Hey! Condi Rice! How many kids have you killed today?" they chanted.
The crowd included several dozen children who should have been standing in line with their classmates, shivering as they waited to shake hands with Miss Rice.
"Many children my age have been killed in Iraq and I think it is wrong. She is partly responsible for that," said Sophia Mubarak, a 12-year-old girl whose mother had let her take the day off school to join the protesters.
Still, in the school's grounds, the children seemed excited enough by the arrival of the most important foreign visitor to Blackburn since Mahatma Gandhi came in 1931.
The moment that perhaps meant most to Mr Straw came when he took his guest to Ewood Park, home to Blackburn Rovers and "the centre of the world", according to the Foreign Secretary.
Mr Straw had planned to show her Blackburn playing against rival Wigan, but Sky television unexpectedly moved the fixture to Monday. So Miss Rice had to make do with a few children playing football in an empty stadium, and a chat with Rovers' American keeper Brad Friedel. In Ewood Park's conference room, the two secretaries delivered speeches on the virtues of democracy in the Middle East.
In keeping with her view that America had to be more understanding of the world, Miss Rice admitted that the US had committed "many mistakes, maybe thousands of mistakes" in recent years.
The former head of Stanford University said: "I am certain there are going to be many dissertations about the mistakes of the Bush administration. I am sure I'm going to oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford."
With that passing reference to her return to her alma mater, Miss Rice tried to skewer any notion that she was planning to run for the White House in 2008. This undermined the most favoured theory to explain her unorthodox diplomatic trips with Jack Straw - that Miss Rice is unofficially raising her political profile.
Another was that she was on a musical pilgrimage to discover the meaning of the Beatles song, A Day in the Life, and its baffling lyrics: "I heard the news today, oh boy. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire." Before her trip, one newspaper had quoted Miss Rice as saying: "I never understood that Beatles song. Perhaps now I will get the chance."
But when journalists asked if she had unravelled the mystery of the "four thousand holes", the Secretary of State looked utterly perplexed. As she may have been by much else that Mr Straw had shown her.
Unless the "10" meant something else...
I think Condi would do better with Jack Black than the Straw man...what a frikken appeaser the Straw man is!!!
You tell 'em, Condi! Take that!
***In keeping with her view that America had to be more understanding of the world, Miss Rice admitted that the US had committed "many mistakes, maybe thousands of mistakes" in recent years.***
I feel certain that the above quote was taken out of context to make the US look bad.
Only by people that think a war can be run 100% according to plan. Of course that standard can never be kept. We adapt and overcome. War is messy and never goes exactly the way it is planned. Only in Utopia can this happen and we all know where that is.... In the minds of the idealists who are out of touch with the real world.
The better to kick a few Clymer's with.
That would explain why I see so little of Condi Rice on television. I wish those editors had felt the same way about Maddie Albright.
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