Posted on 07/26/2006 4:23:45 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
It has always mystified me that Condoleezza Rice is a Republican. She's black, she's a woman, she's smart. (OK, I hear all you Republicans snorting and getting ready to e-mail. I will grudgingly allow there are other bright right-wingers -- but few black women Republicans, and who would sign up after the disasterous Bush White House response to Hurricane Katrina?)
It seems so counterintuitive that Rice, a woman raised in the racially charged atmosphere of Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s, who knew two of the girls who were killed in the church bombing there in 1963, who had to overcome latent prejudice in academia, both as a woman and as an African American, should be a parrot for George W. Bush, a man so out of touch. What has she been smoking?
In fact, Rice was a bona fide Democrat until 1980, when she had an epiphany after overhearing a remark by President Jimmy Carter. He said he was shocked by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Rice, a scholar of Russian politics, was "shocked that anybody would be shocked by that," explained Nicholas Lemann in a profile of Rice for the New Yorker. Two years later she flipped to the GOP.
In some ways, Rice had always been a conservative, Lemann reported, untouched by the militancy of the '60s, including the civil rights movement; an only child who never rebelled; a woman who applied for post-graduate work at Stanford University on stationery that had her name embossed in gold across the top.
But as the saying goes, it's never too late to change. Or, in Rice's case, revert.
The Democrats could use Condi in the next election as a presidential candidate. Think about it: The Bushes got their hands on Rice when she was young and impressionable. She worked for Bush senior and got to know him well before she signed up with Dubya. It is hard sometimes to believe, when one hears her at press conferences or listens to her speeches, that she is saying what she believes, but rather that she is elegantly explaining -- since he can barely do it himself -- President Bush's positions.
"He's actually influencing her," notes Lemann, "and she seems to be performing for him the immensely useful service of transforming shorthand impulses into developed stated policy. When you hear Rice speaking, that's what Bush would sound like if he were as articulate as Rice is."
So what the Dems need to do is figure out how George capitivated her and impress upon her the error of her ways. I would love to see a woman in the White House next time, but I don't think Hillary Clinton is going to make it; her heart is in the right place, but she is too divisive and her recent speech at the Economic Club of Chicago made me want to put my head down on the table and have a long nap.
Hillary does not have the rhetorical flourishes to impassion those around her.
And, Rice -- if only she could be loosened from the Bush grasp and reprogrammed to become less aloof -- would make a dandy Democratic candidate. She could even go on the David Letterman show, a la Bill Clinton and his saxophone, and play the piano.
So this is my advice to the Democrats. Recruit Rice, develop some kind of solid program we bleeding heart liberals could embrace and then, get back into the White House! Got that?
mailto:jhunter@suntimes.com
But she would make a great Democratic candidate for President. The article is a great illustration of left brain/right brain disconnect. ;-)
One thing about it - the threads about her draw short responses all along the same lines. Very entertaining to read over - how people have almost the same exact reaction independently each and every time.
-The Bushes got their hands on Rice when she was young and impressionable.-
As usual, lefties get the facts half-a$$ed-backwards. It seems to me since she was a Rat until the 80's, the Demonrats got hold of her naive youthfulness.
When you mature in the most literal sense, you have no choice but to become conservative. Liberalism is for people who haven't matured. However, you can't explain that to a liberal because they're idiots.
Ms. Hunter, what have YOU been smoking? What a dumbass...
This sounds like it was written "Tongue in cheek".
I think this article is meant to be humor.
Repeat a lie loud and long enough and it becomes the truth...to the moron community...
After further consideration, I agree with you.
All of the injustices above were perpetrated on blacks by democrats. What's counter intuitive is that any black is a democrat.
I thought "He" was an idiot and a puppet. So it is convenient for him to be smart and cunning sometimes and an idiot others. Gotcha. Also, who said Rice was actually a conservative. we know little about her actually. She supports gun rights from what we have heard and she is pro choice.
Jeez! She can't be very sure of herself if she worrys about what we say.
Thanks for defining the ENTIRE party for the rest of us. Here we were all under the impression that you could disagree with one or two party platforms, and still be a Republican. Silly me, I will let everyone else know.
BTW... I am pro - life, but I could see someone not agreeing with you on this one. And the only time Condi has ever mentioned the issue, she said she was "reluctantly pro - choice", and I believe (I could be wrong) that she was referring to extremely hard cases (rape, incest, etc.)
No, it isn't - read her previous columns that he's linked to in #36. This lady is being serious - which ads to the humor we are finding in it - unless she is really meant to be a comedy writer and it isn't being disclosed.
Reading the reactions to these articles she's written on these threads is very entertaining. Please keep posting the columns, Chief. :-)
Best to ignore the pathetic creature.
Yessir... nothin' more than a trained monkey who can't make it on 'er own. Best to git 'er back to the ol' plantation as quick as can be, for 'er own good.
Here is my feedback to the illustrious Ms. Hunter:
26 July 2006
Dear Ms. Hunter:
Regarding Condi Rice and your pondering *why* she is a Republican, perhaps Ms. Rice is a Republican because she recognized that the Democratic Party is the party from which the founders of the Ku Klux Klan was spawned in the wake of the Civil War? Or perhaps she noticed that during the 1960's when black Americans were struggling for equal rights, that the likes of George Wallace of Alabama, Lester Maddox of Georgia, Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Jimmie Davis of Louisiana, were standing in the way, all of them racist, segregationist DEMOCRATIC governors?
Or maybe it was recalling how Bull Conner, the infamous police commissioner of Birmingham Alabama, and a DEMOCRAT, turned fire hoses on civil rights marchers, and filled his jail with her fellow black Americans, all for the 'crime' of seeking their Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights?
On the other hand, perhaps Ms. Rice, knowing her history much better than you apparently do, recalls that the Civil Rights Act was passed only due to the support of REPUBLICAN Senators when Democratic Senators refused to support their own president (LBJ), in fact one of those obstructionists was noneother than Senator Al Gore Sr., father of the famed inventor of the Internet and eventual Vice President?
Perhaps Ms Hunter, you might consider why the Reverend Martin Luther King was happy to meet with then Vice President Richard M. Nixon in June 1957, to discuss what could be done to guarantee the rights of all Americans, regardless of color? Perhaps it slipped your mind that it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who federalized the National Guard in Arkansas in September 1957, to safely escort black teenagers to high school in Little Rock?
In closing, does it not strike you as curious that the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction was passed by Congress in September 1957, by a REPUBLICAN Congress, which created the Civil Rights Commission AND the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? And imagine: that historic act took place following 20 uninterrupted years of Democratic domination of the White House and the Congress? Odd, that FDR and even Harry Truman didn't get around it before they left office.
Well there you are Ms. Hunter, I think those are plenty of reasons why Secretary of State Condi Rice is a Republican, it is because she is a THINKING, INTELLIGENT individual who has seen the Democratic Party for what it is: the last true 'plantation' that expects it's black voters to just 'show up' on Election Day, and 'do as they're told' by their Democratic 'Massas.
Think about it.
Regards,
M.K. Jessup
In other words, why is she off the plantation?
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