CONDOLEEZZA RICE: TO A FREE WORLD

New York Post ^ | 10/6/02 | CONDOLEEZZA RICE

[Brian Mosely]

Adapted from the 2002 Wriston Lecture, which National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice delivered to a Manhattan Institute audience at the Waldorf Astoria on Tuesday night.

FOREIGN policy is ultimately about security - about defending our people, our society and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness and diversity. No place evokes these values better than our cities.

[KC_for_Freedom]

I must say, Condi says a mouthful, The more I hear of her views, the more I like what I hear.

[Channel_Islands_EANx_Diver]

"FOREIGN policy is ultimately about security - about defending our people, our society and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness and diversity."

---

Who wrote this drivel? I will ask again--Whats so great about diversity and when was it decided that "tolerance" and "openness" were defining characteristics of this Republic?

---

Liberal pablum to garner votes from people too illsuited to be voting in the first place.

Hey Condi--Your Boss lost every major multicultural "open" "diverse" city in the United States in 2000. Leave the GroupThink where it belongs.

[Tuco-bad]

I'm glad Conoleezza Rice is awake now.

She was sure "sleeping at the switch" before 9/11.

[Brian Mosely]

That's because the previous administration has taken the alarm clock and replaced it with a white noise generator.

[Miss Marple]

Your usual feeble attempt at disruption and smearing the Bush people, and on Sunday morning, to boot.

Go drink some coffee and read the New York Times. You will find plenty in its pages to make you happy.

[rdb3]

When the Founding Fathers said, "We, the people," they didn't mean me.

So, was she lying?

[Miss Marple]

Your distinction is correct, but we do not care if Iraq becomes a republic. A stable parliamentary democracy would be just fine, and probably easier for them to understand, since they were at one time under British rule, I believe.

As far as South Africa, that is a problem created by the liberals and their PR machine, and in case you haven't noticed, Condi isn't exactly a favorite of that group.

[Orion78]

It should be noted, Condoleezza Rice is/was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[section9]

Who wrote this drivel? I will ask again--Whats so great about diversity and when was it decided that "tolerance" and "openness" were defining characteristics of this Republic?

Liberal pablum to garner votes from people too illsuited to be voting in the first place.

Hey Condi--Your Boss lost every major multicultural "open" "diverse" city in the United States in 2000. Leave the GroupThink where it belongs.

Well, it looks like the PaleoCons have dropped by to put in their two shillings worth. Well, when they're not trying to perfect slash and burn agriculture, they usually have something rotten to say about the Bush Administration.

Well, in this case, let us be short and sweet. There is nothing wrong, philosophically, with anything she said. Diversity and tolerance are okay in and of themselves. It's when one allows the Left to define what diversity and tolerance are that one gives way to the inner fascism of the Left today.

What you should take away from Rice's speech, as opposed to your grievance, is the fact that Rice is drawing a contrast between our society and that of most of the Arab world: intolerant, backward, narrow-minded, mysoginistic, I could go on. She is saying that our society is worth defending because of the good within it.

The defense of our liberty; that is what this is all about.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[Gracey]

Hey Condi--Your Boss lost every major multicultural "open" "diverse" city in the United States in 2000.

Ever check out the level of FRAUD in those heavy leftist areas... plus the fraud where the Union abounds? How much truth do you think there is when the "official" returns show 5% (maybe 6%) of all LA county voted for Bush. Even my Democrat relatives in LA county voted for Bush. It's called FRAUD!!!!!!! The Democrats are stealing most of these elections.

[Republican Wildcat]

Your posts are always worthless. Go away.

[Joe Hadenuf]

FOREIGN policy is ultimately about security - about defending our people, our society and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness and diversity. No place evokes these values better than our cities.

You speak of security when endless lines of trucks with unknown loads enter our country from the south, along with millions of people entering our country illegally every year?

Tolerance? Openness? Diversity? She must be talking about our bleeding borders and this national security nightmare.....

[epow]

The more I hear of her views the more I like what I hear

So do I. Here's an article that provides a bit of insight into the life experiences that have helped form those views.

WASHINGTON, DC, USA, September 20, 2002 — Trained as a girl to be a concert pianist and a competitive ice skater, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, 47, is undergirded by her Christian beliefs. During an Aug. 4 Sunday school class at National Presbyterian Church, she explained what inspires her. Here are some excerpts:

I was a preacher's kid, so Sundays were church, no doubt about that. The church was the center of our lives. In segregated black Birmingham of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church was not just a place of worship. It was the place where families gathered; it was the social center of the community, too.

Although I never doubted the existence of God, I think like all people I've had some ups and downs in my faith. When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky's Supermarket not very far from my house - I will never forget - among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, "Do you play the piano by any chance?"

I said, "Yes." They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the center of Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don't play gospel very well - I play Brahms - and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.

"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.

I played for about six months for them and then I decided to go and find the Presbyterian Church again. I'm a devoted Presbyterian. I really like the governance structure of the church. I care about the Presbyterian Church. On a Sunday morning, I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church [in Palo Alto]. The minister that Sunday morning gave a sermon I will never quite forget. It was about the Prodigal Son from the point of view of the elder son.

It set the elder son up not as somebody who had done all the right things but as somebody who had become so self-satisfied; a parable about self-satisfaction, and content and complacency in faith [and] that people who didn't somehow expect themselves to need to be born again can be complacent. I started to think of myself as that elder son who had never doubted the existence of God but wasn't really walking in faith in an active way anymore.

I started to become more active with the church, to go to Bible study and to have a more active prayer life. It was a very important turning point in my life.

My father was an enormous influence in my spiritual life. He was a theologian, a doctor of divinity. He was someone who let you argue about things. He didn't say, "Just accept it." And when I had questions, which we all do, he encouraged that. He went to great lengths to explain about the man we've come to know as Doubting Thomas; he thought that was a little story from Christ about the fact it was OK to question. And that Christ knew that Thomas needed to feel his wounds; feel the wounds in His side and feel the wounds in His hands. That it was what Thomas needed - he needed that physical contact. And then of course Christ said when you can accept this on faith, it will be even better.

I [liked] that because my father didn't brush aside my questions about faith. He allowed me as someone who lives in my mind to also live in my faith.

In this job, when we faced a horrible crisis like September 11, you go back in your mind and think, "Is there anything I could have done? Might I have seen this coming? Was there some way?" When you go through something like that, you have to turn to faith because you can rationalize it, you can make an intellectual answer about it but you can't fully accept it until you can feel it here (taps chest). That time wasn't a failure, but it was a period of crisis when faith was really important for me.

I try always to not think I am Elijah, that I have somehow been particularly called. That's a dangerous thing. In a sense, we've all been, to whatever it is we are doing. But if you try to wear the imprimatur of God - I've seen that happen to leaders who begin too much to believe - there are a couple of very good anecdotes to that. I try to say in my prayers, "Help me to walk in Your way, not my own." To try to walk in a way that is actually trying to fulfill a plan and recognize you are a cog in a larger universe.

I think people who believe in a creator can never take themselves too seriously. I feel that faith allows me to have a kind of optimism about the future. You look around you and you see an awful lot of pain and suffering and things that are going wrong. It could be oppressive. But when I look at my own story or many others that I have seen, I think, "How could it possibly be that it has turned out this way?" Then my only answer is it's God's plan. And that makes me very optimistic that this is all working out in a proper way if we all stay close to God and pray and follow in His footsteps.

I really do believe that God will never let you fall too far. There is an old gospel hymn, "He knows how much you can bear." I really do believe that.

I greatly appreciate, and so does the president, the prayers of the American people. You feel them. You know that they are there. If you just keep doing that, it is so important to all of us.

In many ways, it's a wonderful White House to be in because there are a lot of people who are of faith, starting with the president. When you are in a community of faithful, it makes a very big difference not only in how people treat each other but in how they treat the task at hand.

Among American leadership, there are an awful lot of people who travel in faith. It's a remarkable thing and I think it probably sets us apart from most developed countries where it is not something that is appreciated quite as much in most of the world.

I've watched over the last year and a half how people want to have human dignity worldwide. You hear of Asian values or Middle Eastern values and how that means people can't really take to democracy or they'll never have democracy because they have no history of it, and so forth. We forget that when people are given a choice between freedom and tyranny, they will choose freedom. I remember all the stories before the liberation of Afghanistan that they wouldn't "get it," that they were all warlords and it would just be chaos. Then we got pictures of people dancing on the streets of Kabul just because they could listen to music or send their girls to school.

Source: Reprinted with permission from Dr. Rice's Press Office, The Whitehouse

The Bush team's character and conduct as she described it in the bold paragraphs is quite a contrast to the depraved behaviour of the Clinton White House team wouldn't you say?

[epow]

When the Founding Fathers said, "We, the people," they didn't mean me.

So, was she lying?

She wasn't lying, but technically her statement isn't entirely correct either. She used 226 years ago, 1776 as her reference date, but the phrase "We the people" is the opening phrase of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, written 215 years ago in 1787. 226 years ago slavery was legal in every state, although Rhode Island had prohibited the importation of slaves 2 years earlier. OTOH, by the time the preamble to the Constitution was written, a total of 5 northern states (NY didn't abolish slavery until 1799) had abolished slavery, leaving 8 states where slavery was still legal. In those 8 states she would have been considered chattel property unless she had been freed by her owner, but presumably in the other 5 she would have been included in "We the people".

But on 2nd thought, even in the free states blacks were not considered equals with whites, so for all practical purposes her statement was right after all.

[epow]

I shouldn't try to post only from memory. The 5 states I mentioned above in #17 were the states which abolished slavery immediately upon enactment of the prohibition, the other northern states provided for a more gradual abolition of slavery. But that doesn't change the premise of #17, which is that Mrs. Rice may have been technically incorrect, but she was correct for all practical purposes and certainly not lying.

[GraniteStateConservative]

Condi 2008 ping!

[mhking]

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