CON GAMES: The Full Condi

August 3rd, 2008 at 04:49pm Michael Conniff 2

Nope—not me, no way, no how was I going to leap to my feet in the Benedict Music Tent here in Aspen for any one of the multiple standing Os which the putatively liberal crowd was giving away to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: one for yakking with Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson, the other for playing Brahms and Dvorak on the Steinway with four worthies from the Aspen Music Festival and School.
I know, I know: either I should have stood for something or I should have stood in bed.

I should have stood for the music part of an afternoon of “Words and Music,” because surely even an unreconstructed liberal like myself could admire the mastery she showed at the piano in a town where she had once been a student (dreaming of playing Carnegie Hall) at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Surely a political palooka like me could at least enjoy the delicious unlikelihood of a young black woman playing classical music in the Deep South, gaining admission to the hoity-toity festival in Aspen—and then somehow, miraculously, growing up to become United States Secretary of State and who knows what else.

Instead I stayed on my fat whining butt—Seat 827, Row N, Section 800, for the record—for the Vulcan the Secret Service calls “Falcon” because I have come to absolutely hate the way everyone loves Condi. She’s charming all right: she loves to cook Cajun like her Cajun grandmother taught her; she wants to be commissioner of the National Football League (NFL); and she plays chamber music with her friends when the world allows.

Charming: I’m sure she’s kind of animals and fond of little children, too, for a person who has blood on her hands. You probably know she called the Presidential Daily Briefing that warned President George W. Bush about Osama bin Ladin by name “a historical document” and that she conflated bin Ladin with Saddam Hussein in her famous “mushroom cloud” pronouncements. But did you know as a board member at Chevron the company named one of its oil tankers the S.S. Condoleeza Rice? Did you know one of her co-authors, Phillip Zelikow, was the executive director of the 9/11 commission that all but gave her a clean bill of health despite her abject cluelessness about jihadism in the days and months before September 11, 2001?

You could look it up. You can look it all up.

Arriving at the White House as a National Security Adviser with an expertise in Russia, she was converted overnight into an unflinching neoconservatism slavishly devoted to the necessity of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, discussions that began ten days after Bush took office. She was there for the discussion on suspending habeas corpus and instituting rendition, of ignoring the Geneva Conventions and green-lighting waterboarding. She saw it all and historically speaking she did nothing but go along with her elders.

And yet, and yet…Condi Rice—the adorable, loveable American success story—can go through life, return to her childhood in Aspen, and go back about her business while accepting no responsibility for anything that went so horribly wrong in her twin tenures as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. How can that be? Would it be the same if she looked and talked like Dick Cheney?

Under the tent in Aspen she said that it really “gets under my skin” when people say she and the neocons wanted to go to war.

“Nobody wants to go to war,” she said.

Really? The way I remember it, everyone wanted to go to war this time despite the evidence, despite the consequences, despite the historical record of disaster so dastardly it still knows no name or precedent. I remember one talking head from the Administration after another talking “cakewalk” and/or “liberators.” I remember years of no one in the Administration, including Condi Rice, having a clue about what to do to put the genie back in the bottle. If President Bush is short on admitting mistakes then Condi Rice was right there to back him up without any personal consequences.

In Aspen, to cheers, she said: “I love this country.”

I love my country, too, but I am not going to give a standing ovation to a person who should have known better, who was in a position to put her body in front of a train wreck to slow it down but chose instead to go along with the boys—and then, like a loyal secretary, to spend the next seven years explaining why those wrong-headed boys were absolutely right about everything.

Condi Rice is an adorable person, lovely really, a pointy-headed pony-tailed intellectual with a penchant for pigskin, a slice of walking-talking Americana who will now live out the American dream on the boards and investment banks who will require it.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it—or to stand for it.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Con Games, United Post