Oh, how times change! At one time, Condi Rice, who famously in a speech spoke of George Bush as "my husband" [how curious!] was seen as someone who brought a degree of intelligence to the Bush White House. Now, she has fallen from whatever pedestal many placed her on. The British have certainly come to realise that she is a dilettante, as the New Statesman explains in this piece, "The fall of Condi":
"How things change. It was less than three years ago that the British embassy here put on a ludicrously lavish extravaganza to mark the 50th birthday of the person whom they wrongly considered to be the most powerful woman in the world. "Dr" Condoleezza Rice, then George W Bush's disastrously inept national security adviser and now his equally feckless secretary of state, walked into the ambassador's residence and gasped when she was met by more than a hundred guests lining the curved Lutyens double staircase, applauding fervently and singing "Happy Birthday to You".
And....ouch!:
"Rice's "brilliance", too, is vastly overstated. Long before Manning's guests wildly cheered her, Washington insiders - ranging from Powell himself to Dubbya's father, the former President Bush - had given up on her. Dick Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council during both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, until he resigned in despair in 2003, tells the story of how he gave a top-secret security briefing about al-Qaeda to Rice during the 2000-2001 transition even before Bush had moved into the White House. It was clear, he says, that she had never even heard of al-Qaeda - and, as a result, was sceptical of everything he had to say."
"How things change. It was less than three years ago that the British embassy here put on a ludicrously lavish extravaganza to mark the 50th birthday of the person whom they wrongly considered to be the most powerful woman in the world. "Dr" Condoleezza Rice, then George W Bush's disastrously inept national security adviser and now his equally feckless secretary of state, walked into the ambassador's residence and gasped when she was met by more than a hundred guests lining the curved Lutyens double staircase, applauding fervently and singing "Happy Birthday to You".
And....ouch!:
"Rice's "brilliance", too, is vastly overstated. Long before Manning's guests wildly cheered her, Washington insiders - ranging from Powell himself to Dubbya's father, the former President Bush - had given up on her. Dick Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council during both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, until he resigned in despair in 2003, tells the story of how he gave a top-secret security briefing about al-Qaeda to Rice during the 2000-2001 transition even before Bush had moved into the White House. It was clear, he says, that she had never even heard of al-Qaeda - and, as a result, was sceptical of everything he had to say."
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