Is she good enough to beat Charles Barkley for Governor of Alabama?

Not that I was a fan before, but this...

“I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

...really tore it for me.

Since we're in Chapter 9,273 of the Israeli Book of Troubles, you'd think that there would be at least a plan or a notion of what to do on the shelf, wouldn't you?

I mean, as Secretary of State, you can reasonably assume that you'll be called upon to deal with some crisis in Israel during your tenure.

Bone up! Read! Get a clue! Something!

At least pretend that your job is to go in there and stop people from getting killed. You could at least say, "My most urgent need is to shuttle over there to stop the bloodshed. This much is clear."

I'm kinda sorry that she's getting hit from the Bill Kristol wing of the party for not being hawkish enough for their tastes. (Or is hawkish the word I'm going for? More like "possessed of enough rapturous bloodthirst." You know.) It's pretty apparent, however, that she's better suited to the Chevron boardroom than the head of the US diplomatic apparatus.

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Middle East media expert Marc Lynch notes that the ham-fisted, half-hearted attempts at diplomacy have made made our position much, much worse (as, ahem, yours truly predicted would happen when this all started). He also explains how mindbendingly ignorant and damaging Rice's verbal gaffes are.

Hed in the Times: Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah.

I feel for Rice, though. She's like the customer service rep sent out to deal with complaints - by a company that could give a rat's buttocks.

Edit: Wow:

According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February. More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.

Lebanese no longer blame Hizbullah for sparking the war by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, but Israel and the US instead.

The latest poll by the Beirut Center found that 8 percent of Lebanese feel the US supports Lebanon, down from 38 percent in January.

KONDRACKE: "Yes. Well, what - what the - the administration is doing, you got to admit, is risky. I mean, it's - it's a departure from tradition, from what administrations used to do. But it - it - it involves risk. I mean, instead of reaching deals, it is - it is - it's an attempt to actually [as the Bolsheviks once said] heighten the contradictions and make people choose. Do you want to be on the side of Iran and Syria and Hezbollah and al-Qaida and Hamas? Or are you going to be on the side of the Democrats?"

Fred Kaplan:

... Secretary Rice spoke like a big-city mayor who, in the middle of a crime wave, announces that he's not going to put more police on the streets; he's going to convene a summit to address the wave's root causes.

...

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Never has the left been so right.

Now this is the very definition of "diplomatic":

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Lebanon, Israel and Rome was an exercise in grace, bravery and, to my regret, wrongly focused diplomacy.

Let's run that through the |_|17|2@-1337 translator:

H0ly sh1tz0rz cONdI YOU R TEH suxx0rz!!!! I p4wn3d j00 n00by

lUv bIlL