Condi

Praktike is quite right; one of the things that has disappeared in a cloud of Lebanese dust over the past two weeks has been Condi Rice’s reputation as a diplomat. I wasn’t quite willing to give her much credit as Sec State, but from what I know the people at State like her, and she hadn’t seemed egregiously more inept in this job than anyone else in the Bush administration. Certainly, it looked as if her SecState performance was an improvement on her NSA work.

But not now. If she’s not a hawk it’s even worse; if she has influence inside the administration it’s not apparent, and she’s proven completely incapable of putting together any international support for, well, any policy at all. As if it weren’t an absurd proposition in the first place, the “Condi for President” line seems not long for this world.