Rice

Condi Rice was wrong about the Soviet Union, her supposed specialty; she denied that the Russian state dictatorship could change itself, and she believed, along with the other military industrialist/national security state players who grew fat on the Cold War and the overestimation of Soviet capabilities, that Gorbachev was faking. She was oblivious and/or clueless about the warnings about Al Queda. She was of course dead wrong about Iraq, which posed no threat of weapons of mass destruction (remember, she said we had to strike before mushroom clouds blossomed over the US). She, along with the other members in the Bush Gang, bears responsibility for the dismemberment and destruction of that country and the death of hundreds of thousands there, as well as the crimes against humanity still being committed in our name. More recently, she was astonished that Hamas won the Palestinian elections. And, of course, she’s stuck like a limpet to the side of a moronic, messianic asshole through thick and thin. Can anyone argue that she’s not a hack?

Today I hear that, miracle of miracles, she has complained about the expansion of another illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem. Finally! But, of course, seven years too late, and certainly not backed up with any stick. In a desperate effort to save her reputation, and the reputation of her capo Bush, for history, she’s pushing hard for “peace” in Israel/Palestine. I put that in quotes because it’s pretty obvious that, via the facts on the ground and the US’s long coddling of the Israeli project to deny Palestinian identity and statehood, that the peace they want is a weak and divided Bantustan-entity under the planes and highways of imperial Israel. It’s a post-modern peace, of course, about perception, and hence doomed.

Like the near-psychotic Clarence Thomas, Rice is symptomatic of the Right’s special form of affirmative action. Desperate for a black face, they’re hurl these very weird, often profoundly angry (in Condi’s case, the vestal virgin act covers a deeply closeted life) people to the forefront, playing up their “story” (for in celebrity-land, biography trumps politics). For Rice’s case, much is made of the fact that she was a friend of one of the four teenage girls assassinated by the Klan in Birmingham in 1963. Little is made of the fact that she hitched her star to the party that inherited the terror-based racist power-structure that the Klan acted as the muscle for.