Some History-Making Help For McCain?

(And boy, I’m sure the “his Venus to her Mars” columns from MoDo in the New York Times would practically write themselves until November…never mind any grounding in reality, since that doesn’t really exist for Dowd when she writes that stuff anyway concerning HRC and Obama.)

Both Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker and U.S. News and World Report here have floated the notion of “Senator Honor And Virtue” naming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as VP on the Repug presidential ticket.

It’s certainly an interesting thought, but I really can’t see how the “values voters” would go along with it, though Lord knows McCain has been sucking up to enough bogus preachers lately to qualify as a full-blown moonbat himself, making such considerations unnecessary.

Some of what Hertzberg said in last week’s issue appears below; I’d link to it, but the New Yorker site is a mess, I constantly receive a “stack flow” error when I access it and I get thrown out of my browser (and yes, I’m still using IE6, but that’s no excuse)…

By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.

And oh yes, wasn’t Condi so “diplomatic” here in which she proclaimed to have no interest in it, though she had, in fact proposed “an ambitious plan with up to two international military forces that would help the Lebanese government stabilize the situation in southern Lebanon,” according to Lebanese sources to both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (don't know about you, but that sounds suspiciously "diplomatic" to me...but not the lying about it, I mean).

Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken when opposition to the Iraq war was approaching its height, she enjoyed a “favorable-unfavorable” ratio of nearly two to one. The conservative rank and file likes her. Though she once described herself as “mildly pro-choice,” she is agile enough to complete the journey to mildly pro-life. And she is a preacher’s daughter.

Sad, then, that someone with an understanding of spirituality (at least, you would hope so) would not also grasp that the struggle for human rights shows a desire to act in accordance with the wishes of what you might refer to as “a higher calling.” I’m saying that based on this post from yesterday in which Rice and Defense Secretary Bob Gates met with Russian democratic reformers, but not the most visible ones: former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, Union of Right Forces leader Nikita Belykh, and (most glaringly) former chess champion Garry Kasparov.

But of course, we’re talking about Condi Rice, who, when asked about the Iraq war by Congress, told them here that “it’s not appropriate to answer that question.” And I’m still waiting to find out about her connection to Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC, as noted here (and I’m sure I’ll keep waiting too).

Maybe I can see the logic behind selecting Rice after all, though, when you consider this episode (a recurring one, apparently); not only could Rice correct McCain when the senator messes up on Iran again, but unlike Lieberman, she could actually speak for McCain and probably command more authority than he does.

Update 3/28/08: Sounds like Condi needs a refresher on the history of Ireland's Potato Famine, among other things (based on this - the "Moonie Times" strikes again!).