Susan Rice for Secretary of State for which Continent?

What is pertinent to Miss Rice's qualifications -- if any other than total loyalty to the president are demanded in our cabinet system as it is now practiced -- is that she epitomized the quietism of 1990s foreign policy. There is no record of her viewing with alarm the signs of things to come: neither the civil war in Algeria pitting jihadists against a military regime, nor the forebodings of jihadi-linked terrorism in Sudan, Kenya, or Somalia, nor the encroaching disaster in ex-Southern Rhodesia, which, renamed Zimbabwe and ruled by the despot Robert Mugabe, was well on its way to the catatonic dictatorship into which it has fully evolved, or rather descended.

The American Spectator : Susan Rice for Secretary of State?

By Roger Kaplan on 12.11.12 

The candidate to succeed Hillary Clinton has whose interests in mind?

I shouldn't be, but I nevertheless am struck by the outpouring of incomprehension in response to what obviously was a sarcastic little pieceregarding what has become the Susan Rice affair. What should have been obvious, a tongue in cheek argument for Mrs. Rice on the grounds that she is the spitting image of the administration in which she serves and all this implies by way of prima facie indictment of our government's reckless and feckless foreign policy, was misread as everything from a defense of lying and cheating to an assault upon the constitutionally defined role of the Senate in the appointment of the Republic's highest non-elected officials. It is a sad and alarming commentary on our times that we no longer read but with the deadly earnest of political apparatniks. Knives drawn, comrades, and at the slightest hint of irony, read it literally -- the worst we can do is indict wise guys who had it coming anyway. I note in passing that Robespierre had no sense of humor, nor did the extremists North and South who brought on the Civil War. Do I digress? Yes, and quite deliberately.

And yet, I admit I set myself up. For however deplorable the tendency of the party out of power to attack a foreign policy on every conceivable ground, from the moral or intellectual fitness of its agents to its damage to our national prestige and interests, not to mention its cost in blood and treasure, this is the way our democracy has debated foreign policy since the beginning, and it is not likely to change.

Still, for this very reason the attacking party should be prepared to take the heat as much as it dishes it out. Deceit in public presentation of a foreign fiasco is scarcely a Democratic monopoly, nor are conflicts of interests in dealings with foreign potentates. Mrs. Rice is accused of lying to protect the administration's preferred version of how things are going in the world these days, and in this version the al Q. terror networks are on the run and beaten and therefore are incapable of a coordinated, well-planned, and executed act of war against our Benghazi consulate.

She is also taken to task for conflicts of interest in areas for which she has had high responsibilities since her years in the Clinton administration, leading to a favorable disposition and the promotion of an appeasement policy toward aggressor regimes and militias in the Great Lakes region, chiefly eastern Congo. And were these sins not sufficient to disqualify her for taking over Mrs. Clinton's cabinet position as the head of the State Department, she is reputed to have made investments in the energy sector that would render suspect any counsels she might offer the president regarding dealings with the Canadians or companies doing business with them (this is of interest to Americans concerned with the fate of the earth) and with the Persians or companies doing business with them (which is of interest to Americans concerned with the fate of America).

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