1115.org

I cannot say it came as a great surprise that Condi Rice struck back as strongly as she knows how (i.e. with a meaningless blather of words) at George Tenet’s charge “that the Bush administration, before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, never had a serious debate about whether Iraq posed an imminent threat or whether to tighten existing sanctions”.

But I still can’t believe that she actually took the tack she took. The centerpiece of her argument seems to be that imminent threat does not mean what the rest of the world has blithely assumed it to mean till now (for the last few centuries, that is). Apparently, when the Bush regime lied led us into the Iraq War, they (and their enablers and handlers and apologists and knee-pad wearers) simply forgot to clarify that when they said Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S., they were just using a post 9-11 definition of imminent threat, one that no one had actually heard before. Till Sunday, that is, when Condi emitted the new definition from her speech orifice:

She also said the question about the imminence of the threat was not “if somebody is going to strike tomorrow.”

“It’s whether you believe you’re in a stronger position today to deal with the threat, or whether you’re going to be in a stronger position tomorrow,” she said. “And it was the president’s assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse.”

Do please read that one more time, and satisfy yourself that it is actually as nonsensical as you thought the first time around.

I would like to state for the record that Condi Rice earned received “her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master’s from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.” No doubt, these are both honorable educational institutions. And there is no evidence that either of them is now cringing at the thought of the ridicule they may have left themselves open to by conferring their seal of academic approval upon someone capable of this kind of utter bullshit.

(And just in passing, ask yourself how often you have heard of Condi’s association with Stanford University, and how often you have heard of her association with the University of Denver or the University of Notre Dame. What could that imbalance possibly mean?)

Silly me, I just realized I forgot to complete the title. It should, of course, read: “Depends On The Definition Of Education”.

And I don’t see how I can end this post here, and go about my daily business, without mentioning that the “imminent threat quibble” wasn’t the only unbelievable performance Rice put on this weekend. She was really on a roll. But I’ll save her other two weekend whoppers for a separate post.