Condoleezza Rice, like condos everywhere these days, finds her market value in free fall. Circumstances conspire to show her up more and more with each passing day. Today the State Department chose to showcase her leadership skills.

Condi, being the great leader that she is, finally realized that she has no damn choice but to follow the lead of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates isn’t even in the middle of an ongoing problem with security contractors, mind you, but:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has sent five of his staff members to the war zone to review contractor operations, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said on Wednesday.

Three days later, what do we find but:

The … State Department announced the creation of a high-level panel to assess whether appropriate rules are in place for the three private firms that protect U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials, whether the companies — including the largest, Blackwater — are following those rules, and whether the system should be altered or scrapped altogether.

Named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the panel will travel to Baghdad on Saturday to begin a comprehensive review of the State Department’s multibillion-dollar private security operation in Iraq, according to Patrick E. Kennedy, the department’s senior management official and head of the panel.

In related news, I have multiple reports from my fly-on-the-wall army that voodoo dolls of Robert Gates can no longer be found anywhere in the Washington D.C. area, for love or for money. State department employees have also been seen scouring the markets for pins, offering to pay double for those with blunt tips.