I think it speaks volumes that a Bush loyalist like Condi Rice, because of her heritage, sees Obama’s speech on race much differently than her colleagues. I have wondered what she (or Colin Powell, for example) would say publicly about Obama’s speech and — the need to discuss the country’s problems with race that this campaign has laid bare. She referred to the legacy of slavery as the country’s “birth defect.” (The Washington Times):
“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”There are ties that bind, despite a gulf of political differences — when you see this issue of race relations raised by Barack Obama and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — people of conscience should take note that we should stop playing political football with this issue and start doing the hard work to heal this, rather than engage in a downward spiral of denial and no-so-veiled vitriol (you hear that, Pat Buchanan and Bill Kristol?).As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”
“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said.
Miss Rice declined to comment on the campaign, saying only that it was “important” that Mr. Obama “gave it for a whole host of reasons.”
44 Responses to “Condi lauds Obama for opening the discussion about race”
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gawd. not Condi.
I am sorry, she should be voted off the planet along with Bush! I don’t care what nice message she is sounding. She is a war criminal.
grrrgnm,ngnmf!!!!1111!
“The Little Brown Ones” are the wave of the future and Condi knows this. She might want one of them for a running mate, ya know!
Can I just say that I HATE that they refer to her “Miss Rice”? She’s a PhD and the freaking Secretary of State, for goodness’ sake. “Dr. Rice” or “Secretary Rice,” please. Or even “Ms. Rice.” I mean, I don’t know what I’m expecting, it is the Washington Times after all.
Hah! Good luck with that. Buzzword bigotry has been winning elections for Republicans since Richard Nixon, and they won’t stop until it no longer works.Politics need to set aside to this discussion to work and boy, is that going to be difficult after this adminstration’s destruction of America. But somehow, the first thing to go has to be the acrimony.
It’ll be interesting to see what the right-wingers’ response to Dr Rice’s comments is.
I hope that hearing this from someone so clearly on their side will prompt them to think a bit. But it’s a rather faint hope.
Meh. Rice is warming up for the VP slot. If that happens, she’ll want to use the same framing as Obama - he’s showing everyone how a black candidate for the high national office makes it work. She can’t very well run as a Black VP candidate and stand by the racist talking points of the GOP base, now can she?
“It’ll be interesting to see what the right-wingers’ response to Dr Rice’s comments is. ”
They were FURIOUS the last time she praised the diversity of someone who wasn’t a straight white male:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=condi+dybul+mother-in-law
I forgot where I read it but I softened toward her a bit when I read a piece that describe her selling her soul for a place at the table. The article argued she knew the lay of the land and went along with the idiots anyway.I guess she saw how Powell was screwed over for daring to disagree with what the neocons wanted to do in the Middle East. One could blame her more for it I suppose, but at least I stopped saying to myself, “How could anyone so supposedly smart say stuff that’s so stupid?” The answer is she wanted to stay in the game.
Of course to say anything that could be complimentary to a Democrat may disqualify her from any position in the Republican party in the future.
Condi was provost at Stanford while I was there. She’s brilliant, but she used her powers for evil.I totally buy the argument that she wanted a seat at the table and was willing to sell her soul to do it. I even think it might have been easier to rise so high with the Republicans, as long as you didn’t mind what they really think about you, as a person of color gives them cover for their otherwise racist policies.
Doesn’t change the fact that she’s a war criminal and has been highly instrumental in bringing the worst of the Soviets’ totalitarianism here.
And once again race is presented as a binary- two races founding a nation on the tabula rasa that was North America before the coming of the Western Europeans and their enslaved Africans. I am really starting to understand why all my Mohawk and Micmac friends have near continual headaches this electoral season.
Again, we have revisionist history. This land was inhabited and owned by the Native Americans. Enuf said.
I really do not care that CR thinks her background is birth defect.
Who is Eagle Publishing? They have documents portrayed to ‘expose the real Obama’. Is this tied to some religious group or something?
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The answer is she wanted to stay in the game.
I see this as worse, actually, than someone who comes off as a naive rube. You know how dangerous these policies are, but you go along to further your own cold ambition?
Calling this a “birth defect” seems like pretty clumsy use of language, and not really defensible as explanatory rhetoric, either. How much you wanna bet it’s some kind of dog-whistle to anti-abortionists or some other fringe nutball group?
Pam, I can’t believe you’d fall for this. She’s one of the most powerful people in the Bush administration. Everything is political football with them. There is no common ground.
Please note that I’m speaking only of the Bush administration. This is not necessarily true of Republicans at lower levels.
Calling this a “birth defect” seems like pretty clumsy use of language, and not really defensible as explanatory rhetoric, either. How much you wanna bet it’s some kind of dog-whistle to anti-abortionists or some other fringe nutball group?
Pam, I can’t believe you’d fall for this. She’s one of the most powerful people in the Bush administration. Everything is political football with them. There is no common ground.
Please note that I’m speaking only of the Bush administration. This is not necessarily true of Republicans at lower levels.
That’s really interesting, I wouldn’t have expected it from her. To be cynical, it could be that she is paving her own “I used to believe in the Bush agenda but then the scales fell from my eyes” way out, like almost eveyone else associated with that criminal admin who wants to evade shunning and/or prosecution later.
Miss Rice? WTF?? Since when did we use that title for adult women in the United States, especially ones with important job titles not to mention Ph.D.s?
Caren:
Precisely, she’s evil. Karl Rove is not the evil genius in the Bush admin, he’s just a snot-nosed bully. Dr. Rice is the diabolical mind behind the policy, if not the politics. I’m not surprised that she thinks Obama’s speech was important, but it doesn’t matter. I’m glad if it pokes a hole in the “Democrats are secretly racist” balloon the Repubs bring out every time we point out that Republicans are racist.
Hawise, you’re absolutely right- there has to be an open discussion for ALL, not just black and white, in regards to race relations.
Well, as Instapunk said: “We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that.”
This is just further proof that even Condi is party to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of
ZionAfrica.I’d rather have an evil genius in charge than an evil fuckwit, if the evil is mandatory.
pipedream = an illusory or fantastic plan, hope, or story (from Merriam Webster online dictionary)
More than one person has brought this story to my attention:
BREAKING: Condi Rice Flirts With VP Possibility — Speaks to Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Group Meeting
As if to signal that her comments are an attempt to land the GOP VP slot. And so what if it is? I’m sure that many on the right are not happy with her blunt assessment about the need to address race, it’s hardly an issue for the Bill Kristols on the right who are running screaming with their pants on fire from the matter. I can only imagine what the Freepi (who worship Condi) are saying right now.
Whether you think Dr. Rice is evil, incompetent or a tool of the Bush Administration, as sick as our country is about race, it’s meaningful that any high ranking person of color can and should use their platform to address race relations more widely in a positive manner.
That’s why I think we need to stay away from handling this as a largely right/left issue (note the ease with which people harped on Buchanan when racism is blatant, with more hand-wringing or outright denial when it comes from the left in more subtle ways). Both sides have a lot of work to do in this area, as there is enough implicit and explicit bias to go around that is equally poisonous to the future of this country.
Does it mean I would vote for her if she was on a McCain ticket? Of course not. But for those of us out there who know what it is to be the on the other side of bias — and it happens to POC who are wealthy, young, old, Republican or Democrat, that’s the difference in seeing the invitation to expand the dialogue regardless of political affiliation is meaningful. She didn’t have to say anything on the matter at all and no one would have thought anything about it, given this administrations woeful record.
Hear, hear, Pam!
Come on, if the Republicans clean their house and get better on race, isn’t that a net win? Period?
Condi as VP candidate? Well, Geraldine, there’s your cue to shove the right foot in next to the left!
And if the kept her from talking? Well, it would be the fault of shiny black people.
Gah. Just found this:
That almost had me tearing up, and my compassion for republicans tends to be zero. The manner in which she used ‘founding’ was certainly eye-opening. The only way that Americans ever learn about ‘founding’ anything would be the Founding FATHERS, who were of course all white, male, generally well off etc. She opens up the concept of founding to a much larger population (as in everyone who was in North America). Perhaps one day we will be enlightened enough as a society to teach that concept of founding to our kids.
I hope so too, atheist woman…
But Condi has been kept rather ‘virginal’ from the scandals in the Bush White House either because she is to stupid to know what was going on (we had no intelligence that Al-Qaida wanted to strike here) or she was purposely kept out of the fray to have a chance at being the president when Fester McCain dies.
I can’t imagine how a party that has run roughshod over everything that this country stood for AND was the party in power after the largest attack on our soil in the past 200 years can have a hope in hell of having their candidate come close to winning the election.
In Europe Bush and Cheney would have been sent packing on September 13th!
Who is Eagle Publishing? They have documents portrayed to ‘expose the real Obama’. Is this tied to some religious group or something?
Wikipedia says: “Since 1993, Regnery Publishing has been a division of Eagle Publishing, which also owns the weekly magazine Human Events.” More familiar with those two?
I’ve been seeing Human Events running google ads (with occasional spelling errors, I must note) for their ‘the real barack obama’ site for awhile, I assume this is the same campaign.
I can’t see Condi getting the VP; the GOP already at least thinks it has all the foreign policy cred it needs with McCain.
I don’t think they’ll go for the diversity issue yet with any candidate; Sarah Palin is too young/inexperienced, JC Watts has been out of politics too long/has baggage (nobody in politics actually “spends more time with their family” these days, and he has at least one out-of-wedlock child,) Blackwell is…Blackwell, Jindal is too young (but will be the frontrunner once McCain loses to Obama, IMHO.)
Eagle Publishing is now the parent of RedState.com, too.
I had been under the impression that Eagle Publishing was one of Phyllis Schlafly’s outfits, but that’s Eagle Forum - here’s some backstory on the founder of Eagle Publishing, which as noted above, has acquired old-time right-wing propaganda mill Regnery in the last ten years.
“I don’t think they’ll go for the diversity issue yet with any candidate;”
calvin, I think you seriously underestimate the GOP.
The way I see it, all the GOP needs is another 200-300 more years and they’ll be ready an’ roarin’ to have a Black VP.
We just need to give them time. Don’t stress them out too much. They’ll come around…
…eventually…
Eagle Publishing is now the parent of RedState.com, too.
I had been under the impression that Eagle Publishing was one of Phyllis Schlafly’s outfits, but that’s Eagle Forum - here’s some backstory on the founder of Eagle Publishing, which as noted above, has acquired old-time right-wing propaganda mill Regnery in the last ten years.
Whether you think Dr. Rice is evil, incompetent or a tool of the Bush Administration,
“Or”?
You may recall Colin Powell being seriously touted for high office, only to allow himself to be used to sell the invasion of Iraq. As far as I can tell The Powers That Be in the Republican party see black leaders as expendable assets towards their own agendas - and Rice doesn’t have nearly the mana Powell had.
Caren, I’m sorry. I missed her as provost by a couple of years. The thing I always remember about her, though, is the talk she gave at the frosh orientation event for African American students. I was so disappointed to learn that she was a GOP shill.
Phoenician, Black Republicans have a VERY important role.
They’re the only thing that let’s idiots like Tony Snow claim racism was finished in the 1960’s.
I mean, you think they look like bigots now - just imagine if they didn’t have a couple of tokens to trot out during the convention?…
An essay on rethinking race categorization from the Boston Sunday Globe.
Remember, they don’t actually say racism is over–they just say that racism still exists in only Democrats because Robert Byrd was in the KKK 60 years ago and has a D after his name, and because Abraham Lincoln had an R after his name 145 years ago.
Racism is nasty and evil but like all hatred it’s a powerful tool if you can control it.
The republican party has nearly the entire main stream media running interference for them so I think they can handle the possibility of blowback and damage.
Well, after all look how well they emerged from the 9/11 ‘incident’ so unscathed and smelling fresh… Anyone remember the anthrax problem? Bear-Stearns? Plame?
Practitioners in the ‘fiction based community’. Bush is right because we say so.
Wasn’t we say so the name of the evil corporation in ‘Monsters, Inc.’?
Yes: WE-SAY-SO… Hah hah.. Ooooohhhhh…
“An essay on rethinking race categorization from the Boston Sunday Globe.”
Ms Kate, that was a really interesting article…
Made me think about a Black man I know who is married to a Japanese woman. They have two sons.
Sometimes I wonder about how race has figured in their relationship, let alone cultural differences. I wonder how their sons identify, and how they deal with questions they have and questions they get from others about their heritage (the boys are in their teens too, so they are in the thick of adolescence). But, it’s not my business, and they all seem to get along well, so…
Examples like that give me hope that there will actually be a “post-racial” future, where we can concentrate on other things, instead of obsessing over a concept as marginal, and in many ways nonsensical, as “race”…
Those late to the thread should click over to the newer post, Freepers turn on Condi Rice over comments on Obama’s speech on race.