Condi

She brought her scowl and teeth briefly flashing in a contorted smile to the 9-11 hearing, and the media build-up for it virtually guaranteed that if she didn't flat out fall on her face (and probably even if she did), then the Bushies would hail it as a great success and lots of people would agree.

The overall media reaction was as schizophrenic as anything else in national politics these days, but the 9-11 families---especially the three widows known as the Jersey Girls---seemed pretty near unanimous in being underwhelmed. Condi Rice, as the vast world now knows her thanks to the instant intimatizing media, tried to be gracious, acted as if her participation in the Bushies attempted character assassination of Richard Clarke had never happened, and she had never refused to testify in the first place...but basically she was on the defensive. And her defense sounded pretty narrow: none of my underlings (which must include cabinet officers, CIA etc.) gave me a paper entitled Threat Assessment indicating that al Quaeda operatives were going to highjack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Such a defense, accompanied by evidence that there was a lot of information buzzing around to raise suspicions, and a lot of warnings (even if they weren't in reports from her deputies entitled Warnings!) of what did happen, but no actual evidence that anything in particular was done in response, tends to point to Condi Rice as the person who screwed up, at least in the sense that she had way too narrow a view of what her responsibilities were, if not her job description in the Bush bureaucracy, as National Security Advisor to the President.

This certainly was the view of the Jersey Girls on the talk shows, but care must be taken not to make Condi Rice the scapegoat here. The widows must resist what could be a psychological displacement, a kind of survivors' guilt, projecting onto the only woman in sight. Besides which, it leaves others off the hook---especially Dick Cheney and the other Nixon/Kissinger/Reagan Cold War/Hot Oil warriors---but also Sleepy George himself. Rice may be an exceptionally bright but exceptionally passive National Security Advisor, but she was working in a particular culture, best described by New Yorker writer Ric Hertzberger as "real men care about missile defense and Iraq," not skinny terrorists in shacks, miles away from a B-1 bomber or a decent restaurant.