http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/opinion/03dowd.html?_r=1

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004883

Maybe not Fox News….but MSNBC

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/condi-rice-pulls-a-nixon_b_193379.html

Lots of viewers think that she is embracing the line that Nixon took in his discussions with David Frost: that if President says it is legal, then it is legal.

It raises the question: is Condi going to be able to deal with being called back from the big leagues? She’s been playing pro-ball for eight years now, and I can’t imagine being called back to her AAA roots is all that satisfying.

She treated the first kid she speaks to in the video with an odd mixture of respect and disdain. The respect is impressive, she gets that he is mustering up quite a bit of courage to even speak to her, but the disdain comes hard and fast, as soon as the word “torture” is used in reference to Gitmo. She first tells him, “No, dear, you’re wrong,” before going on to undermine his credibility by pointing out what he does not know. He doesn’t know about an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) report about Guantanamo’s “model” status, nor does he realize that the Supreme Court, of all people, held up the trials of detainees! (forget that it was because the Court eventually found the proposed system to be unconstitutional). The whole exchange is from about 4:04 to 5:26, and it’s worth another look.

At the same time that I feel bad for the kid, I feel bad for Condi too. She seems much more human here, the emotion showing on her face and in her voice when she talks about the difficulty of the choices the administration faced after 9/11. She is a human figure, much easier to relate to, and perhaps harder to critique. I feel, ultimately, much less vindictive about her than I thought I might.

She’s almost a tragic figure, some kind of twisted Quixote who, though you want to laugh when they are finally taken down a notch—back into reality—the pathos of their suffering is tangible. A sad clown? No, that would be Bush—but seeing her now, so furiously trying to navigate the transition between her spotlit past and her back-lit future, I certainly wish I could have met her before she ever went to Washington. She must have been a remarkable woman.