You Heard it Here...Second!

I was listening to some of the remarks by our new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and thought that they were worth repeating here along with the prediction that by December 31, 2005, Senate Democrats will have called Rice back to the Hill to answer charges that the State Department is in shambles, the result of press leaks by disgruntled staffers.

Her remarks spell out, clearly and concisely, why Bush is doing what he is doing. It stands in sharp contrast to the myopia of liberals in America. Here it is:

"I'm going to look and the president is going to look, to this department to lead that effort, and not just to implement policy, but we're going to need ideas, intellectual capital. I need your ideas. My door will be open. Please, understand that this is a time when history is calling us, and I just look forward to working with each and every one of you toward that end. The president has laid out a bold agenda, and he expects a lot of us. I want you to know, too, that I'm going to be committed to you, the men and women of the Foreign Service, the civil service, and our Foreign Service nationals abroad, and you in turn will be committed, and we in turn will be committed to carrying out that bold agenda.

"I got to participate in Germany unification and the liberation of eastern Europe and the peaceful talks with the Soviet Union, but you know, I realize that I was just harvesting good decisions that had been made in 1946 and 1947 and 1948. A lot of those decisions spurred by good work done by this building, the men and women of the state department. And those were days when it must have seemed that freedom's march was not assured. You think about it, in 1947 civil wars in Greece and Turkey, and in 1948 the permanent division of Germany thanks to the Berlin crisis and in 1949 the Soviet Union explodes a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule and the Chinese communists win. It must not have looked like freedom's march was assured. But they somehow pulled themselves together, people like Truman and Atchison and Marshall and, of course, on Capitol Hill, Senator Vandenberg, and they created a policy and a set of institutions that gave us a lasting peace. While no one might have been able at that time to imagine a Democratic Germany or a Democratic Japan, when President Bush now sits across from chancellor Schroeder or from Prime Minister Koizumi he sits across not just from a friend but a Democratic friend.

"I know that there are those who wonder whether democracy can take hold in the rocky soil of the West Bank or in Iraq or in Afghanistan. I believe that we as Americans who know how hard the path to democracy is, have to believe that it can, and we have to make it so that we work with those who want to achieve those aspirations so that one day a future president is sitting across from the Democratic president or prime minister of many a Middle Eastern country, of many a country that has not yet known democracy. That's our charge; that's our calling."

Limbaugh may not be your favorite, but I have to agree with him on the following:

Just keep a sharp eye, because you're going to see these leaks and you're going to see these leaks resulting in newspaper stories, and it won't be long before the state department is out of control, she's gotta go, and she'll be called back to the hill for testimony on all this.
The New York Times, The Washington Post will run the story, and Biden and Leahy will say we can't put up with this; or Ted Kennedy, "We'll need to get to the bottom of this, find out what's going on. We've never had the state department in this bad of shape," and the word of journalists will suffice as an official report.

And that's the scheme. This is how the Democrats work: Lob charges, investigate the charges, and keep lobbing charges, investigating those charges, and just keep investigations going, and the whole purpose of the investigation is for the television pictures of the investigation, designed to make the American people think we got an incompetent bunch of boobs in this administration who don't know what they're doing.

Democrats are out there trying "to save the day."

Mark down this date on the calendar. All this and more is on tap for Condoleezza Rice easily within this year.