A minor quibble with Mr. Roach: unless I’m sadly mistaken, the Ugly American was actually a good guy who understood and sympathized with the locals. The term, like so many others, has been stood on its head.

It’s because she’s BLACK. That’s why she was at the top of the NSA, that’s why she was G.W. Bush’s foreign policy advisor, and that’s why she’s Secretary of State right now. There just weren’t that many black women who could speak Russian in the 1980’s, and since she did she got a huge career boost. The Republican Party must have color and Ms. Rice provides that (along with being a very non-controversial figure).

Eunomia is one of the most intelligent blogs I’ve discovered of late… via Reihan at Andrew Sullivan (when he guest’d blogged). I applaud you for that… but intellectuals sometimes are too smart and just don’t get that life is often horribly ironic and simple.

Obama’s surrogates (Moveon.org and Kos, etc.) are going to turn the general election into a race that pits racists versus non-racists. Despite Condi’s imperfections as a foreign policy guru, she might help to blunt a race/culture war in the general election and turn it into a policy debate. With Obama having no record whatsoever of accomplishing anything in his political and professional life, he stands to get hammered by a septogenarian who has a life full of accomplishments.

Consider her record. She failed after 9/11 to be a voice of reason, refusing to defend racial profiling of Middle Easterners and distinguishing this from the Jim Crow policies of America’s past. She failed as National Security Advisor to take Bush aside and pull him off the rails by saying, “If we’re to pursue this ambitious course, we need many more troops regardless of what Rumsfeld is saying.” In works like Fiasco and Cobra II, she appears to have done very little in her role at the NSA, being bulldozed and parried by aggressive folks like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Since becoming Secretary of State, she has been tone deaf in our dealings with Serbia, Russia, Israel, China, and many other parties, the worst example of the “ugly American” we’ve ever seen in this role.

Worst of all, when she is not insulting foreigners, she insults America and its past with half-educated bromides, usually dealing with slavery and discrimination. Her habitual appeal to these examples show that she is far too traumatized and alienated by her youth in Alabama to be entrusted with stewardship over the country as a whole. The United States is still a white majority country where most of its people see much to admire in our history. Most of us, particularly on the Republican side, view the Founding as a glorious chapter in our history, the exact opposite of a “birth defect.”