Breslin:

Reading this in Clarke’s book, and listening to him at the hearing in Washington on Wednesday, I was struck with the sameness in the story about her. Condoleezza Rice always is introduced as a former provost of Stanford University. You can’t get anything to sound much better. Provost! She must be in charge of science you can’t even imagine. Economics! Graphs and formulas. Ancient literature. Anything ancient. If it is impossible to understand, she knows it.

It turns that as provost she was in charge of assigning lecture halls. If they were for decent conservative visiting lecturers they were given good places. Some cheap liberal had to speak on the other side of the school, with one foot in the bay. I know a scientist who is on the staff out there and he brought out Paul Glimscher from NYU to lecture. Rice found him to be a dastardly New York liberal and they couldn’t get a place for three days.

***

Ben-Veniste was pretty exciting as a prosecutor in the Watergate case. I don’t think he was being entirely light hearted when on Wednesday, he asked only one question of a witness and then turned to another member and said, “You can have all my time, if I can have yours with Condoleezza Rice.”

She sure heard that. And she acts as if she has something to hide. She has at least a couple of things that people want to talk to her about in public.

And watch how far away she stays from Ben-Veniste.