Chicken and Rice.

It seems whenever the president needs a little pre-national address confidence, he looks to Condoleezza Rice to bring the goods. Her over-bearing air of intelligence has the ability to knock over even the staunchest Bush policy critics (and her choice of black leather boots matched with a power suit is always appreciated).

Bush will address the nation on Thursday, reportedly for about fifteen minutes, during prime time. There he will explain his take on the reports from Petraeus and Crocker, and explain what his plan of action will be in Iraq going forward. Either he is a blithering dunderhead, or an evil genius (in the fashion of his self-proclaimed favorite villain, Dr. Evil), because it's reported Bush plans on saying he will scale down troops by around 30,000. Now, this means that the levels of troops will be roughly the same as right before the surge. So perhaps the surge was all a careful "strategery" to be able to show the nation that his initial level of troops "wasn't so bad after all," when set in relief. Well, I think people are on the whole still unimpressed, but you can't completely blame the guy for trying.

But back to Rice. It's hard to bash her, because her background and ever-present composure highlights her eloquence and accolades. She finished college quicker than most are able to buy their textbooks, and her knowledge of the world is perhaps the only saving grace in Bush's foreign policy. But what makes all these wonderful attributes so tragic is the fact that they are used by the Bush administration primarily like a corporation seeking to increase it's popularity and assets; in other words, they bought out Rice for her name and brand power. Slap her name on a headline, have her speak to foreign leaders, and we, the national political consumers, feel a sense of brand quality. But sadly, for both Rice and the consumers, all we're really getting is the same old defective product repackaged, to lull us into a false secure complacency. Sadly, the product inside the box with Rice's name on it is unrecognizable, manufactured in some dank bunker, tainted with leaden and overbearing political contaminants.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070912/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq