Rice Curies favour - But not with me

This week Marshall McLuhan must be laughing so much in his grave that the locals must be aboot to go down to the mounties and ask what all those funny sounds from the graveyard are, eh?
Marshall, if you're not dead, I'm desperately sorry.
McLuhan was the man who told us that the medium was the message and predicted pretty accurately in my humble estimation, that as we became more saturated with media information, the shorter our collective attention spans became.
Couldn't help thinking of this when I read some of the encomia that greeted the arrival of the new American secretary of state in Europe this week.
After Colin Powell resigned I put up some snide insinuations that she and Bush might be having some sort of affair.
I think the internet was invented for stuff like this that would never see the light of day in any print medium.
I'm less sure about the nature of their relationship now. It seems that W was introduced to Rice in 1998 by his much more moderate and sane father (that, as you know, aint saying a great deal) who realised that his so was the Republican party's choice and wanted a relative moderate on his team as a counterweight to some of the neo-cons like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
The key word here is "relative". While Rice may be moderate compared to the people I mentioned, this is clearly no great feat.
Remember that when the Bush administration was trying to convince the world that it was the "moderate" Miss Rice that warned the world the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud? I sure as fuck haven't, but it seems that some European journalists who've been seduced by the "mood music" emanating from her general direction. Even on the supposedly left-wing Guardian people were at least suggesting that she should be given a chance.
When the Bush administration were asked by the UN and the government of every civilised country in the world to give the UN weapons inspectors a chance, Rice told the world to go and take a flying fuck, or words to that general effect. So why should we listen to her now?
One possible answer is that the poor old people of Palestine have been through so much that any straw that seems to offer a chance a peace should be grasped, that a starving man doesn't care where his food is coming from.
I'd go along with this general line of argument I had enough trust in the Bush administration to think their words might mean something.
Yet it's important to realise where the Bush adminsitration are coming from on the Middle Eastern question.
Around 50 milion Americans believe in the Rapture, which means that they think if they've led good lives and not watch Sex and the City or go around with any underwear on display
then God will lift them up to heaven and leave sinners like myself behind. They believe that a sign that the rapture is going to come is when Israel regains all it's Biblical lands.
It doesn't seem to matter to Rice that many of the people who believe this are the same people who were bullying her when she was an African-American growing up in the archetypal hick state of Alabama.
Not that Rice is above accusing people of Rascism when she wants to get her way: "don't impugn my integrity" is her among her favourite phrases.
Coming from the background that she did, she ought to be able to able to sympathise with the Palestinians , but the truth is that even if she does care about them, it would be political suicide for Bush to allow the creation of an independent Palestine, as the shocking truth is that 9% of Americans already think Bush is too much of a lefty and if many of them desert him then people will start to get suspicious when the disparities between the opinion polls and election results get really big?
So why all the sweet talk?
Have a read of Ron Suskind's book on Paul O Neill
to get a sense of what the answer might be. It's revealing of what both Bush's attitude to Israel is - apparently he favoured a complete pull-out of peace-keeping troops as he thought this might help "clarify things" and the Machiavellian political tactics that the Bush team employ. It seems that they appointed him just so they could get their insane tax cuts past senate and congress, which given that he too had a reputation as a "moderate", he was able to do. When he'd done this, they hung him out to dry, starting a "whispering" campaign against him on places like Fox News and Talk Radio, claiming he was loose-lipped and "too honest" which is one of the worst criticisms Bush can make, it seems.
The really sad thing is that the Bush adminsration never sued Suskind, which means that either everything bad he says about Bush is true or they just don't give a rat's ass as swing voters in Ohio don't read books anyway.
As O' Neill was Bush's moderate face on Capitol Hill, so it seems to me Rice is Bush's moderate face to the world.
It's a difficult job but my fear is that Rice may be able to pull it off, perhaps convincing the world that she stays up nights worrying about the plight of Karen hill tribe people and that their future invasion of Burma has nothing to do with that country's long border with China.
Over the last 3 1/2 years Americans have been going on about how they're willing to kill and die for their freedom. Maybe now's the time to exercise that freedom by questioning the adminstrations motives.
But if we can't even do this in Europe, what chance in Nebraska?