Canadian Cynic

Jeebus, lady, how much time do you need?

It's fascinating to see how one of the defenses of Condi Rice's hopelessly incompetent stint as National Security Advisor is that, hey, they'd been in office only 233 days, I mean, come on, give 'em a break. It's amusing to see the reference to exactly, precisely "233 days". Kind of reminds you of the exactitude of those nasty "16 words" in the president's SOTU speech.

But if the Bush administration needed help getting up to speed, why didn't they take advantage of those fun folks who, within 24 hours, were accusing former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill of disclosing classified infomation on "60 Minutes"? Or the folks who didn't waste a lot of time savaging Joe Wilson or outing his wife as a CIA operative?

It's not like this administration doesn't already have its own rapid response team. Apparently, though, they use it only for the important stuff like political character assassination, and not this more mundane, unexciting stuff like, you know, national security.