“We have been successful, too, because Americans have known that one’s status of birth is not a permanent condition,” she said. “And your greatest ally in controlling your response to your circumstances has been a quality education. But today, today, when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, can I honestly say it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going?”
Rice called the crisis of underprivileged kids trapped in failing schools “the civil rights issue of our day.”
“And on a personal note, a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the south where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state,” Rice said.
“America has a way of making the impossible seemed inevitable in retrospect, but we know it was never inevitable,” she said. “It took leadership. And it took courage.”
Update: Video of Rice’s speech added.
Nothing less than greatness came forth from Condi Rice’s presentation.
I think she gives us too much credit – but she makes me want to live up to the ideals that she describes so well.
Who cares, she should go back to Stanford and work on improving the food service or something, did you hear Ryan!??!
You’re kidding, right?
No I’m not kidding. I had some serious problems with the speech. But it doesn’t matter at all, she was 1000% upstaged by Ryan. Nobody will remember Rice was even there.
I liked Ryan’s speech, but Condi’s was incredible, one that will be showcased for decades. If this was similar to what she gave at Park City, no wonder all the big wigs were just ga-ga. No anger, but loads of conviction and pride of country. If we can get the independents to listen to it, they will be O no longer voters.
The concept of America is Opportunity, yes we have work to ensure equal opportunity, but the only thing that should be free in life is ourselves to pursue our dream.
While you were typing, one of the billy goats gruff crossed your bridge. Bad Troll!
Rice is one of the greatest assets the party has. For you to dismiss her speech with a jab that is both anti-woman and racist (evoking a black woman working on a food service line) makes one wonder when your next Klan meeting is.
Condolezza Rice is a liberal on just about every possible point EXCEPT the Second Amendment. She’s a globalist, to boot.
Asset to the party?
Yes, to the RINO party.
She’s no friend of America.
My love for her is undying.
The little girl who couldn’t sit at the white’s only stool, made it all the way to Secretary of State, and could be president, but NEVER, NOT ONCE has she ever played the race card- that’s the difference between a class act and Obama’s act.
(And he did not grow up in a segregated south.)
And that makes all the difference!
best next door neighbor I ever had was her.
So why was the video removed?
Scott
I thought she did a great job.
She was incredible. I’ll take her at her word that she won’t run for office, but she did say she’ll remain in public service on issues she cares about, especially inequality in K-12 education, “the civil rights issue of our time.”
Don’t confuse the worshipping crowd with facts, FeralCat. It really annoys them.
She describes herself as a “Second Amendment Absolutist”.
Other than that position, I can’t think of any issue on which she’s on America’s side.
This is the incredible, nothing-less-than-greatness personified, university provost who, singlehandedly, gave us all the freshly minted North Korean atomic-bomb with its unprecedented proliferation of nuclear tech and materiel.
Dimwits! Examine her record not her rhetoric…
Yes, President Bush was completely uninvolved in that process.
Since she won’t run for office, I have a great idea for a role for her.
She could be a great Secreary of State for Mr. Romney.
(Also, Rudy G. for Attorney General)
The very definition of insanity.
How about Ambassador to Afghanistan.
I wonder if Condoleezza Rice was surprised by the headlines over her comment to The Washington Times that America suffers from a national “birth defect” — namely, the practice of slavery at the time of the nation’s founding.
Make that the first founding. She said she considers the civil rights movement to be the nation’s “second founding.” The secretary of state made another point. She said “one of the primary things” that attracted her to the candidacy of George W. Bush “was not actually foreign policy.” Rather, she explained, “it was No Child Left Behind.” She continued: “When he talks about `the soft bigotry of low expectations,’ I know what that feels like.”
Rice has actually said all of this before, including more emphatic remarks on No Child Left Behind and “soft” bigotry. “I’ve seen it. Okay?” Rice said in 2005 to The New York Times. “And it’s not in this president. It is, however, pretty deeply ingrained in our system and we’re going to have to do something about it.” Rice offered as an example her own high school teacher who suggested she was junior college material.
Maybe someone should inform the secretary of state that being underestimated, turned down or shunted aside is, alas, part of the human experience, not the exclusive function of race. But it’s probably too late for that. As secretary of state — not, say, secretary of education — Rice has long been doing “something about it” on the world stage. Instead of different states and school systems, she’s been working with different countries and belief systems. Suddenly, things about the Rice Doctrine — better, the No Country Left Behind Doctrine — begin to fall into place.
I’ve written before about how Rice makes faulty comparisons between the evolution of democratic principle (all men are created equal) in the United States and the introduction of democratic procedure (ballot boxes) to the Middle East, always ignoring both the miracle of our 18th-century Constitution, which contained the blueprint for abolition, and the dispiriting reality of 21st century Islamic constitutions, which charter Sharia states where freedom of conscience (among other things) doesn’t exist. I’ve written also about how she sees the transformation of her once-segregated hometown of Birmingham, Ala., as the blueprint for democratizing the Islamic world. Hers is a worldview personal to the point of autobiographical, as when she explains how, as a daughter of Birmingham (or “Bombingham,” as she has called it), she can relate both to Israeli fear of Palestinian bombs, and Palestinian “humiliation and powerlessness” over Israeli checkpoints, which she sees as a form of segregation. What she never seems to realize is that such “segregation,” far being the sort of prejudice she remembers, is actually an Israeli line of defense against the ultimate prejudice of Palestinian bombs.
Considering her remarks about America’s “birth defect” — an egregious term for any secretary of state to use about a nation that has brought more liberty to more races, colors and creeds than any in history — I am struck anew how deeply Rice’s vision of race in America, or, perhaps, in segregated Birmingham, affects her vision of America in the wider world. It is as if Rice sees American influence as a means by which to address what she perceives as disparities of race or Third World heritage on the international level.
This would help explain her ahistorical habit of linking the civil rights movement to the Bush administration’s effort to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, in a 2003 speech to the National Association of Black Journalists, she argued that blacks, more than others, should “reject” the “condescending” argument that some are not “ready” for freedom. “That view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham and it’s wrong in 2003 in Baghdad,” she said. In 2006, she made a similar point. “When I look around the world and I hear people say, `Well, you know, they’re just not ready for democracy,’ it really does resonate,” Rice told CBS’s Katie Couric. “It makes me so angry because I think there are those echoes of what people once thought about black Americans.”
There’s something shockingly provincial at work here. In seeing so much of the world through an American prism of race, Rice has effectively blinded herself to historical and cultural and religious differences between Islam and the West. To put it simply, neither Baghdad nor Gaza is Birmingham. And nothing in all of history quite compares to Philadelphia.
Her talk about the civil war was enough to alienate about 20,000,000 voters right there. I mostly agree with her, but it had no place being argued at the Republican convention. I’m afraid Condi strikes me as an anachronism. As you outline, her record in office is somewhere south of mediocre and that’s in her supposed area of expertise. I think she’s sort of stuck in about 1988.
Condi Rice: “More than at any other time in history, greatness is built
on mobilizing human potential and ambition. We have always done
that better than any country in the world. People have come
here from all over because they have believed our creed of
opportunity and limitless horizons.
They have come here from the world’s most impoverished
nations just to make a decent wage. And they have come here
from advanced societies as engineers and scientists that fuel
the knowledge-based revolution in the Silicon Valley of
California, in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, along
Route 128 in Massachusetts, in Austin, Texas, and across this
great land.
We must continue to welcome the world’s most ambitious
people to be a part of us. In that way, we stay young and
optimistic and determined. We need immigration laws that
protect our borders, meet our economic needs, and yet show that
we are a compassionate nation of immigrants.”
That is pure RINO talk for amnesty. Sorry, but it is. We didn’t accept it when it came out of McSlug’s mouth and we shouldn’t be happy to hear it come out of hers.
Let’s be honest about immigration.
First, Our schools do not produce anywhere near the amount of scientists, engineers, etc. that we need. Why not poach the best and brightest from other countries?
You aren’t going to take an uneducated doofus off the assembly line and make them a high tech asset. Period. They aren’t taking jobs Americans could fill because not enough Americans want to do the work it takes to get there, even if they were capable. I can tell you with some authority – decades in high tech, that they are mostly not.
Second, on the lower end, immigrants see jobs in the fields and in restaurants, as opportunity where our youth has been so imbued with self-esteem they wouldn’t go anywhere near such hard work, character building or not. Same with the laid off plant worker. This isn’t work they can’t do, it’s work they won’t do.
We used to have a guest worker program for mexicans to come north to work, then return. It was called the Bracero program. It needs to be reinstated.
The fact is our country needs, and benefits from immigration. It simply needs to be managed better.
“My fellow Americans, we do not have a choice,” she stressed.
No, in point of fact we do have choices and the mark of a leader is the ability to make the correct choices. Does tending to AIDS orphans in Africa materially benefit our national security or does it simply make us feel good? Does our playing the world’s policeman better mankind or does it merely allow others to shirk their duties? Does our meddling in the affairs of oppressed nations relieve the oppression or does it tighten the control of the oppressors?
Ms. Rice talks about leadership but which one is leadership: showing impoverished nations how we lifted ourselves out of poverty and encouraging them to do the same in their own way or forcibly changing their society to better suit our elites? If North Korea wants to live in abject poverty with her citizens suffering starvation and deprivation then we should leave them to starve. If the Palestinians want to live in hovels and embrace the 15th century then we should let them. Instead, we’ve made the choice to provide material support to the dictators, thus cementing their power and control, while simultaneously erasing the choice of the citizens to remove their disastrous leaders. I’m sure that’s great “state craft” but helping to tighten the chains on billions of slaves shouldn’t be a source of pride.
And, Ms. Rice, if we don’t have choices then why even have an election? Isn’t this election about which set of choices will be made or is it all just a show for the yokels? Is the outcome already preordained with an ever expanding government, an ever growing tax burden, and an ever increasing flow of our blood and capital to other “more deserving” nations? Because, Ms. Rice, when you say “we don’t have a choice” what you’re really saying is “we have an obligation”, you’re saying “citizens of other nations have a prior claim on our work product”, and you’re enslaving the First World to the Third World with no understanding that the Third World nations are still Third World nations because of the choices they made, not because of our choices. That’s not leadership, that’s misguided guilt. Leadership is encouraging others to succeed, it’s not rewarding failure.
Many people can NEVER forget that Rice was very pro-Islam and EXTREMELY anti-Israel.
oooh, yeah..We better keep her out of the picture and keep the current folks. God help Israel if she gets back in a foreign service job! I’m certain at that point the Israelis will look back fondly and long for all the support the Obama administration has given them.
” 14. Linda Rivera
Many people can NEVER forget that Rice was very pro-Islam and EXTREMELY anti-Israel.”
Oh really. Paid any attention to the current administration recently?
True.
And others are idiots.
Condi Rice”: “I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian. I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”
As Rice believes it is wrong to have security checkpoints, why is she not DEMANDING that all security at airports and all other places are ELIMINATED?
The rabid Jew-hater clearly wants Jews to be mass murdered. Rice does not represent Americans who believe that Jews have a HUMAN RIGHT to protection.
Rabid.Jew.Hater. That wants Jews mass murdered.
Wow.
I don’t understand how one can look at her life and body of work and conclude that invective.
She said she knew how they must feel, to have to pass a checkpoint that exists through no fault of your own. She didn’t say the checkpoint shouldn’t exist. Sure, the Arabs (that call themselves Palestinians) are their own worst enemies, but there are many many people caught in the middle.
Israelis aren’t entitled to protection from us. It’s in our interest to provide it. And we have to balance that interest with our other interests in the region, like it or not. And those interests conflict at times.
You can’t size up the very difficult job she had as Sec-State, and conclude she’s nothing more than Josef Goebbels in a dress.
True, the word choice was over-the-top, inapt, and should be withdrawn, but in her critically important diplomatic role, Rice did not favor a key US ally sufficiently during her time at State (over an anti-semitic terrorist mob). For that, she must be held to account, all of her other many truly wonderful achievements notwithstanding. Of course, she was bending over backward to appear “even-handed” and an “honest broker”; but the real reason there is no peace is a failure to see and speak and act on the truth. The Pals will never agree to reasonable terms so long as they are treated as an equal bargaining partner. Never.
Both Christians and Jews are HATED. America disarmed the Christians in Iraq rendering the Christians defenseless prey for barbaric, predator Muslims:
frontpagemag.com The Plight of Christians in Iraq
Immediately after the American invasion of Iraq, the Christian militias were disarmed. They were the only militias to be disarmed. American forces allowed both the Sunnis and Shiites to keep their armed militias. Christians first fled from Baghdad to the Nineveh Plains, and then to Jordan and Syria. In Jordan and Syria the American embassies told Iraqi refugees to go to the United Nations because their plight “was not an American problem.” Excuse me?
Meanwhile the official position of the State Department under Condi Rice is that Christians are harassed by “criminal elements” in Iraq and that no persecution exists. That attitude has caused even greater persecution and led our embassies and other nations to be unhelpful.
…Condi Rice values good relations with Islamic dictatorships who are the worst offenders of human rights in the world.
Middle class women whose husbands were murdered in Iraq before they fled, have been forced into prostitution.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32478
Really, just watch what happens now that the islamist take over. Women’s rights, religious rights, any rights out the window. Sharia is the only way to these new leaders.
Hey, if they were stupid enough to disarm, whose fault is that? Don’t blame America for the actions of morons.
A black woman gave a key speech at the Republican convention; this is important (although it should not be). Ms. Rice, a brilliant scholar and accomplished pianist, gave an important speech, appropriate for a convention. She touched on national security issues, which have been ignored in the debate on our dismal economy. {Her academic studies, and positions centered around her expertise in USSR national security matters. George Schultz “found” her.) If we let our educational system continue to rot, it has grave national security dangers. If we let our energy infrastructure continue to rot, it has grave national security dangers. What she omitted is how do we pay for it? After green energy wasted money, we are broke.
As a white guy who came from Birmingham, I can understand her speech. It was aimed at gathering black votes, not mine. Her dad was the minister at the church that was bombed. It was full of kindergarten age girls; she knew a few of the victims. Her dad kept a loaded gun, which informed her of the absolute need for Second Amendment rights if your police chief is Bull Connor.
She recently kicked open the door to the Augusta National golf course, a previously all male domain. Her green jacket is meant to garner women votes; it may lose a few males, who worry about sports.
MacArthur, the Caesar of conquered Japan, wrote Washington to either send food, or bullets. It is the constant question of international relations and Ms. Rice can inform. She contributed one crucial concept, American socialism is more dangerous to our survival than Chinese communism.
She gave a good speech; Ryan’s was more important.
Rice is great to have back in the GOP tent. But I would prefer John Bolton’s approach to foreign policy, and hope she is not advising on it. As noted by others here, she truly missed the whole issue in the Middle East.
Just out of curiosity, who do you blame for Obama’s foreign policy? Oblama or Hilarity Clinton?
Non sequiter.
3000 of my fellow citizens are lay dead on the Streets of New York, due to the incompetance of Ms. Rice. It happened on her watch; she saw the intelligence, she did not pass it on, she did not listen. A competant National Security Advisor would have prevented 9-11 easily.
I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER. How quickly conservative and Republican saps do.
Their blood cries out.
So Condi has us fired up to sacrifice, Ryan is ready to challenge Iran and Romeny promises to ‘stand up and confront’ the Russians (who are keeping their word and launching our astronauts, letting us transit former Soviet territory to supply Afghanistan etc).
Save us from the warmongers of the party. We don’t want any more wars; we can’t afford them.
Picard said: “The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy… and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”
Other than indirect references to allies that are owed loyalty (Canada and the UK come to mind) – what does the US have against a partnership with a revamped Commonwealth to be a force for good. For it doesn’t make sense for anyone, other than enemies of the US, for the US to be overextended.