Rice Cooker

For all these Republican Senators who were shocked, SHOCKED, that anyone could possibly oppose someone so diligent and upstanding and qualified as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I submit Exhibit A:

Nearly half of the Federal Aviation Administration's daily intelligence reports in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks mentioned Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, according to newly released documents.

This after Condi claimed in the days after 9/11 that "we never could have imagined terrorists flying planes into buildings." Well, unless the government read the report:

In the months before Sept. 11, the Federal Aviation Administration told some of the nation's largest airports that if a terrorist wanted to hijack a plane to commit suicide in a "spectacular explosion," it would probably be a hijacking on U.S. soil rather than overseas.

Then there was Rice's claim in the WaPo from March 2004 that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration." Except for this:

EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.

"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.

Here's the memo.

See, it wasn't the color of her skin, or just Democrats being "obstructionist." It's, as 1-term Senator Mark Dayton put it, the "lying." As in "I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly."

Neither do I.