A match made in heaven

Item from this week's Wall Street Journal: A grass roots movement is taking shape to get Condi Rice on the GOP ticket as the VP candidate beside John McCain.

It's simply too good--Run, Condi, run! Oh please, oh please, oh please!

Here is the dowry Condi would bring to that particular marriage (emphasis added):

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

That 935 figure includes:

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials [i.e. Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld], along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both.

And that 532 number, in turn, breaks down as follows:

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

Think about that: In the two years after 9/11, Rice told more lies than Dick Cheney did about Iraq! And this is the person some Republicans want center-stage next summer and fall. Excellent plan!

And don't imagine that the "lied to get us into war" meme, in all its permutations, will be yesterday's news. I think it's going to be evergreen. This was her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday:

Isn't that stack of documents Wexler points to a nice prop?

McCain is running on the positive future of the Iraq occupation, which strikes me as foolish enough; why would he want to encourage questions about that war's tainted beginnings? Condi can safely make her plans to join the Heritage Foundation after next January.