Can Condoleezza Rice Go Home Already?

Seriously, send this woman on her oil tanker out to sea and let us never hear from her again. Rarely has there been a worse policymaker more beloved than Condoleezza Rice. She has not a single accomplishment to her name in eight years — so much for those much-heralded Israel-Palestine talks, huh? — unless you count being the worst national-security adviser in American history.

And yet The New York Times Magazine sees fit to let Rice embarrass herself in its pages. The forthcoming issue features snippets of advice from Rice to Barack Obama, and she gets downright incoherent. Here’s Rice on the need for American democracy promotion:

If the U.S. doesn’t remain that lodestar, then I think democracy moves off the international agenda at a time when you’re beginning to see, for instance, the Europeans unafraid to give their award to a Chinese dissident, despite the blowback from Beijing.

… and then she apologizes for autocratic Russia:

They’ve got problems, and the basis of this is that the legitimacy of the Russian government is not ideology; it is not a pretension to a different route for human development as Communism was. It is the ability of Russians to, if they can’t afford those Cartier shops near Tverskaya, to be able instead to go to the Ikea store that now completely dominates the Tank Trap Monument that celebrates the repulsion of the final push of the Germans into Moscow.

And then comes the refusal to face reality of what her administration did in the Middle East:

There have been some real gains, but there also has been a complete change in the conversation, particularly in the Middle East, where some form of popular legitimacy is being sought in almost every country. The American voice has got to stay strong in that conversation.

Uh, that’s always been the case. The only change in the conversation is that millions more people in the Middle East have been driven to pure hatred of the United States thanks to the invasion of Iraq, which has killed perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. If this woman isn’t delusional, she’s a liar. The only comfort is that we no longer have to listen to her ever again.