Haul Her Butt In

Secretary of State Condi "Mushroom Cloud" Rice is announcing that she will not condescend to appear, under subpoena, before Chairman Waxman's committee to investigate the use of bogus intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. Instead, she says that she'll answer the questions "again" in writing, as if they were honestly answered before in her confirmation hearings. This, of course, would not allow cross examination and follow up questions by the committee, which is no doubt what Rice intends. This is becoming a pattern with the Rethug regime: stonewall, lie, and avoid accountability. The pattern needs to be interrupted by forcing her to come to the hearing, sit in the witness chair under oath, and answer questions about why this Assministration lied about WMD, Saddam's connections to al Qaeda, etc. She can't handle that.

Go for it, Chairman Waxman.

D'oh!

Today's Washington Post reports that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice once again used a suspect aphorism in describing the "challenging time" for the U.S. in the Middle East. "I don't read Chinese, but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is weiji, which means both danger and opportunity," she said. "And I think that states it very well. We'll try to maximize the opportunity." A possible source for this ersatz erudition? None other than Lisa Simpson, who engaged in this exchange with Homer:

Lisa: "Look on the bright side, Dad. Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for 'crisis' as they do for 'opportunity'?"
Homer: "Yes! Cris-atunity."

Elsewhere, the Post also reports that Victor Mair, professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, calls this a "grossly inaccurate formulation," saying that the character "ji" actually means "incipient moment" or a "critical point." Weiji should really be translated, he says, as "a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry."

Well put, Secretary Rice!