Oh this is just too funny. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

I remember the heady days for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

About 2 1/2 years ago, when she was new in office, I accompanied her on her first trip around the world, with stops in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan and China. Crowds gathered to see her limousine drive past; people whistled, waved and cheered. Interviewers routinely asked her whether she was planning to run for president. One TV reporter in India told her she was "arguably the most powerful woman in the world." She chuckled but did not exactly agree -- or disagree.

How things change.

A few months ago, she decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Oddly enough this relates in at least a sideways manner to our earlier discussion of the Reagan-to-BushCheneyCo intentional wreckage of the government, in that Condi's unpublishable piece had some very familiar sounding elements in it:

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept "telling me to shut up," he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. "They just wanted us to be Bush automatons."

Sound at all familiar? The author of this item, btw, is not exactly in the DFH class. It's by Joel Brinkley, whose bottom-of-the-article blurb reads

is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times.

The rest of the item is just a razor-cut synopsis of the promise with which Rice's tenure at State started out, and the utter debacle it has been since. Very nice.

But it's the "wouldn't publish her article" part I particularly enjoyed. I wonder what sort of Wingnut Welfare she'll be reduced to after her office husband is gone from the scene. If there were justice in this world she'd have to go get a blog, which nobody would read or link to. Instead she'll no doubt find a sinecure at some college that wants her for her title on their board rather than anything she can actually bring to an educational environment. And tuition will rise anyway, alas.