More secretary than State

Don't know if I should be amused or aghast.

Marcus Mabry has a biography of Condoleezza Rice coming out. From the excerpts in Newsweek:

"Rice was drawn to Bush. 'First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around,' she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. 'He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it.'

"Bush was also a bad boy. And Rice, according to friends and family, had a thing for bad boys. . . .

"Rice's friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. 'He fills that need,' Hamberry-Green decided. 'Bush is her feed.'"

As for Rice's job, Mabry writes that "the major task of the national security adviser was to be the skeptic-in-chief. . . . But Rice tended to enable the president's missteps rather than check them. The basis of the relationship had been formed in the campaign: she molded his instincts, she didn't challenge them. So as the administration marched toward war in Iraq, she didn't push back. She didn't question troop levels or the Defense Department's rosy post-Saddam scenarios. She didn't demand the administration devise a single, unified plan for after Saddam's statue fell. . . .

"Even Rice's friends, most of whom happen to be Democrats, say her affection for Bush blinded her to his failings. 'She thought he could do no wrong,' said one. . . .

"[S]tepmother Clara Rice offered a simpler explanation for why she stayed: 'she just can't say no to that man.'"