Condi on the Elliptical
Nero fiddled -- Condi does cardio. We've commented many times on the show about Rice's workout routine and the elliptical machine that is sometimes brought to her hotel room when she jets about -- and we have a lot of audio of her discussing her weight, her dieting tips and her exercise routine, which seem to take precedent over diplomacy. But I hadn't realized how much she has literally been ellipticizing while the world burns: Maureen Dowd today quotes a new book in which Rice tells the author (and Times reporter) how she went back to doing the elliptical after she found out the news that Hamas had won the elections in the West Bank, something that seemed to take her by surprise. This is the woman who is now helping to broker peace in Anapolis, which is all the more laughable:
In 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon and many civilians died, including children, Condi and W. drew Arab and U.N. ire for not forcing Ehud Olmert to broker a cease-fire faster.
That same year, in another instance of spectacular willful ignorance, she was blindsided by the Hamas win in the Palestinian elections.
As she described it to Bumiller, she went upstairs at 5 a.m. the morning after the Palestinian elections in 2006 to the gym in her Watergate apartment to exercise on her elliptical machine. She saw the news crawl reporting the Hamas victory.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’ ” she said. She kept exercising for awhile but finally got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department. “I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’ and they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness! Hamas won?’ ”
When she couldn't’t reach the State Department official on the ground in the Palestinian territories, she did what any loyal Bushie would do: She got back on the elliptical.
“I thought, might as well finish exercising,” Rice told Bumiller. “It’s going to be a really long day.” It was one of the few times she was prescient on the Middle East.
|