Book: Tough Love

Susan Rice's new book came out last week, and she's making all the talk shows to promote it. When she was on Rachel she struck me as intelligent and well-spoken and a remarkable reminder of times past when "the best and brightest" went into public service.

I'm 115 pages in (of 532), and so far she's a little too self-congratulatory.  Yes, she was one of the first African-American Rhodes Scholars, yes she graduated with Departmental Honors, yes she worked in prestigious jobs for prestigious firms, yes she was a star athlete whose mother was good friends with Madeline Albright and sat on several corporate boards, and her father was Lynden Johnson's head of the Federal Reserve.

Underprivileged she was not.

The book starts with the childhoods of her grandparents, and proceeds chronologically.  In the sixth chapter she about to graduate from Oxford.  People with such high achievements can be exhausting.

According to her interview on Rachel, later in the book she'll get into her time in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and then bemoan the current administration.  Hopefully that'll be less intimidating.

Apparently -- I was not aware -- Rice came under some criticism for her handling of Al-Qaida prior to 9/11. She also uses her book to strike back at her critics.

Susan Rice wrote:

When it comes to South Sudan's morally bankrupt leaders, I am reminded of the depressing adage, "You can't help those who refuse to help themselves."

Diplomacy, in Rice's telling, seems like a thankless chore.

Susan Rice's descriptions of day-to-day life inside the Obama White House sure paint a stark contrast from the current president.

Obama was up late most nights devouring books or briefings or periodicals, and often came in in the morning with something he wanted to discuss.  His inner staff would sit around for a couple hours discussing policy, world events, or just some scientific discovery that Obama thought was interesting. Anytime a major policy was being announced, he'd meet with his advisors and with his opponents to try to gain consensus and make sure nothing was overlooked.  He was, if anything, excessively cautious about all of his presidential actions.

Susan is up to the Snowden revelations in her book.  She claims Obama did not know the NSA was spying on allies, and she claims "Snowden absconded to Vladimir Putin's Russia where he shared God knows what."

These are Administration talking points, long since debunked.

Snowden's new book, "Permanent Record," is next up on my reading list.

Susan Rice wrote:

I have long tended to favor a posture that would enable us to sustain counterterrorism efforts without perpetually propping up the Kabul government, which remains poor, weak, and ineffectual--unlikely to defeat or even hold back the Taliban without a continued, significant U.S. troop presence.  Yet, risking the Afghan government's collapse, after years of U.S. sacrifice, is hard to contemplate.

Why???  I mean, when there's s NO CHANCE of success -- not even a definition of what success would be -- why the fuck does past sacrifice even factor in?  This same nonsensical argument was used to justify staying in Viet Nam ("after so many men have given their lives, we can't just leave or their sacrifice will have been for nothing").

Is it the gambler's superstition, that having lost x dollars at the casino, a payout is due them?