“I remind people that, like when I’m with, Condi, I say she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C student and just look at who’s the president and who’s the adviser.”
I know, I know, there are more substantive issues about which I should be concerned, but there is, I am certain, a doctoral dissertation lurking in coming to understand how we have arrived at a point where the President of the United States comes before a press conference and stumbles through such a deeply unfunny, smug, unenlightened, degrading, irrelevant statement in just 30 short words. Whether he has actually ventured this observation to others, or whether he blurted it out here for the first time, "misunderestimating" its profound offensiveness, it is so inappropriate in so many ways, that it is uncomfortable to hear. Even though Dr. Condoleeza Rice is clearly not the only target of the benighted sentiment seething in this utterance and has made, in my opinion, some pretty severe mistakes for which she and we are bound to suffer, she is incontrovertibly a highly accomplished and important – not to mention ambitious – figure, and it made my insides squirm to think of her having to tolerate this. In the context of a range of past and unfolding revelations of how the President accepts, encourages, and arranges the humiliation and degradation of those working with him, how could one not but conclude that, at least in his personal interactions, this man has the sensibilities of a profoundly insecure and deeply disturbed third-grade bully. It seems even Jon Stewart cannot find a funny angle in this. Is it perhaps more the stuff of tragedy?
