Condi whopper

There's been plenty of great coverage of the Waxman-Rice showdown already, but here's a big whopper that I transcribed for everybody's enjoyment.

Rice: I wouldn't want to make public allegations about corruptions for anybody, unless i could be certain that they were substantiated, corroborated and i would hope that it would be understood that the last thing that we want to do is to talk about allegations rather than fully investigating them, rather than taking the time to see if they can be corroborated. And that would be the way follow whether it was an ally or an adversary.

The way this actually works in the Bush administration is people like Condoleezza Rice say nothing about the extreme levels of corruption--alleged or substantiated--in any number of convenient countries, and cast about all sorts of aspersions, even lies, about less reliable governments.

Obviously Iraq is a special case. The Maliki government's corruption comes directly at our cost, both in funds and lives, and inasmuch as the United States has no intention of leaving Iraq, we should address the issue vocally. But if one were to make a rule about this sort of conduct, I'd say it should be prudence first, but that we should be if anything more overtly demanding of our allies and strategic partners than we should of tinderbox countries like Iran--adversaries of whom we may have more extreme demands, but from whom we can expect nothing if all we do is express public outrage about their crimes.