Condi couldn't get op-ed published

[Lanya]

[Poor baby. Maybe she should go buy shoes....]

Brinkley: Condi Rice Couldn't Get Op-Ed Published

By E&P Staff

Published: July 22, 2007 8:30 PM ET

NEW YORK If you've ever had trouble getting an Op-Ed submission published -- and who among print journalists has not? -- this might make you feel a little better: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has had the same problem.

Writing a -- what else? an Op-Ed -- in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley (who now teaches journalism at Stanford) reveals Rice's problem in discussing her wider loss of influence.

Here is an excerpt.
*

A few months ago, she decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept "telling me to shut up," he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. "They just wanted us to be Bush automatons."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003615116

[yellow_crane]

Is it not interesting the object lesson regarding all people the Neocons appoint to official positions.

How many people have completely lost their credibility?

Colin Powell, who might well have become the Republicans perfect cross-over candidate somewhere shortly down the line, will now be lucky to obtain a decent paycheck.

Maybe he could buy a van and live down by the river, giving 'don't do what I did' speeches re. wrong track decisions.

He might well be hired for some sinecure niche in one of the Right Wing's giant corporations (probably Energy), but he couldn't be elected to anything above dog catcher now.  His public life, once promising, is over.

This administration and its privatized approach to conducting governmental affairs along the lines of corporate morality (lie, deflect, threaten, intimidate, assassinate character, overwhelm with torts, spin, lie again) sure did incur its share of collateral damage. 

The sad thing is--and this earmarks the consistent m. o.  of the whole Bush family--the collateral damage often coincides with a complete abandonment of personnel by the Bush inner core.  Ask Katherine Harris.  Ask a dozen others.

Who will be next?

Will he be a US General of Greek dissent?

[BT]

Editorial decisions are left to the editors. If the OP-Ed didn't add anything to the narrative , why publish it?

And Floyd sounds like he has a terminal case of heartburn from sour grapes.

[Lanya]

When I read that, for a split second I thought it said

"Pink Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs...."

and it didn't seem all that weird.  A momentary head-shake to restore equilibrium, and go on.  We have torture, spying on citizens, loss of habeas corpus, on and on...why not Pink Floyd as director of media affairs?    Normalcy will be VERY hard to get used to ever again.