Eight years later, she moved into government, serving the president's father as senior National Security Council director for Soviet affairs, where she made her reputation as a concise and incisive briefer, someone who could help a busy president cut to the heart of a problem. ...

"Condi is not a moral relativist," said Coit D. Blacker, director of Stanford's Institute for International Studies and a Rice confidant. "She has very strong views that are informed by a certain kind of religiosity…. She thinks through issues carefully, seeks divine guidance, makes a decision and sticks to it. Other people might call that being stubborn."

-- read the whole thing

Rice Preview: The excerpt suggests the good and bad sides of Dr. Rice. Her intelligence, leadership skills, and personal ethics are things we wish in public officials. On the other hand, her experience and knowledge quite arguably is not of the sort appropriate to the post-Cold War Era. Likewise, her moral vision might very well be laudable, but it reflects a troubling aspect of this administration -- a certitude that is especially problematic when one uses it to promote a questionable policy.

One can see how the President's moral vision appeals to her, but if anything, we have seen it is a vision that needs to be checked, not just encouraged. [Dr. Rice was called in to school the candidate on foreign policy, but reports also noted how the candidate drew her in with his moral certainty. Was she was perhaps both a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome and a willing enabler?] Who among "The Vulcans" serves this role?

Prediction: She might say some stuff that is used by the other side to show the administration's complicity. All the same, the (wicked) limits placed in the ground rules as well as the actual shades of gray of the events themselves might very well result in no true smoking gun that will damn the administration arising. [Time will tell, but it's often better to be temperate in one's predictions.] Either way, I think at least half of the injury to the administration was and continues to be self-inflicted. With enemies like these, sometimes you don't really need friends.