Is Condoleeza Rice to be John McCain's Dick Cheney?

The rumors that Condoleeza Rice is lobbying hard to be John McCain's running mate have been flying fast and furiously in the past few days, her denials notwithstanding. Rice would be a compelling choice; after all, the Democrats are now limited to either a black person OR a woman, whereas Rice would raise the ante for the Republicans to both. And for some strange reason known only to that fetid morass that is the conservative brain, Republicans adore her. I suspect it has more to do with Republican male fantasies about Condi in her dominatrix attire than about her competence. After all, we're talking about THIS woman:

And this one:

On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with the FBI director, Louis Freeh, nor with his temporary successor that summer, the acting director Tom Pickard.

There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.

Maybe she's an expert on a country that no longer exists (the Soviet Union), but she's dumb as a box of rocks in terms of her ability to add two and two and get four when it comes to terrorism.

Now it turns out that those fuck-me boots may not just be about Republican male fantasies after all -- the woman really is a masty piece of work:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Can you imagine a more cynical move than a guy who spent five years being tortured in a Hanoi prison choosing a strong advocate of torture as his running mate as a means of upping the "groundbreaking" ante?