BSE-afflicted senator attacks

Senator (Democrat) Barbara Boxer gets personal with Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleezza Rice — and sends feminism back into the dark ages.

Click on the image (or here) and watch the video clip (1:23) from Good Morning America. Note the reaction on Dr. Rice's eyebrows.





Transcript

RICE: I can never do anything to replace any of the lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom . . .

BOXER [interrupting]: Madame Secretary, please, I know you feel terrible about it; that's not the point. I was making the point about who pays the price for your decisions. Now the issue is who pays the price? Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand, with an immediate family.


New York Post has this to say:


Breathtaking.

Simply breathtaking.

We scarcely know where to begin.

The junior senator from California apparently believes that an accomplished, seasoned diplomat, a renowned scholar and an adviser to two presidents like Condoleezza Rice is not fully qualified to make policy at the highest levels of the American government because she is a single, childless woman.


The Washington Post reports:


Rice tried not to be baited. A ferocious Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), noting that the childless Rice is not at risk of losing her own offspring in Iraq, displayed a 2005 quote from the secretary saying she had "no doubt" about a troop reduction in Iraq. "You had absolutely no doubt about how great it was going," Boxer said.

"Senator, let's not overstate the case," Rice soothed. "I don't think I said it was going great."


Mark Finkelstein has an interesting take on how the Associated Press chose to word their article:


AP Going Victorian?: The Associated Press used this phrase to describe Boxer's slap: "Even Rice's status as a single woman was fair game." Single woman? In an age in which 30% of all children, and over 70% of black children, are born to single women, how oddly Victorian of the AP. Was this just a slip, or was AP reluctant to use the expression "Rice's status as a childless woman" because that would have cast Boxer in an even crueler light?


Speaking to a news anchor later, Dr. Rice commented:


"I guess that means I don't have kids. Was that the purpose of that?" Rice said. "Well, at the time I just found it a bit confusing frankly. But in retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that. That the only question is are you making good decisions because you have kids?"


Perhaps, insecure before the august intellect of Dr. Condoleeza Rice, Barbara Boxer assumed that marital status and reproductive success fall under qualifications and/or achievements in curricula vitæ?


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[Aside]

This reminds me of an old post by takchek:


I even met with our Education Minister when he visited Teachers College. Of the questions he asked me, two stood out: "When are you going back to Singapore?" and "When are you going to have babies?" It hit me that I had never spoken to the Minister when I was teaching in Singapore. I wondered: am I valuable to the country only after I leave? (Dr. Jocelyn Yen Yen Woo)