Liberals Just Can't Accept Condi Rice's Accomplishments

Why does King Day bring out the whiniest left-wing activists, who feel it's "their day" instead of one to recognize people like Condi Rice, a true American with constructive solutions to the world's problems. Better that than the failed recycled ideas of the 1960's still pushed by her detractors.

I don't think Dr. King would have cared one bit about Rice's party affiliation, he would have seen her accomplishments, intellect and leadership.


(Seattle Times) In September 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy for three of the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. What King could not know was that within earshot of the blast, just blocks away at her father's church, was another little black girl, a friend of the youngest victim, who 41 years later would be on the verge of becoming America's foremost diplomat.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opens hearings tomorrow on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state.

The juxtaposition of today's Martin Luther King holiday and tomorrow's hearing offers those who knew King, lived that history and ponder his legacy an opportunity to wonder: How might they explain Rice's rise to him? And what would he make of it?

She is, after all, the literal fulfillment of King's dream — a woman judged not by the color of her skin but by the content of her character. She is also living proof that King's eulogy was prescient, that "these children — unoffending, innocent and beautiful — did not die in vain."

"I would hold her up as a standard for all young black women," says the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil-rights leader who brought King to Birmingham. And yet Shuttlesworth believes the president Rice serves has got it wrong: "I just don't think bombing people makes them love you."

And there it is for many of King's disciples: profound pride at the scale of Rice's success, measured against deep doubts about the foreign policy of George W. Bush.