Snow

It’s snowing in southern Westchester County. Another setback for the plans to turn my co-op into a tropical beachfront resort.

Speaking of snow jobs, yesterday Condi Rice seemed to deny that the U.S. is building permanent bases in Iraq. Liz Sidoti reports for the Associated Press:

Rice did not say when all U.S. forces would return home and did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., when he asked, “Will the bases be permanent or not?”

“I would think that people would tell you, we’re not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places,” Rice replied.

Huh? Was that a denial, or not?

10 thoughts on “Snow

  1. Yea moving bases from Germany to Romania Condi.
    Condi ( in Blackburn Lancashire)paraphrase: ‘Oh yes I am used to protests, we have them all the time on college campuses. No they don’t bother me at all. ‘
    so is it 1970 Condi? maybe that’s why the thousands of mistakes don’t bother you, you think it is someone else’s mistake and not yours. Well here’s a clue dear, it is 2006 and you, National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, have to take credit for all the mistakes.
    I used to call her kindasleazy but now she is ” thousands of mistakes Condi”

  2. It appears to be a denial, but that would depend on the meaning of permanent. Wasn’t it Buddha who said..transiency is in the nature of all things?

  3. The Bush administration knows that the bases are and will be a sore point with the Iraqi people and others in the middle east. If they were not planning to build permanent bases, they would shout it from the rooftops instead of making cryptic comments to members of Congress.

  4. Of course there will be permanent bases in Iraq. Don’t you remember the “mission accomplished” banner? Bushie was able to jack up the price of oil for his Texas chums, and the construction of 5 permanent military bases that would guard over the oil fields had begun.

  5. Lets take this apart piece by piece…

    “I would think that people would tell you,”

    first off, she’s not actually saying that she is saying anything. Just that she would think that somebody would tell us something about…

    “we’re not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days.”

    aside from the argument about how permanent anything can be… whats this about “really pretty much”? That is not an absolute. Thats a kind of, sort of, maybe, maybe not type of answer. And “these days” says nothing about yesterday or next week. these days they might not be seeking anything, but tomorrow… well tomorrow who knows.

    “We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places,”

    a lot of places does not imply Iraq in any way. She could be talking about the moon for all that statement commits to. And a nice verbal clue is “in fact”. Always look sideways when somebody throws in an unnecessary “in fact”. More often than not, there is more hidden information to those facts than there appears to be.

    You know, she might have well have looked into the camera, shrugged her shoulders, and said “Poptarts?”

  6. I had to smile at that header – I was looking out my office window in New Rochelle almost the entire time it was snowing… everyone in the office was amazed. My boss said, “That’s it, I’m leaving for the day to go skiing…”

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