Women really don’t get math: Just look at Condi Rice
Senator, the last time I saw something that small, it had an eraser on the end of it
Condoleeza Rice may be a brilliant, highly capable woman. She may be able to speak 14 languages, play the Minute Waltz in 53 seconds, and recite Homer’s Iliad backwards in the original ancient Greek. None of that will bring back any of the almost 1,400 dead Americans that are result of the failed policy that this supposedly brilliant and highly capable woman has championed.
Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has been pilloried for suggesting that women may be biologically unsuited to succeed at mathematics.
He may have a point.
Just look at Condoleezza Rice.
She’s clearly a well-educated, intelligent woman, versed in Brahms and the Bolsheviks, who has just been rewarded for her loyalty with the most plum assignment in the second Bush Cabinet.
Yet her math skills are woefully inadequate.
She can’t do simple equations. She doesn’t even know that X times zero equals zero.
If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Rice, who helped the president and vice president bamboozle the country into war.
Was Condi out doing figure eights at the ice-skating rink when she should have been home learning her figures? She couldn’t have spent much time studying classic word problems: If two trains leave Chicago at noon, one going south at 20 mph and one going north at 30 mph, how far will each have gotten by midnight?
Otherwise, she might have realized that if two cars leave the Baghdad airport at noon on the main highway into the capital of Iraq, neither one is going to get there with any living passengers. Our 22 months at war have not added up to that one major highway being secured.
It’s lucky for Rice that she’s serving with men who are just as lame at numbers as she is. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz couldn’t be bothered to tally correctly the number of dead soldiers when he testified before Congress.
Rather than admit that the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq has been a failure of criminal proportions, Rice has continued to back a horse that was DOA at the starting gate. That a woman of such obvious intellect and talent could so willingly and knowingly support such a deceptive policy should be prosecutable. Apparently, a high IQ does not corrolate to a high degree of common sense and integrity.
At Condi’s hearing, she justified the Bush administration’s misadventures by saying history would prove it right. “I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up,” she told a skeptical Sen. Biden.
Problem is, she’s calculating, but she can’t add. For now, Sam Cooke is right about the Bushies. They don’t know much about history.
As far as writing history goes, it’s too early to clearly understand how this travesty of a foreign policy quagmire will be viewed. What is important in the here and now, though, is that the loved ones of 1,400 dedicated American soldiers are dealing with the reality that their husband, wife, sons, and daughters died for a lie. And Condi Rice has no problem with that.
That Rice can look at herself in the mirror without feeling even a twinge of guilt is almost beyond belief. That she can sit at her confirmation hearing and feign indignity that Sen. Barbara Boxer can “question her integrity” strains the bounds of credibility.
This all sounds like the subject of a book: Smart Women, Foolish Choices. Somehow, we could and should have expected better from someone with such polished academic credentials. Apparently, common decency and integrity aren’t included in the package.
