The Heartbreak of Condi Rice

Feeling sorry for the Secretary of State does not come easily these days, but even the hardest-hearted Bush critic has to feel a twinge about the psychobabble profile of her in the new issue of Newsweek.

Yesterday as she was doing what she always does, protecting George Bush, on three TV talk shows, against George Tenet’s memoirs, the newsmagazine was running an excerpt from a book about “Her Path to Power.”

In the kind of breathless prose abandoned by women’s magazines long ago, it relates how she was drawn to George Bush and details her history of finding “bad boys” irresistible, starting with a football player at Notre Dame:

“Rice's friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. ‘He fills that need,’ Hamberry-Green decided. ‘Bush is her feed.’”

There is so much more, including another friend’s description of the “funny kind of transfer of energy” between the two: “It's as though they're Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe."

When she is in the Middle East this week trying to deal with the nuclear threat of Iran and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Ms. Rice may be lonely. But as her stepmother is quoted as saying, “She just can’t say no to that man.”

Next week: “The Strange Love of Alberto Gonzales” and “Dick Cheney’s Secret Passion.”