Et tu, Condoleezza Rice? After your clusterf**k for eight years?

A political science professor who is also a former provost of Stanford intentionally misinterpreting the past, and misleading the public on what Romney/Ryan can do, while dissing what Obama has done?

First, from Daniel Drezner, who characterizes her tenure in the Bush cabinet as "clusterfuck":

it was a great speech -- so long as you skipped the opening paragraph: 

We gather here at a time of significance and challenge. This young century has been a difficult one. I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center – and then a second one – and a third, the Pentagon. And then the news of a fourth, driven into the ground by brave citizens that died so that many others would live. From that day on our sense of vulnerability and our understanding of security would be altered forever. Then in 2008 the global financial and economic crisis stunned us and still reverberates as unemployment, economic uncertainty and failed policies cast a pall over the American recovery so desperately needed at home and abroad

The problem with this paragraph is that, vague language aside, it reminds the listener that two of the three greatest negative foreign policy shocks of the last decade happened while Rice and the GOP ran the executive branch. Oh, and the third is Iraq, which also happened on their watch. 
Whatever foibles and errors the Obama administration has committed on foreign policy -- and they've had a healthy share -- nothing they have done has been remotely close on the clusterf**k scale to the events Rice mentions in her first paragraph. 
Once you skip that, though, it really is a great speech.  

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Obama's track record on foreign policy is much better than that of Bush, whom Rice ably(!) assisted as the national security adviser and then as the Secretary of State.  Fred Kaplan writes about Rice's chutzpah, and that with her disastrous track record, she has "no business lecturing Obama on international politics" 

The facts of the matter are these. Obama’s foreign policy, while hardly perfect, has been quite successful. Uncommon for a first-term president, he hasn’t caused any outright catastrophes. He ended the Iraq war (a subject that neither Rice, who helped start it, nor McCain, who avidly promoted it, mentioned Wednesday night). He approved his generals’ plan for escalating the war in Afghanistan, but when it didn’t work, he backed off instead of plunging deeper into the big muddy. And—something the Republicans wish everyone would forget—he ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden (a decision more fraught with risk than his critics acknowledge) and decimated al-Qaida.

For the first time in a half-century, the Democrats have a stronger image on national security than the Republicans do.

So, why such a distortion of reality?  Kaplan suggests a reason:

If elections were decided on issues, the Republicans would stay away from foreign policy this year. Even drifting into that realm risks reminding voters of Obama’s clear advantage. But some political strategist must have reasoned that they can’t just let the issue go, especially since foreign policy is the one area where presidents have a lot of power to do things by themselves. If the Republicans in 2004 could turn a war hero like John Kerry into a coward, and a reserve pilot who never saw battle like George W. Bush into a war hero, maybe they think they can turn the president who terminated the world’s most-wanted terrorist into a rudderless wimp.

Whoever booked McCain and Rice on the same night of the Republican National Convention must have thought, “It’s worth a shot.”

Perhaps the talk was worth the prized green jacket, eh!