Condoleezza Rice: Obama Team “patriotic,” “trying to do their best every day”

I can’t say I was a huge fan of Condoleezza Rice as George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, but I’ve got to say, she does have class and sanity. In the Jon Stewart interview, for instance, Rice praise the Obama Administration’s foreign policy team as “patriotic people who are trying to do their best every day” and vows that she won’t “chirp” at them. That, of course, contrasts greatly with the likes of Dick Cheney, who has launched outrageous charge after outrageous charge against the Obama administration, and in general has been the complete opposite of what Rice believes foreign policy should be – “bipartisan.”

In other comments on her book tour and in the context of her meeting with President Obama yesterday afternoon, Rice “rolled her eyes at the notion that Obama is a closet Muslim, and she defended him from criticism – led by former vice president Richard B. Cheney – that Obama had weakened the country.” According to Rice, “Nothing in this president’s methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America’s interests.” Rice also “lavished praise on her successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton: ‘I think she is doing a lot of the right things. . . . She is very tough. . . . I think she has done a fine job, I really do.'”  Last but not least, Rice took a shot at a subject who greatly deserves it – Newt Gingrich. Rice slammed Newt’s bizarre assertion that Obama has a “Kenyan, anticolonial worldview” as “over the top, and I don’t think very helpful.”

What’s truly pathetic is that we’ve come to the point in this country where a former Secretary of State’s sane, normal, rational, balanced comments about President Obama are remarkable because they represent such a huge contrast with the frothing at the mouth we hear from the Sarah Palins and their brain-dead, lunatic ilk on a near-daily basis.  Still, I’m glad that Condoleezza Rice has defended the Obama administration on foreign policy, and I look forward to other Bush administration figures defending him on domestic policy as well. Yeah, dream on, I know…