Fun With Antecedents

Via Scott Lemieux, Robert Dallek reviews a new book on Condoleezza Rice:

Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.

By the same token, if earth's yellow sun gave me the powers of a kryptonian, I'd be a super hero. If my blog had Engadget's traffic, I'd be the most popular political blogger. If George Bush could breath underwater, he'd be a fish.

Comments

"If George Bush could breath underwater, he'd be a fish."

I'm going to have to take issue with that one. I think he'd be a sponge, or some kind of sea slug.

Posted by Njorl | December 28, 2007 10:05 AM

But she's a VSP, don't you know? Isn't she on Tweety(the Sunday show) sometimes?

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | December 28, 2007 10:12 AM

Can we please be serious about this? If Bush could breathe underwater, he'd be some sort of merman.

Posted by Jim | December 28, 2007 10:15 AM

And if Bumiller were a real journalist, she would never have kept her job on the NYT White House beat...

Posted by RKU | December 28, 2007 10:17 AM

If Bumiller and the rest of her cohorts in the MSM had done actual journalism in 1999 and 2000, we'd be in second term of Al Gore's successful Presidency.

Posted by "Fair and Balanced" Dave | December 28, 2007 10:22 AM

If Bush could breathe underwater, he'd have even less sympathy for people being waterboarded.

Posted by KCinDC | December 28, 2007 10:23 AM

If Bush could breathe underwater, he'd be some sort of merman.

The lazy, swaggering, hyperconfident sort, I'd imagine.

Posted by alkali | December 28, 2007 10:25 AM

The classic, young Matthew, translated is the Yiddish, "Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde." (If my grandmother had balls she'd be my grandfather.)

Posted by Matthew G. Saroff | December 28, 2007 10:27 AM

While that is funny, this caught my eye:

“It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them,” Ms. Bumiller writes. “Her real ideology was succeeding.”

Succeeding at WHAT is the begged question.

Posted by Armando | December 28, 2007 10:29 AM

If Bush could breathe underwater he'd be the Sub Mariner! He already has down the part of being a big ass.

Posted by Rob | December 28, 2007 10:34 AM

No one who has watched much television over the last 40 years or so would take the advice of a Dallek . . .

Exterminate! Exterminate!

Posted by rea | December 28, 2007 10:50 AM

The pleasures of the subjunctive.

Posted by Ben Cronin | December 28, 2007 10:50 AM

If blue were green, then bluegrass would just be grass.

Posted by Buckeye Hamburger | December 28, 2007 10:57 AM

If Bush could breathe underwater, he'd care even less about the flames that the Middle East is going up in.

Posted by Delicious Punditds | December 28, 2007 11:10 AM

Count your blessings. Bumiller's piece could have easily have ended with the line, "but history may judge them differently if they are able to remove the threat of Iran becoming the regional superpower with a rapid deployment of superior airpower".

Bush used to be addicted to alcohol and now he is addicted to killing people. His gameplan is clear: first use whatever pretext is available to initiate an attack on Iran, then having committed the US to a new war use the hopeless strategic situation and the unthinkable cost of defeat to justify use of nuclear weapons for the biggest orgasm of his life.

Posted by PHB | December 28, 2007 11:25 AM

I thought that Dick Cheney's office declared that the White House was part of no particular one of the 5 kingdoms of life, but had executive authority and powers representing the Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera.

Posted by El Cid | December 28, 2007 11:29 AM

Super-hero? Why not super-villain?

Although I'd think you'd become SuperWonk. You might even be able to post more than Andrew Sullivan with powers of super speed typing...

Posted by El Cruzado | December 28, 2007 12:13 PM

If George Bush could breathe underwater then he would be even less concerned about:

A) Rising sea levels due to global warming
B) Drowning in his own vomit (during his drinking days)
C) Katrina victims
D) Nothing. His level of concern for just about everything is already too low for further reduction
C) All of the above

Posted by Hugh Simmons | December 28, 2007 12:46 PM

WTF? This is something you'd expect in "The Onion". Bush is going to cure all the world's troubles in the Middle East and N. Korea in the next 12 months? Again, WTF?

Posted by steve duncan | December 28, 2007 12:50 PM

Oops. The last "C" should be "E". Snarky posts are diminished by poor proofing...

Posted by Hugh Simmons | December 28, 2007 12:51 PM

I don't know why I find MY's last line to be so funny.

Posted by Reality Man | December 28, 2007 2:41 PM

I don't know why I find MY's last line to be so funny.

Posted by Reality Man | December 28, 2007 2:47 PM

If I could secure both the starting point guard position for the Lakers and center field for the Yankees it would give me claims on being the best 49 year old athlete in the USA!

Posted by T-Mac | December 28, 2007 6:04 PM

"You might even be able to post more than Andrew Sullivan with powers of super speed typing..."

Christ, even more typos and bad grammar.

Supervillain, indeed!

On topic, Condi Rice is one of the dumbest bitches in Washington right now.

Here's what Jeff Huber had to say about Condi's visit to Kurdistan:

Keystone Kondi's Kurdish Kaper
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,158932,00.html

Money quote:

"She did, however, manage to insult Kirkuk's municipal officials before she left, lecturing them on how grateful they should be for America's help. "I look forward to talk with you about how the PRTs (provincial reconstruction teams) are helping to bring prosperity, creating jobs and bringing political reconciliation," she told them.

Great. Caesar's. Ghost.

I’m not sure what stuns me more: that our Secretary of State actually said that to a hostile audience, or that she might actually have thought saying it was a world-class piece of international diplomacy. How much do we have to pay Doctor Ditz to resign, jump on her broom, and go back to teaching political science at Stanford?"

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 28, 2007 10:59 PM

Antededents are the nouns to which pronouns refer. The word you want is protasis (pl. protases) the clause of a conditional sentence expressing an assumed or imagined state, the if-clause. The other clause is the apodosis.

Posted by VinnyD | December 29, 2007 7:52 AM

They'll very likely do half of that - if you call signing some sort of an arrangement with North Korea "half.”

I suspect it will be something akin to what was in place before, but be called "new and improved" and "not what Clinton did” - so conservatives will easily swallow as ordered.

Seriously, some sort of an agreement with NK is not just possible but VERY likely to happen. The conservative’s savior, Moon, openly brags about being involved in the six way talks. He’ll make things happen for them, he always has.

Posted by cw | December 30, 2007 9:59 PM

Dear Ms. Bumiller,

RE: "A Woman of Ambition, Neither Hero of Villain"

If I'm not mistaken, there was Ms. Rice's 2002 warning that the "smoking gun" might be a "mushroom cloud" -- major fear mongering since Iraq didn't then and never had the capability of showering the U.S. with nuclear weapons (which, it turned out, they never, ever even had). However, that didn't stop you or Judith Miller or Michael Gordon from repeating and spreading the lies of Ms. Rice and the rest of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Aren't you ashamed that you didn't call Condi on her outrageous lies, that you didn't aggressively ask George W. Bush about his lies, that you allowed the New York Times to be a tool for the lies of the Bush-Cheney Administration? You had the power to question these mendacious, cheesy, neocon warmongers and yet you held back because you were too fucking polite to confront these evil fucks (and that includes your beloved Condi) with any suggestions that they just might be fucking up the entire world. Thanks for your journalistic courage and integrity, Elisabeth.

P. S. I'm sorry I said "fuck" too much, but Condaleezza Rice and George W. Bush are not only responsible for the deaths of nearly 4000 Americans (more than Osama bin Laden, by the way), but for the life-long wounds and disabilities of at least 30,000 more -- and for the deaths of probably over a million Iraqis and the dislocation of 4 million more, within and without Iraq. Don't you have any shame that you are making money selling the story of a war criminal -- which Condi Rice surely is? You can "sugarcoat" her all you want, she still supported Bush's insupportably stupid and criminal war policies. She's as guilty as her "master." Where's her shame? Where's yours?

Posted by radlib1 | December 31, 2007 4:38 AM