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" I have stayed away from the silly controversy over whether or not Condoleezza Rice had a First Amendment right to make $35,000 to uncork a fire hose of banality at this year&amp;#039;s graduating class at Rutgers. That&amp;#039;s because the universal ridicule that position deserves can be found almost everywhere else on the Intertoobz. (Most notably, Scott at LG&amp;amp;amp;M parked it deep into the centerfield seats of the Jarry Park in his mind.) But I would like to note a small, but not insignificant passage, in Stephen J. Carter&amp;#039;s exercise in Missing The Point. Then there are your fellows at Rutgers University, who rose up to force the estimable Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national security adviser, to withdraw. The protest was worded with unusual care, citing the war in Iraq and the &amp;quot;torture&amp;quot; practiced by the Central Intelligence Agency. Cleverly omitted was the drone war. This elision allows the protesters to wish away the massive drone war that President Barack Obama&amp;#039;s administration has conducted now for more than five years, with significant loss of innocent life. Excuse me, professor. Even as a great fan of free expression, I&amp;#039;d like to ask, politely, what in the unholy fk those quotation marks around the word &amp;quot;torture&amp;quot; are all about. One might as well have put those quotation marks around &amp;quot;drone war,&amp;quot; or even around &amp;quot;massive drone war.&amp;quot; The administration to which Ms. Rice was unswervingly loyal -- and for which she fudged her testimony in front of the 9/11 commission, and for which she helped lie this country into a war that was the most fundamentally immoral act of foreign policy (perhaps) in its history -- did, in fact, torture people to those ends. As far as I know, Ms. Rice never even has acknowledged that undeniable fact, much less apologized for it. It is interesting that I caught this on the same day I read Ta-Nehisi Coates&amp;#039;s remarkable essay in The Atlantic that has as one of its central subtexts the function in our politics of the history that we choose to forget. We choose to forget that history because it undermines the myths and the conjuring out of which he concoct the dubious -- but sadly durable -- innocence of our national identity. I fear that process may already be underway as to the events, and the crimes, that occurred in this country between the years 2000 and 2008. We will bury the history to avoid the reckoning. We will put quotation marks around the words, in the hopes that they will obscure the deeds. The poison will continue to flow. Our amnesiac nation will continue to sicken. And whether or not Condoleezza Rice gets to give a speech will be the least of our problems. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30989/condoleezza-rice-rutgers-052314/>