Ms's Rice and Palin Trip Out Over Russia

Secretary of State C. Rice and candidate for VP S. Palin are not doing much for the already doubtful concept of "foreign policy experience" and, more importantly, for the distaff side of power politics.

Ms Rice has been in her post for several years and has met with "world leaders" all over the place, yet has shown no more proficiency in it and has accomplished no more than you and I have done from our obscure chairs at home. And recently, like some sort of irked, imperious schoolmarm, she capped her performance by calling Russia "irrelevant."

Russia irrelevant, the largest country in the world in area, covering one-sixth of the earth's land mass, and one of the largest in population, a group of active, energetic people with an abundance if achievements in all areas of human activity? Russia irrelevant, with all that oil, gold, and other minerals, and all those forests and waterways? Russia irrelevant, with all those nuclear subs, both attack and missile, still roaming the seas and still with enough firepower to render not only the U.S. but also all of civilization null and void? Russia irrelevant, with not one but two vigorous leaders in the prime of their lives who make the man currently occupying the Oval Office and the man that his party blundered into choosing to try to succeed him look like even more of a pair of stumblers and bumblers than they would already be? Russia, the country that not long ago at a tremendous cost to itself on a scale totally unknown to the U.S., did the lion's share of the work in beating back perhaps the biggest threat to civilization ever, the German war machine of the 1940's, irrelevant?

As it happens, Ms Palin has also run afoul of the same country, with her claim that the proximity of the extreme eastern edge of Russia to her home state has given her, as governor of ALaska, the requisite "foreign policy experience." One wants to ask how many treaties has she discussed with them? How many real life Russians has she met on one of the frigid coasts of the Bering Strait, and whether she even knows that that area is literally the hind end of Russia and so remote from its business end that they pay as little attention to events there as we might do to the tails that somewhere back in evolution we lost. The Russians don't spend much time engaging in dirges lamenting the way that they turned over to the Americans their confiscation of Alaska for little more than a song.

Actually these two ladies need to talk, because in her interview yesterday with K. Couric, Ms. Palin, in her desire to show how aware she is of situations overseas, it occurred to her to call Russia "a powerful country." So which is it? Hopefully in a few months they will have all the time in the world to sip some rum and to resolve this and other issues, from the comfort of a veranda in Wasilla, during which Ms. Rice might ask, diplomatically, "I thought somebody said we could see Russia from here."