With A State Department Like This...

And the Bush Philosophy of "government that does the least, does the least", continues. The hardworking Bush Administration has been caught plagiarizing a report on Iraq BIG time.

"State outright plagiarized much of the major media in making its "report." And what's really funny, they even stole a number of paragraphs from a New York Times article when, as I recall, the NYT is the newspaper that George Bush refuses to read because it supposedly has such a "liberal bias."

"it turns out the entire thing is basically plagiarized word for word from those news articles, with the slightest of adjustments so as to maybe give the impression it’s in their own words.

via Americablog

All this makes Maureen Dowd's story of Condi Rice's work ethic make so much more sense.

That same year, in another instance of spectacular willful ignorance, she was blindsided by the Hamas win in the Palestinian elections.

As she described it to Bumiller, she went upstairs at 5 a.m. the morning after the Palestinian elections in 2006 to the gym in her Watergate apartment to exercise on her elliptical machine. She saw the news crawl reporting the Hamas victory.

"I thought, 'Well, that's not right,'" she said. She kept exercising for awhile but finally got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department. “I said, 'What happened in the Palestinian elections?' and they said, 'Oh, Hamas won.' And I thought, 'Oh, my goodness! Hamas won?' "

When she couldn't reach the State Department official on the ground in the Palestinian territories, she did what any loyal Bushie would do: She got back on the elliptical.

"I thought, might as well finish exercising," Rice told Bumiller. "It's going to be a really long day." It was one of the few times she was prescient on the Middle East.

That's our Condi - keeping up with world affairs by watching the TV

via NYTimes