Happy Aniversary, Condi
Got You on My Miiii-iiiind

Fred Kaplan over at Slate puts Condi's 6-month anniversary as Secretary of State into perspective:

A list of her accomplishments to date is considerable: She reopened nuclear negotiations with North Korea, even authorizing bilateral talks, which George W. Bush had adamantly refused to conduct all through his first term as president. She persuaded Bush to endorse similar (if less promising) negotiations that Britain, France, and Germany had initiated with Iran, which he had also vigorously opposed. She crafted the terms of a United Nations resolution to investigate war crimes in Sudan, a measure that first-term Bush had resisted. She dropped the campaign—which had been launched with great verve by Vice President Dick Cheney—to replace Mohamed elBaradei as chair of the International Atomic Energy Agency and then got U.S. intelligence agencies to resume briefing IAEA officials, a practice that had also been discontinued in the first term. As a prerequisite to all the above accomplishments, she staved off Cheney's intense efforts to appoint his protégé, John Bolton, as deputy secretary of state and implicitly acknowledged Bolton's unsuitability for a concession prize—U.N. ambassador—by assuring Democratic opponents that he would be carefully "supervised." Yet these feats are only stirring because of who she's working for. They are the sorts of things—conducting diplomacy, entering negotiations, dealing with international organizations—that secretaries of state in most administrations do routinely. They (and, by extension, Rice herself) are seen as remarkable only because this administration, in its first term of office, so rarely engaged in such activity and so often and openly disparaged it. It's as if an architectural firm simply stopped work for four years and then hired a new superviser who started signing some contracts again, erected a few nice houses, designed a couple of intriguing office buildings—and, as a result, was hailed as the next Frank Lloyd Wright.