And that geographic fact is not going to change

Condi Rice talked to reporters yesterday before heading to the Middle East, I guess before the release of the Vanity Fair article about how she & the Bushies pushed Abbas to overturn the Hamas election victory two years ago, which I thought we already knew. Anyway, Condi is pushing the rather odd claim that Hamas is “trying to arrest progress toward a Palestinian state. And everybody should be very clear that that’s what Hamas is trying to do. ... those who sit outside the consensus, like Hamas, are going to have a lot of questions to answer about why they don’t want the Palestinians to have a viable Palestinian state.” Someone be sure to ask them those questions, if you can hear the answers over the sound of Israeli air strikes.

Doing that completely-un-self-aware thing the Bushies are so good at, she said, “Well, the only thing that Hamas can lay claim to is fomenting instability and violence.”

Asked if Russia’s presidential elections were free and fair, she said simply (and not at all evasively), “I would say that Russia now has a new president.”

Asked about Iran President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Iraq, she explained, “Iran is a neighbor; that’s a geographic fact. And that geographic fact is not going to change.” Just in case you thought that geographic fact might change, now you know. It won’t.