MSNBC reports that he Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. The vote was 16-2 vote with only John Kerry and Barbara Boxer voting not to recommend that Rice be confirmed.
Boxer's and Kerry's dissension come as no surprise. For Boxer it was just part of her Interminable Meltdown. In Kerry's case we should write if off to being a sore loser or part of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The New York Times reports that Kerry had these exchanges with Rice during the hearing:
"You know, we went in to rescue Iraq from Saddam Hussein," Mr. Kerry told Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's nominee for secretary of state, at a confirmation hearing. "Now I think we have to rescue our policy from ourselves."
While Mr. Kerry told Ms. Rice that "you are going to be confirmed, and everybody knows that," he said his own vote was not assured. "I have reservations, and they are not personal in any way whatsoever," he told her, early in the hearing, adding that he was especially disturbed by Ms. Rice's assertion that she would not have changed the number of troops in the region.
"You sat there this morning and suggested it was the right number of troops," he said, "contrary to the advice of most thoughtful people who have been analyzing this."
[. . .]
"President Mubarak said to me, 'We're only training 146 officers,' " he said at one point. Moments earlier, he had told Ms. Rice, "Every Arab leader I asked 'Do you want Iraq to fail?' says 'No.'"
How do you maintain that voting against recommending confirmation isn't personal. What a crock.
UPDATE: At PoliBlog, Steven Taylor also thinks Kerry is contemplating running again in 2008.
At bLogicus, Tim posted that Senator Boxer made a spectacle out of the hearing before voting against Rice's confirmation. I couldn't agree with Tim more. See "Boxer's Interminable Meltdown."
La Shawn Barber posted that she dosen't like Barbara Boxer because she’s a misinformed, envious partisan hack.
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