Friday, September 15, 2006

All kidding aside, this points up two problems with the media: they cannot keep from fixating on Rice's marital status and they cannot be relied upon to remain serious. If Rice looked like Helen Thomas, the first problem may not even arise, but her appealing physical appearance and lack of a wedding ring seem to have become an obsession with the media. During the 2004 election, some speculated that she considered George Bush her "husband", so close was their professional relationship. Apparently the media is convinced that a woman cannot remain single and still refrain from sexual entanglements in the workplace -- a rather chauvinistic attitude for such a supposedly enlightened profession.(my emphasis)

A pressing issue of dinner-party etiquette is vexing Washington, according to a story now making the D.C. rounds: How should you react when your guest, in this case national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, makes a poignant faux pas? At a recent dinner party hosted by New York Times D.C. bureau chief Philip Taubman and his wife, Times reporter Felicity Barringer, and attended by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Maureen Dowd, Steven Weisman, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb—” and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.” Jaws dropped, but a guest says the slip by the unmarried politician, who spends weekends with the president and his wife, seemed more psychologically telling than incriminating. Nobody thinks Bush and Rice are actually an item. A National Security Council spokesman laughed and said, “No comment.”