And maybe I'll be pulling out my tarot cards again.  I didn't know I could get a certification for that.  Is that a Hawaiian thing?

"on the basis of of your presumption"

You mean on the basis of just about every political commentator/analysis, and people in Obama's Administration.

I think it's too early to chastise someone for something that hasn't happened, but to pretend the assumption was based on one assumption is pretty weak tea.

her long record of war advocacy -- ?  Is Susan Rice a closet neocon?  Somehow I doubt it. There are very few liberal politicians that have a perfect pacifist or isolationist foreign policy.  Regardless, the majority of Democrats are much much better than the Republicans in foreign policy.

too close for comfort relationship to global dictators- Give me a break.  

It's a shame Susan Rice is backing down. I do think something happened behind the scenes, but not sure the above three reasons are it.

Zero: "It's nice to know [Susam Rice] was corrupt as well as incompetent."

... is the inert mass of grey matter between your ears. And speaking for myself only, I'm through putting up with wingbats who casually engage in drive-by smears and slanders of Democratic public officials, without offering a single shred of irrefutable and documented evidence to support what happens to be a very serious charge.

Once you let it start, you can never be surprised at how terrible and unpredictable it gets. Not in this day and age. Not with all the lessons history has given us.

From the Columbia Journalism Review that Addams Family cited:

The day before Carney's briefing, OnEarth magazine, a publication of the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, broke the story that Rice "holds significant investments in more than a dozen Canadian oil companies and banks that would stand to benefit from expansion of the North American tar sands industry and construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline."

That's a problem because, should she become Secretary of State, one of Rice's first responsibilities would be to decide whether or not to grant a permit to construct the 1,700-mile pipeline that would transport Canadian tar sands to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Conflict of interest? You betcha.

Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, owns stock valued at between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline, according to OnEarth's Scott Dodd:

Beyond that, according to financial disclosure reports, about a third of Rice's personal net worth [somewhere between $23.5 million and $43.5 million in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics] is tied up in oil producers, pipeline operators, and related energy industries north of the 49th parallel -- including companies with poor environmental and safety records on both U.S. and Canadian soil.

It's hard to understand how Carney mistook OnEarth for the GOP and investigative journalism for politics.

But I hold to my belief that Dean would have destroyed Bush in the debates, would have gone on to win, and we would be immeasurably better off than we are now.