Anne Applebaum in her review of Elisabeth Bumiller's new book, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life says of W. and Condi -

Like him, she has always had zero interest in ideology—zero interest in "big ideas" at all,

He's the Scarecrow still searching for a brain and she's the Tinman with no heart like Clarence Thomas. Of course she would negotiate with the Saudis as "a pragmatist" even though they treat women as chattel because she wouldn't champion the cause of women even in this country.

MartyP:

Of course she would negotiate with the Saudis as "a pragmatist" even though they treat women as chattel because she wouldn't champion the cause of women even in this country.

It is better to have friends than enemies. When a foreign government does things we don't like, there are two ways we can be friends: (1) We can ignore that which we don't like about them and be friends anyway, or (2) We can try to overthrow their government and replace it with a better one.

Which approach do you prefer?

I'm astonished that the author claims that Bush is not an ideologue. His two terms have been rife with ideology: an obsession with tax cuts as the cure to any economic problem and exporting democracy as a cure to any political problem, to name just two. "You're with us or you're against us" is not pragmatism; it's a black-white distinction without regard for the nuances that pragmatism requires.

To me, the mark of an ideologue is that when facts conflict with the ideology, it's the facts that get rejected. It's well documented that when officials came to Bush to give him bad news on Iraq, he regularly dismissed them as being pessimists. If science got in the way of policy, the science was suppressed. If inspectors weren't finding WMDs in Iraq, it must be because Saddam had hidden them so well, not because they really weren't there.

Yes, Bush ran as pragmatist in 2000. But I see no evidence that he has acted like one. This White House seems to me to be the most ideological in modern political history.