Rice's "Magical Mystery Tour"

When members of the Bush administration aren’t busily stomping on my last good nerve like it’s a sack of flaming shit on the porch that needs putting out, they’re making such total asses of themselves that I am left writhing in discomfort. This week’s squirm-inducer: Condi Rice, whose “goodwill trip” to Britain “hit rock bottom when she failed to get a famous Beatles reference—even after she'd visited their hometown of Liverpool.”

Rice, a classically trained pianist and student of the great composers, has said she is a Beatles fan. But she looked blank during a stopover in British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's hometown of Blackburn, when a British reporter referred to the "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire."

Straw jumped in to explain that the line was from the classic 1967 Beatles song "A Day in the Life," on their album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The Beatles were referring to a newspaper article about the Blackburn roads surveyor‘s count of 4,000 potholes in the area.

The reporter asked Rice to sing a few bars. She meant the part about the 4,000 holes. "But Rice, in over her head in Beatles trivia and looking sorry she had gotten into the whole thing," according to the Associated Press, woodenly sang the title "Sgt. Pepper‘s Lonely Heart‘s Club Band," then left with Straw.

Oh groooooan. It’s so embarrassing, I almost feel sorry for her. (To top it off, Rice and Straw—which sounds more like a bluegrass duo than two world leaders—were then pilloried in a Times of London editorial cartoon, which featured their likenesses “holding up a hole-ridden sign labeled ‘The Case for War.’” Heh—cheeky Brits.) But even as pitiable as any member of the Bush administration may passingly be, they always manage to swing me back around to open contempt by the end of any article.

Later, at a press conference, asked to name some of the "thousands" of mistakes she had said the U.S. made in Iraq, Rice replied: "First of all, I meant it figuratively, not literally. Let me be very clear about that. I wasn't sitting around counting. The point I was making to the questioner ... is that, of course, if you've ever made decisions, you've undoubtedly made mistakes.”

So just name one then. These people have a pathological aversion to admitting error, which is infuriatingly ironic considering their bounteous capacity to err.