Dear Dr. Rice,

Your speech at the RNC convention was a masterpiece. My congratulations. Effective doublespeak requires double the effort. None of us will forget that bright September day when your assistant told you an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. You testified before Congress to the effect that you’d been briefed on Osama bin Ladin and his activities over 40 times. You were one of only six people in that group within the Executive so briefed.

It’s disturbing, to hear you speak of a sense of vulnerability. Your job as National Security Adviser was to keep the President apprised of such dangers. You were a Sovietologist, already irrelevant and completely unqualified for any Executive advisory capacity. If you didn’t do your job, and you didn’t, you’re not entirely to blame. I blame the idiot who hired you.

It is also somewhat annoying to hear you speak in the passive tense of how in 2008 the global financial and economic crisis stunned us and still reverberates as unemployment, economic uncertainty and failed policies cast a pall over America. It was Republican-proposed and Republican-enacted policies of deregulation which would create this mess.

This is what we’ve come to expect of the GOP: blank and willful ignorance followed by predictable disasters.

The desire for freedom may be universal but the Republicans have always connived with tyranny in one form or another. Colonel Khadaffy guy just loved ya.  Loved ya.  The people in the Middle East are not striving for freedom. They appear to be striving for the reestablishment of Islamic law, hardly a paragon for freedom-loving, multi-confessional democracies. The dictators in Iran are an interesting bunch: we can hardly blame them for feeling paranoid when the USA has overthrown the regimes to their respective east and west, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq lapses into Shi’a tyranny and Afghanistan lapses into a narco-state. So much for freedom. Iraq has again descended into a civil war. When we might have done something about making Afghanistan into a viable democratic state, the Bush administration would not give Karzai mandate in its own country and a little bird tells me you and Zalmay Khalilzad were pretty tight back then.

As for Syria, it will be the same tiresome story we saw in Iraq, for Syria is also a Ba’athist state in serious trouble. If China and Russia prevent a response, they understand the Ba’athists were secularists and Arabists. The Ba’athists didn’t tolerate the tribalism and sectarianism the Bush administration tolerated in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians have been fighting Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, some sinister ministers in Ingushetia and Abhkazia too, and for far longer. Increasingly, China’s having to fight them, too.

Well, Saddam Hussein made an interesting speech after you Bushies invaded Iraq. He said you’d find out why he’d acted the way he did and do them all yourselves. And you did, to the letter, including using Abu Ghraib prison for torture and interrogation. He left it for you, ready-made, and you did exactly as he’d done. Except you played favourites and ended up fighting the Sunnis. Al Qaeda took advantage of the dog’s dinner you’d made of Iraq. The Ba’athists just went over the border to Syria and you didn’t run them down, fighting terrorists everywhere, as you’d promised.

Thanks for nothing. You disgraced America in the eyes of the world: reducing us to the level of our enemies. The very reasons you gave for invading Iraq, that Saddam tortured people, and it was true, he did – those reasons are now being used to recruit terrorists all over the world, that we abuse Muslims. And that’s true, too.

Americans have made many sacrifices, this much is true. A great crop of Vermont granite tombstones have been sprouting up in graveyards all over this country with thousands of American kids buried under them. Oh, when they get around to building the statue of George W. Bush in front of his library, the best possible pedestal would be an edifice made of blocks of granite, one for each dead American servicemen killed in Iraq, each carved to the dimensions of regulation military tombstone, stacked into a vast cube. Then you could put a life sized statue of George W Bush on top. That way, nobody could see Bush from ground level. It would commemorate his greatest mistake and serve as a monument to error, a warning to future presidents. Oh, be sure to tell Dubyah to build a proper foundation, that’s an awful lot of granite.

Those religious dissidents in China? Lots of them are in Pakistan, the Muslim Uighur. They’re running terrorist training camps. Be careful who you call a religious dissident. You Bushies were sposta be great friends with Pakistan. Obama’s been going after terrorists in Pakistan. You guys let them get away at Tora Bora and Obama had to deal with your fuck-up there.

Our friends and allies do not trust us. Israel spies on us and lies to us about the issue of settlements. The Philippines is a vast collection of islands and they’re not doing so well fighting back Muslim insurgents. Colombia is an anarchic nightmare: our idiotic War on Drugs should have been fought here at home, dealt with as a public health menace. Instead of reducing demand, we’ve only added more risk and therefore more profit to the proposition of illegal drugs. We’ve wasted billions of dollars turning Colombia into a military state. But then, you know all about fighting useless wars, doncha, Dr. Rice?

We aren’t abandoning our free trade policies, Dr. Rice. That’s a lie. President Obama has signed trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and the aforementioned Colombia. He’s gotten Japan and Canada to sign onto the Trans- Pacific Partnership accord. Australia, Chile, Peru and Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand Vietnam and Brunei are also joining the organisation. Obama’s done more for free trade than any president in recent history.

Energy independence is something of an ignis fatuus. Someone has to produce the energy for someone else to consume it, even within one country. Now it would be a fine thing to quit importing oil at some point – but at what cost, domestically? This isn’t an answer for you at your pay grade. You were supposed to be a National Security Adviser and you screwed that job up. Energy policy is a bit beyond you.

That bit about grievance and entitlement rings a bit hollow. Romney’s out there scaring the rubes about Medicare. I’ve always laughed to see the Tea Parties, your new buddies, out there with their placards “Keep your cotton-picking hands of my Medicare!” You just settle up with the grievances within your own party ere you start in on other grievances.

All that about mobilising creativity and ambition? I’m glad to hear all that. Standard issue boilerplate for any political convention. But where are the mobilisation plans? The Romney/Paul campaign is woefully short on specifics. Seems to me, based on what few numbers we can find, Romney plans to remain true to form from his days at Bain Capital, financing all such efforts with borrowing.

Welcoming the world’s most ambitious people? How about welcoming our own children, you know, Americans? But that means we’d have to invest in our educational system. Darn, that means spending money. Hard to get that past the Congress, as No Child Left Behind got passed only after all its funding provisions were removed.

Dr. Rice, it doesn’t matter what the government does about joblessness, hopelessness and all that jazz. That’s not really the government’s job. Government’s job is to keep us safe, invest in what markets can’t accomplish on their own and enforce the law. Maybe you and Paul Ryan should have a little talk about what Doing Anything Less might mean. He’ll scare you to death. This guy is a whole lot more intelligent than Sarah Palin and four times as dangerous.