to even justify her position to a fourth-grader:

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

... Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."

Waterboarding is and always has been torture, so it was not legal. The above clip includes video of her talk at Stanford, which started this whole incident:

“[President Bush] was also very clear that we would do nothing – nothing – that was against the law or against our obligations internationally,” Rice said May 3rd at a Washington school.

And ended with her saying, again, that she didn't make a "Nixon/Frost" type gaffe.

Well, what should we call it then?

Andrea Mitchell said that she may have been bitten by an insect playing golf and was having a allergic reaction in her eye, so that's why her face looks swollen. But her words are just gibberish, and you can't help wondering if those words and their strangled reasoning are causing Condi's discomfort. Is their endgame to just try and move polling a few more points in their favor against torture investigations?