Here is an excerpt from the “Review & Outlook” section of [url=http://www.opinionjournal.com]Opinionjournal.com[/url], posted today:

Rice on the Record
Democrats on the 9/11 Commission inadvertently underscore Bush’s successes.
Friday, April 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

We predicted yesterday’s Condoleezza Rice show would be more about the 9/11 Commissioners themselves than anything the National Security Adviser had to say. But we confess we were unprepared for Bob Kerrey’s Vice Presidential audition.

We thought the former Senator had more class than to preface his remarks with a condescending allusion to the fact that Ms. Rice is a black woman. (”I’m very impressed . . . [by] the story of your life.”) Or to then complain that her attempts to answer his monologue were cutting into his time. In their zeal to show all the things that went undone before 9/11, Mr. Kerrey and other Democrats on the Commission inadvertently underscored all that President Bush has done since. Think of it as one long endorsement of pre-emption.

One genuinely interesting news nugget came in Ms. Rice’s opening statement. There she gave details of the Bush Administration’s first major national security directive, completed September 4, 2001. It covered “not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda.” Obviously this didn’t prevent the events of a week later. But it does suggest, contra Richard Clarke, that the Administration was attentive to the terrorist threat.

Mr. Kerrey and his fellow partisans made much of an August 6, 2001, Presidential briefing titled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside United States.” But Ms. Rice properly observed that there is no obvious response to non-specific warnings that “something very big may happen.” She likewise dismissed Democratic insinuations of a bureaucratic “silver bullet,” such as dealing with issues at the “principals” level: Unlike his predecessor, President Bush was already conferring with his Director of Central Intelligence on a daily basis.

[url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004932]MORE… [/url]

Thanks to [url=http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,116563,00.html]Fox News Online [/url]for posting the full transcript of Dr. Rice’s 9/11 Commission testimony. For those interested, [url=http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,116563,00.html]here it is…[/url]