Late Night: Condoleezza Rice, Jon Stewart talk Kadafi’s crush

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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by enemy territory (a.k.a. ‘The Daily Show’) Tuesday night to discuss her new book, ‘No Higher Honor,’ which chronicles her years in the Bush administration.

Most of the long and spirited conversation (which you can watch in full here) was devoted to discussion of the Iraq war and the intelligence mistakes that led up to it, but Jon Stewart started out on a (relatively) light subject: Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi’s well-documented crush on Rice.

‘Were you aware that he had a strange and, shall I say, creepy fixation on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice?’ he asked.

Rice explained that some foreign-minister pals had already warned her about Kadafi’s obsession, and that she did her best not to get too distracted. ‘I thought, ‘Just get through your business, just do the work of diplomacy,’’ she recalled. ‘Everything was going fine and then he said, ‘I have this video for you.’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh, what is this?’’

It turned out to be a video that included pictures of Rice with various world leaders (Hu Jintao, Vladimir Putin) set to a song called ‘’Black Flower in the White House.’ (No, really.)

Stewart could barely contain his laughter, and Rice seemed awfully amused as well. Sadly, Rice could not remember how the song went.

It was a nice, if brief, moment of accord. For the remainder of the segment, Stewart and Rice discussed the situation in the Middle East, including the ‘Arab Spring’ and the run-up to the war in Iraq, and they didn’t find much to agree on.

They’ll always have Kadafi.

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-- Meredith Blake
Twitter.com/MeredithBlake