“Rice appears to have been picked to run the State Department as much for her fierce personal loyalty to Bush as for her own foreign-policy views,” opined Inter Press Service Washington Bureau Chief Jim Lobe in November, 2004. “Many State Department officials expressed serious concerns about Rice’s appointment.”…

The New York Times editorial board scoffed in November, 2004, that the “friends of George” were ascendant within Bush’s insular administration.

“Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, the whole world seems to be noticing that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with yes men and women,” the Times editorial’s opening paragraph reads. “It’s worrisome, although when the president did have dissident voices in the top tier of his administration, he did a very thorough job of ignoring them.”

They expressed concern that Rice’s tenure as NSA was characterized by her wiliness to tell the president merely what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to know.