I've been rather hard on the potential Secretary of State nominee, holding her to standards to which I would hold any nominee in any administration. But as Frank J.Fleming of the New York Post points out, there is another way to look at things that ought to lead Republicans to support her nomination.

This idea that President Obama should only appoint honest, competent people is really unfair. The guy is a Chicago politician; he’s probably never once met anyone like that.

Just look at his first Cabinet to see how out-of-the-blue this demand for competency is. He has a treasury secretary who couldn’t figure out how to pay his own taxes. His attorney general leads a Justice Department that somehow thought selling guns to Mexican drug cartels would have good results.

Then there are Obama’s secretaries of commerce, who were supposed to be promoting job creation and economic growth — who in the world knows what they’ve been up to these past four years?

Really, looking at the administration as a whole, Obama did better than we could have expected by appointing only one czar who was a Communist truther.

So, to be fair to Rice, Republicans should at least grade her on a curve. Is she really that awful . . . for an Obama appointee? That’s a pretty hefty charge that had better be backed up by a lot of evidence. Unless we really think she’ll give nuclear secrets to North Korea or accidentally burn down a foreign capitol building, she might even be above average for the Obama Cabinet.