If You Can't Be With The One You Love, Love The One You're With

In her continuing effort to stay out of the country and avoid a subpoena, this week finds our intrepid Secretary of State Connie "Hot Chocolate" Rice heading for Egypt.

Rice said she could address any question from Iran during meetings in Egypt and sought to tone down expectations about talks to stabilize Iraq. "Now, that doesn't mean we won't answer questions about Iraq," said an aide to Secretary Rice, "It just means we'll be making those answers up."

Speaking en route to Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh resort Rice ruled out "full-scale negotiations" with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki but said she would not avoid an exchange. "If I, like sit down at my seat and, like there's a note there, I'll totally answer it and put it in Mottaki's locker at lunch," she told reporters.

"If we encounter each other then I am certainly planning to be polite and see what that encounter brings," said Rice. "And if he like, asks Ahmadinejad to ask my friend Brittney if I would go to the dance with him, and like, she tells me, that would be totally awesome."

Rice said talks with Iran, which could be the most substantive high-level U.S. meeting with Tehran in nearly three decades, would focus on Iraq but she would not cut off a conversation if it turned to what's on Mottaki's Face Book page.

"I think I can handle any question that is asked of me," she said. "Except, well, you know, if he wants to know if I'll go steady, or something like that."

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the talks in Egypt "will be important because Secretary Rice will be seated around the table with the Syrian foreign minister and we hope and think with the Iranian foreign minister, although the Iranians have been a little bit ambivalent which is so totally bogus because everyone knows Connie thinks the Syrians are like these total nerds."

The meetings in Egypt take place amid unrelenting sectarian violence in Iraq and mounting concern by Iraq's neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, that Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is not committed to reconciliation and that the violence will spill over. "Maliki is such a total doofis," Rice said. "I mean, have you seen the way he dresses? Is the man colorblind, or is his momma? Know what I'm saying?"

She urged Iraq's neighbors, attending the meetings along with G8 nations and the European Union, to put more pressure on key players in Iraq. "There's only so many people that can sit at my table in the cafeteria. That's all I'm saying."