The fact that the GOP nomination process has come down to Newt and Mitt is hard enough to take. But this is all I can takes and I can’t takes no more. Especially not this…

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

The pro-life credentials of Mitt (who says he has changed) and Newt (equivocates on ESCR) are already suspect. Condi’s opinion is not. She is pro-choice.

Asked, “Are you pro-life? Are you pro-choice? What is your thought on abortion?”, Rice responded: “I believe if you go back to 2000, when I helped the president in the campaign, I said that I was, in effect, kind of Libertarian on this issue, and meaning by that that I have been concerned about a government role in this issue. I’m a strong proponent of parental choice, of parental notification. I’m a strong proponent of a ban on late-term abortion. These are all things that I think unite people and I think that that’s where we should be. I’ve called myself at times mildly pro-choice.

With little prompting Rice continued, “Yeah, mildly pro-choice. That’s what that means. I think that there are a lot of things that we can unite around, and that’s where I would tend to be. I’m very comfortable with the president’s view that we have to respect and need to have a culture that respects life. This should be an issue pretty infrequently because we ought to have a culture that says that, ‘Who wants to have an abortion? Who wants to see a daughter or a friend or, you know, a sibling go through something like that?’ And so I believe the president has been in exactly the right place about this, which is, we have to respect the culture of life and we have to try and bring people to have respect for it and make this as rare a circumstance as possible.”

Babies don’t get mildly dead. They get all the way dead. Whoever the GOP nominee is, they better pick somebody to the right of the Pope on life issues. If they pick Condi, they can count me out. I will be nobody’s pawn.