Hillary: "All About Eve"

Maureen Dowd (NYT) writes:

"...In politics, there are many unpredictable and unsavory twists and turns. That’s why she’s hanging around.

[...]

Maybe a tired, stressed Hillary was giving an unfiltered version of a blunt conversation that she’s had with her husband and advisers about staying in the race, using R.F.K. as an anything-can-happen example, in the same way she fantasizes about Sean Hannity breaking a story that would demolish Obama.

[...]

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past."

Cartoon credit: Warrentoons.com

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Technorati tags: Hillary Clinton, RFK, Barack Obama, Kennedy, Vice President, Bill Clinton, Maureen Dowd, New York Times

The Audacity of 'Billary'

Hillary's Hatchet Campaign continues on it's way, arrogantly slashing away at anyone in her path. If this is the change America is seeking -- more lies, smears, and corruption perpetrated by a candidate who changes her positions on the issues based on her assessment of what will garnish the most votes at a particular moment in time -- if that's the "change you seek, vote for her.

Just don't be surprised when she and Billy-boy are happily ensconced in the White House and fail to deliver on each and every campaign over-promise.

• Hillary or Nobody? | New York Times

  Maureen Dowd writes: "...Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat...."

• AlterNet: The Top 10 Myths Keeping Hillary in the Race:

  "Here are ten enduring, kudzu-like myths about the state of the Democratic nomination race, with the debunking they sorely need."

• Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination | AlterNet:

  "Addressing the myth that Hillary's chances are better in the battleground states, and other frequently asked questions from the campaign trail...."

• Superdelegates Hiding from Wrath of Clintons | AlterNet:

  "I'm not sure at this point if there are any Clinton friends who they aren't willing to vilify or toss under the bus for political gain...."

• Bill Clinton Stuns Superdelegates with Angry Tirade Behind Closed Doors | AlterNet

  "Take it with a grain of salt, since it's anonymous, but wow...."

• Steve Weissman | When the Clintons Mine Big Bucks

  Steve Weissman writes for Truthout.org about the relationship of Canadian mining mogul Frank Giustra with the Clintons:

  "Giustra and his agenda should rank among the major issues in the Democratic primary. They do not, mostly because the Obama campaign has so far failed to question the newfound Clinton riches, both in the family coffers and the William J. Clinton Foundation. I suspect the Illinois senator will raise the issue in the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22."

• Hillary Counting on Gullible Voters:

  "...The Clintons' entire approach to this campaign season was based on learning the wrong lessons from their political history. They survived the Lewinsky imbroglio, the pardons scandal, and the theft of White House gifts and assumed they were bulletproof.
  
  They confused our forgiveness with gullibility and came to feel that they could get away with anything. When Hillary won her Senate seat in New York, after Giuliani dropped out and Lazio could offer only nominal opposition, she believed she could sell voters any kind of chimera and they would fall for it.
  
  But she assumed wrong. We saw through her claims of experience and followed her twists and turns on Iraq. We realized that she was being propped up by lobbyists and special interests as a phony brand of change. And when we saw the real kind of change offered by Obama, we backed his candidacy."

• Clinton Aide Met on Columbian Free Trade Deal | WSJ.com

  "Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate opposes.
  
  Attendance by the adviser, Mark Penn, was confirmed by two Colombian officials. He wasn't there in his campaign role, but in his separate job as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, an international communications and lobbying firm. The firm has a contract with the South American nation to promote congressional approval of the trade deal, among other things, according to filings with the Justice Department...."

• Clinton Superdelegate Lead Nearly Erased | AlterNet:

  "It appears that Obama is imminently poised to take the superdelegate lead even before Pennsylvania...."

• Clintons Made $109 Million in Last 8 Years | New York Times

  "...since Mrs. Clinton announced her campaign for president, controversies involving her husband’s business and philanthropic endeavors have occasionally raised questions about the potential for ethical conflicts should she win the White House. Among them is Mr. Clinton’s partnership with Ronald W. Burkle, the billionaire investor and supermarket magnate, whose deals have included investing money for the government of Dubai and acquiring a stake in a Chinese media company....
  
  ...The Clintons took a tax deduction in 2004 for $2.5 million in charitable gifts, $2 million of which went to their family foundation, which as a tax-exempt nonprofit is considered a charity under the tax code. That same year, the foundation gave away just $221,000 to charitable groups, according to its tax return...."

• What Did Bill Clinton Do To Get $15M From Ron Burkle? | The Huffington Post

  "...Burkle and Yucaipa have been involved in a number of controversies that have reportedly prompted concerns in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign that her bid might be damaged by resulting adverse publicity.
  
  Bill Clinton was, according to sources close to both Burkle and Clinton, deeply angered by a September 26, 2007, front page Wall Street Journal article detailing some of Yucaipa's questionable dealings. The story, which broke on the same day that heads of state and business leaders convened in New York to discuss the Clinton Global Initiative, described plans to invest millions of dollars in a venture to buy up Catholic Church property.
  
  Clinton, according to aides, intends to sever his financial ties with Burkle, although he may do so only if his wife wins the nomination, an increasingly unlikely prospect.:

• Chief Strategist of Clinton Campaign Steps Down | New York Times:

  "ALBUQUERQUE — Mark Penn, the architect of much of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, has been replaced as the campaign’s chief strategist in the wake of revelations that he lobbied on behalf of a trade treaty with Colombia that Mrs. Clinton [supposedly] opposes...."

• Incoming, Mrs. Clinton! | Times Union

  "...THE ISSUE: The latest distraction in the presidential race is sniper fire that never occurred.
  
  THE STAKES: It's one thing for Mrs. Clinton to misspeak, but quite another to mislead. It erodes her credibility."

• Is Hillary Using "Tonya Harding Tactics" to Take Down Barack? | AlterNet

  "When Clinton sits alongside Richard Mellon Scaife on the same day her campaign distributes an article from the American Spectator, there’s a problem...."

• Hillary's Ireland Story: Is It Experience or Just Proximity? | AlterNet

  Jill Deal believes what Hillary Clinton is doing "also demeans women like me who have built their experience ..on what they have done on their own...."

• Hillary's Donors, Lies and Videotape | AlterNet:"

  The plot sickens...."

• Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre | New York Times | Frank Rich:

  "MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses? ..."

• Obama-Blasting Publisher Gave Hillary Grand | Queerty:

  "Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal’s no doubt pleased with this week’s edition.
  
  His paper made a splash yesterday when it published both an extensive interview with Hillary Clinton and a big, blank middle finger to Barack Obama, who PGN accuses of avoiding the pink press. But an Obama interview isn’t the only thing missing from the paper...."

Hillary Clinton, Lies, Politics, Presidential Campaign, credibility, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Tax Returns

A Wake-Up Call for Hillary

This is a MUST READ for all those voting -- especially those who are as yet undecided -- in Tuesday's primaries:

Maureen Dowd, in yesterday's Times op ed, nails Hillary's abysmal campaign failings:

"Hillary Clinton keeps trying to dismiss Barack Obama’s appeal as
emotional. But behind that ethereal presence he’s a wonky lawyer, just like Hillary...."

Continue reading.

Other Must-Reads:

• Begrudging His Bedazzling | Maureen Dowd | New York Times


• A Nominee? Or a Debacle? | Bob Herbert | New York Times


• A Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian | Jeffrey Rosen | New York Times


• Truthdig | Underestimating Obama:

  "The Reagan metaphor explains why Hillary Clinton was in trouble from the moment she failed to knock Obama out of the race in Iowa. During the last two months, Democrats in large numbers have reached the same conclusion that so many Republicans did in 1980: Now is the time to go for broke, to challenge not only the ruling party but also the governing ideas of the previous political era and the political coalition that allowed them to dominate public life."
  

• Truthdig| Bill Boyarsky | Obama and the Jews


• Obama and Israel | Nicholas D. Kristof | New York Times Blog

  ...I did come across a speech by Obama the other day in which he, very carefully, did show some of the leadership I yearn for. It was to a Jewish audience in Cleveland, about Middle Eastern issues. He started off trying to allay suspicions by emphasizing his support for Israel’s security. But in response to questions, he also called for a more open and constructive dialogue about Israel and the Palestinians — a position that will get him no votes and may cost him some. It was a breath of fresh air. I recommend the full speech and Q/A, but here’s some of what he said....

• FLOTSAM & JETSAM: The real divide on Hillary Clinton

  ...It is hard to get Democrats to focus on this problem, but consider this: The Justice Department's and other investigatory files on the Clinton years are currently fully under the control the Bush administration and will be until Inauguration Day.
  
  Bluntly put, the Democrats are walking into a huge trap....

• Meet the Carlyle Group and Hillary's Connections | Elizabeth Berry's Blog:

  Draw your own conclusions. The Carlyle Group are listed among Hillary’s supporters. David Marchick is the name of the person associated with the contribution to her campaign. Less than a year ago the Carlyle Group named David Marchick Global head of Regulatory Affairs for Carlyle saying that his new position will provide government affairs, regulatory and strategic advice.
  
  Mr. Marchick worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and served in four departments – the White House, USTR and Departments of State and Commerce – over seven years in the Clinton Administration. Among other positions, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and while at the White House, helped coordinate the Administration’s efforts to secure passage of NAFTA and the creation of the World Trade Organization....

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Maureen Dowd, Hillary Clinton, Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, Primaries

Hillary: Strong Enough for a Man, Not Made for a Woman

In MoDo's most recent Times op ed, she states that since polls show women think Hillary would be "an effective commander in chief," her problem with women's acceptance of her candidacy isn't gender related. I disagree.

As a woman-- Surprise, people, I'm female! -- I don't want Hillary to be a strong commander in chief in the image of her male predecessors. I want her to be a strong woman leader, who brings the best of her gender's unique qualities to the office of the President. I want a woman president who isn't afraid to be a woman: a president with true compassion for people and their very real problems, a president who repudiates torture, war, and inhumane acts against humanity, a president who protects our rights under the Constitution, a president who takes responsibility for her actions, a president who inspires us to be the best we can be not unlike the way our mothers inspired each of us, a president who tells us what she thinks and believes in no uncertain terms, eschewing propagandistic political airs.

Is Hillary the woman I want as my president? Hell no! Hillary embodies none of the above attributes. On the contrary, she is doing everything in her power to be "one of the boys," as tough a war-monger warrior as the best of them, and she is succeeding -- to the detriment of all the women who still hold a small sliver of hope that someday, a woman who embraces her gender and all of its positive, nurturing, down-to-earth, peace loving qualities will lead America to a wiser, gentler, more enlightened era.

MoDo is right in one sense, "things are getting confusing out there in Genderville." And it's no wonder when things have gone positively haywire out there in American Valuesville.

Illustration: (Vanderbilt -'06/via Scared Monkeys)

A Woman Who's Man Enough
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Things are getting confusing out there in Genderville.

We have the ordinarily poker-faced secretary of defense crying over young Americans killed in Iraq.

We have The Washington Post reporting that Hillary Clinton came to the floor of the Senate in a top that put “cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2.”

We have Mitt Romney spending $300 for makeup appointments at Hidden Beauty, a mobile men’s grooming spa, before the California debate, even though NBC would surely have powdered his nose for free.

We have Elizabeth Edwards on a tear of being more assertive than her husband. She argued that John Edwards is a better advocate for women than Hillary, explaining that her own experience as a lawyer taught her that “sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women’s issues.”

We have Bill Clinton, who says he’d want to be known as First Laddie, defending his woman by saying, “I don’t think she’s trying to be a man.”

We have The Times reporting that Hillary’s campaign is quizzical about why so many women who are like Hillary — married, high income, professional types — don’t like her. A Times/CBS News poll shows that women view her more favorably than men, but she has a problem with her own demographic and some older women resistant to “a lady president” from the land of women’s lib.

In a huge step forward for her, The Times said that “all of those polled — both women and men — said they thought Mrs. Clinton would be an effective commander in chief.”

So gender isn’t Hillary’s biggest problem. Those who don’t like her said it was because they don’t trust her, or don’t like her values, or think she’s too politically expedient or phony.

There is a dread out there about 28 years of Bush-Clinton rule. But most people are not worried about Hillary’s ability to be strong. Anyone who can cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband’s mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack around dictators, and other Democrats.

John Edwards and Barack Obama often seem more delicate and concerned with looking pretty than Hillary does. Though the tallest candidate usually has the advantage, Hillary has easily dominated the debates without even wearing towering heels.

When she wrote to Bob Gates asking about the Pentagon’s plans to get out of Iraq, it took eight weeks for an under secretary, Eric Edelman, to send a scalding reply, suggesting that she was abetting enemy propaganda. But Mrs. Clinton hit back with a tart letter to Secretary Gates on Friday and scored something of a victory, since he issued a statement that did not back up his own creep.

Maybe Hillary has had her tear ducts removed. If she acted like a sob sister on the war the way Mr. Gates did, her critics would have a field day.

Even in an era when male politicians can mist up with impunity, it was startling to see the defense chief melt down at a Marine Corps dinner Wednesday night as he talked about writing notes every evening to the families of dead soldiers like Douglas Zembiec, a heroic Marine commander known as “the Lion of Falluja,” who died in Baghdad in May after giving up a Pentagon job to go on a fourth tour of Iraq. “They are not names on a press release or numbers updated on a Web page,” he said. “They are our country’s sons and daughters.”

The dramatic moment was disconcerting, because Mr. Gates, known as a decent guy who was leery of the Bushies’ black-and-white, bullying worldview, has clearly been worn down by his effort to sort out the Iraq debacle. He and Condi, who worked together under Bush I, have been trying to circumvent the vice president to close Gitmo without much success, while the president finds ingenious new ways to allow torture.

Mostly, though, it was moving — a relief to see a top official acknowledge the awful cost of this war. The arrogant Rummy was dismissive. The obtuse W. seems incapable of understanding how inappropriate his sunny spirits are. And the callous Cheney’s robo-aggression continues unabated. (What could be more nerve-racking than the thought of President Cheney, slated to happen for a couple of hours yesterday while Mr. Bush had a colonoscopy? Could it be — a Medal of Freedom for Scooter?)

Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a warped war themselves.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 2008 Presidential Election, Women, Politics, US Government, Presidential Elections, Hillary Clinton, news, commentary, op ed

What "Bring 'em On" Hath Brought

Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined to Strike in U.S.
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.

While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.

The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

“It hasn’t worked for Pakistan,” she conceded. “It hasn’t worked for the United States.”

Just as we outsourced capturing Osama at Tora Bora to Afghans who had no motive to do it, we outsourced capturing Osama in Pakistan to Mr. Musharraf, who had no motive to do it.

Pressed by reporters on why we haven’t captured Osama, especially if he’s climbing around with a dialysis machine, Ms. Townsend sniffed that she wished “it were that easy.” It’s not easy to launch a trumped-up war to reshape the Middle East into a utopian string of democracies, but that didn’t stop W. from making that audacious gambit.

The Bushies, who once mocked Bill Clinton for doing only “pinprick” bombings on Al Qaeda, now say they can do nothing about Osama because they can’t “pinpoint” him, as Ms. Townsend put it. She assured reporters that they were “harassing” Al Qaeda, making it sound more like a tugging-on-pigtails strategy than a take-no-prisoners strategy.

We’ve had it up the wazir with Waziristan. Surely there are Army Rangers and Navy Seals who can make the trek, even if it’s a no-man’s land. If it were a movie, we’d trace the saline in Osama’s dialysis machine, target it with a laser and blow up the mountain.

W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

Photo Credit: (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Related:

• NYT Editorial: The Politics of Fear


• Six Years Later, the Same Threat - New York Times

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Bush, Politics, U.S. Government, Iraq, Foreign Policy, US Military, Terrorism, War on Terror, news, commentary, op ed

Who's Sorry Now?

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

There’s not much lately that we’d like to import from China.

Certainly not the yummy steamed buns stuffed with shredded cardboard soaked in a caustic agent used to make soap. Or the tasty toothpaste laced with an antifreeze ingredient. Or the scrumptious seafood with a chemical kick. Or those pet foods with kibbles and bits of poison.

But there is one thing made in China we could use: mea culpas of high officials.

Zheng Xiaoyu, a top regulator who helped create China’s Food and Drug Administration, accepted $850,000 in bribes from drug companies and became enmeshed in the mistakes that flooded the market with dangerous drugs. Before he was executed Tuesday, he wrote a short confession titled “How I Look on My Mistakes.”

“Thinking back on what has happened these years, I start to see the problems clearly,” he wrote in prison. “Why are the friends who gave me money all the bosses of pharmaceutical companies? Obviously because I was in charge of drug administration.

“I am confessing here that I loosened self-discipline, ignored the bottom line,” he said, adding that he had to confess his mistakes “as an act of saving my soul.”

We would skip the execution — although perhaps there should be ranch arrest for W., and Cheney could do community service passing out condoms at Gay Pride festivals.

But it is time for the lethally inept duo running the country to do some painstaking self-examination and confession. Just as the Communist Party helped the late Mr. Zheng compose his thoughts, I volunteer to ghost-write our leaders’ self-scrutiny:

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by George W. Bush

The people trusted me with an important position. I didn’t live up to expectations. I let Dick supersize the executive branch and cast Democrats as whiners and traitors. Why did I not suspect that Dick might be power-hungry when he appointed himself vice president? Why did I let him take over my presidency and fill it up with warmongers? I was so afraid to be called a wimp, as my father once was, I allowed Dick and Rummy to turn me into a wimp. I should never have allowed Dick to conspire with energy lobbyists and steer contracts to Halliburton. A tip-off should have been when Dick kept giving himself all the same powers that I had. Or when he outed that pretty lady spy.

If only I had kept my promise to go after the thugs who attacked us on 9/11, because now I’ve made Osama and Al Qaeda stronger. I know my false claim about Al Qaeda’s ties with Iraq led to Iraq’s being tied down by Al Qaeda. I see now that my bungled war on terror has created more terror, empowered Iran and made America less secure. Oh, yeah, and I’m sorry I broke the military.

I stained the family honor when I ignored the elders of the Iraq Study Group. I should not have worried that I would be seen as kowtowing to my dad’s friends. The Oval Office is not the right place for a teenage rebellion.

I should not have picked that dimwit Brownie, and I should have trusted the gut of anyone besides that goof-off Chertoff to keep the nation safe. And what was I thinking when I said Harriet Miers should be a Supreme Court justice? That was loony. I’m sorry I made the surgeon general mention my name three times on every page of his speeches. That was childish.

How could I have let Dick bring in his best friend, Rummy, my dad’s old nemesis? Dummy Rummy let Osama escape at Tora Bora, messed up the Iraq occupation and aborted a mission to wipe out top Al Qaeda leaders because he was protecting Musharraf, who was protecting Al Qaeda in the tribal areas. Even though I promised to get rid of dictators who helped terrorists, I ended up embracing a Pakistani dictator who helps terrorists.

I’m embarrassed that the Iraqi Parliament is taking a monthlong vacation in the middle of my surge. Could I have set a bad example when I rode my bike in Crawford while New Orleans drowned?

I’m sorry I keep pretending Iraq will get better if we stay longer. It wasn’t very nice of me to push the surge when I knew it couldn’t work. I just wanted to dump the defeat on my successor. I wish Hillary the best of luck.

If I had left the gym long enough to read about Algeria or even one of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, then I might have not gotten bogged down in Iraq and let North Korea, China and Russia slide.

Being the Decider is so confusing. I regret stealing the presidency and wish I could give it back.

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by Dick Cheney

Buzz off.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Bush, Politics, U.S. Government, Xheng Xiaoyu, China, news, commentary, op ed

History as an Alibi

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

On Friday, Condi Rice played hooky and spent the afternoon at the Tiger Woods golf tournament at Congressional Country Club in suburban Maryland.

She had lunch at the clubhouse with Tiger, who had dedicated the contest to American servicemen. She followed Phil Mickelson and Brad Faxon for a bit, after having them over to the White House on the Fourth to watch the fireworks. She gave interviews about her newfound affection for golf, laughing about her errant drives and “wicked hook.”

Like W. going out boating and fishing in Kennebunkport as Britain and its new prime minister, Gordon Brown, reeled from terrorist attacks, Condi acted as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And why on earth should she?

The homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, has a gut feeling that a Qaeda cell might be coming or already be here. “Summertime seems to be appealing to them,” he said, sounding more like a meteorologist than the man charged with keeping us safe.

With 30 mortars hitting the Green Zone yesterday and Army recruiting wilting, some Bush advisers are at long last coming around to the Baker-Hamilton report recommendation that they should engage in intense diplomacy with the countries around Iraq.

Someone might tell Condi — who said in one of her golf interviews that her zest for sports is so all-encompassing that “I love anything with a score at the end” — that she’d better get to work or America’s score in Iraq will be zero.

The Iraq war she helped sell has turned into Grendel, devouring everything in sight and making it uninhabitable. It has ravaged Iraq, Bush’s presidency, the federal budget, the Republican majority, American invincibility and integrity, and now, John McCain’s chance to be president.

And there’s no Beowulf in sight. Just a bunch of spectacularly wrong hawks stubbornly continuing to be spectacularly wrong at what an alarmed Republican Senator John Warner calls “a time in our history unlike any I have ever witnessed before.”

Watching the warring tribes in Iraq grow more violent has caused the beginning of a reconciliation among the warring tribes in Washington, as they realize they have to get the car keys away from the careening president who has crashed into the globe.

With Republicans in revolt over the surge and losing patience, and Bushies worried, as one put it to The Washington Post, that “July has become the new September,” the president decided to do a p.r. surge to sound as if he’s acquainted with reality.

But in a speech in Cleveland yesterday, the president was still repeating his deranged generalities. Making a tiny concession, he said we would be able to pull back troops “in a while,” whatever that means, but asked Congress to wait for Gen. David Petraeus to debrief on the surge in September — rather than focus on the report due this week that says the ineffectual Iraq government has failed to meet benchmarks set by America.

It was ironic that his strongest supporter to the bitter end was the Republican who was once his bitter rival. There was speculation that Mr. McCain would come back from his visit to Iraq and revise his bullish support of the war to save his imploding campaign. But the opposite happened.

As his top advisers were purged, Mr. McCain went to the floor of the Senate to reassert his warped view that “there appears to be overall movement in the right direction.”

Like W., Senator McCain values the advice of Henry Kissinger and said, “We can find wisdom in several suggestions put forward recently by Henry Kissinger.”

Why they continue to seek counsel from the man who kept the Vietnam War going for years just to protect Richard Nixon’s electoral chances is beyond mystifying. But Mr. Kissinger holds their attention with all his warnings of “American impotence” emboldening radical Islam and Iran. Can’t W. and Mr. McCain see that American muscularity, stupidly thrown around, has already emboldened radical Islam and Iran?

The president mentioned in his speech yesterday that he was reading history, and he has been summoning historians and theologians to the White House for discussions on the fate of Iraq and the nature of good and evil.

W. thinks history will be his alibi. When presidents have screwed up and want to console themselves, they think history will give them a second chance. It’s the historical equivalent of a presidential pardon.

But there are other things — morality, strategy and security — that are more pressing than history. History is just the fanciest way possible of wanting to deny or distract attention from what’s happening now.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, George W. Bush, Presidents, History, Iraq, news, commentary, op ed

A Hair Beyond John Edwards' Hair

MoDo adds to her series of "fluff" op eds and her obsession with everything you never wanted to know and couldn't care less about about asking John Edwards.

C'mon, Mo. Raise the bar.

Phantom at the Opera
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Here are five things you might not know about John Edwards:

¶He never saw a single episode of “The Sopranos.”

¶He doesn’t like the opera, but his favorite musical is “Phantom of the Opera.”

¶His first date with Elizabeth was dancing at the Holiday Inn in Durham or Chapel Hill — he can’t remember which — sometime after which she made an ironclad rule that politicians should never dance.

¶He became a lawyer because as a kid he loved watching “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders” and “The Fugitive.” (Richard Kimble really needed a lawyer.)

¶His top sex symbol is a fellow North Carolinian, Andie MacDowell.

John Edwards has not written soulful poetry, like his old running mate John Kerry or his current rivals Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinich. And he says that “if I have a Saturday off, I’m not going to the ballet.”

His approach to culture tends to be geographic — lots of Southerners, especially North Carolinians — and thematic, embracing subjects that dovetail nicely with the campaign trope of Two Americas.

After Mr. Edwards told George Stephanopoulos that “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone was “a wonderful book,” Bob Novak jumped on him, claiming that he had chosen a book by a “radical” journalist “identified as a covert Soviet agent.”

I tell the Democrat that Poppy Bush drolly told the story about his ’64 Texas Senate race, when a John Birch Society pamphlet suggested that Barbara Bush’s father, the president of McCall Publishing, put out a Communist manifesto called Redbook.

He laughs and says of Bob Novak, “Wait till he finds out I also like Langston Hughes.”

“There was a really beautiful piece about African-Americans and rivers,” Mr. Edwards says. “And another one that starts something like, ‘My old man is a white old man, my mother’s black.’ I thought it was really well done.” Those are from Hughes’s poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Cross.”

Though he’s often compared to a Southern lawyer out of John Grisham, and he says he used to “blow through” Grisham novels, Mr. Edwards doesn’t read him much anymore. The literary character he is “inspired” to identify with is, of course, Atticus Finch.

He likes Kaye Gibbons’s novel “A Virtuous Woman.” “She’s from North Carolina,” he says. And he enjoyed “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier, another North Carolinian. “That was set in North Carolina,” he says. Right now he’s reading nonfiction, “The Race Beat,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, a chronicle of civil rights press coverage in the South.

He says the paintings in his house are by Southern artists, including North Carolinians named Joe Cave and James Kerr.

Asked about his Hollywood dream girl, natch, she’s a North Carolinian. “She’s in those skin commercials,” he says. “She was in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’ ” And his favorite actress is Glenn Close, who had to dub Andie MacDowell’s lines in her first big part, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” because her Southern accent was so thick.

Fave actors? Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. (Don’t tell Bob Novak.)

He doesn’t watch much TV, he says, except when his son Jack gets him to watch “Jimmy Neutron,” or Elizabeth gets him to watch “Boston Legal” and “Brothers & Sisters” (a show he likes).

He loves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who once defended the right of rich pols like him to talk about poor people. He says he’s seen his fellow Southern lawyer Fred Thompson on “Law & Order” a time or two when flipping channels to get to sports. “I’m a huge Tar Heels fan,” he says. “I know way too much about basketball and football.”

Movies? “ ‘Shawshank Redemption,’ ” he says. “I loved ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ‘Schindler’s List.’ And on a much lighter note, ‘Old School.’ ”

He may look like Bobby Sherman, but as a teen he liked the Allman Brothers, the Doors and the Stones. Now he plays U2, Springsteen and Dave Matthews on his iPod, “mostly compilations.” He says he’s not particularly fond of Celine Dion, whose “You and I” is Hillary’s insipid jingle.

Recalling his first date with Elizabeth, in law school, he says: “I was such a classy guy, I took her to the Holiday Inn to dance. It was loud. Elizabeth made fun of me for weeks for taking her there. Elizabeth thinks the two rules you always use in politics are: Don’t dance. And don’t wear hats.”

Especially not if you’ve got such a fabulous haircut to show off.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, John Edwards, 2008 Presidential Election, Culture, North Carolina, news, commentary, op ed

2008: Time For A Change?

Maureen Dowd's satirical take on Bill and Hillary in today's Times op ed begs the question, "Do we really want another term with the Clintons in the White House? The time was never more right for new blood, folks -- no more Bushies and no more Clintons, been there, done that.

The question is will anyone emerge with the credentials and ability to execute a bold, positive vision for the country? Or will be faced in 2008 with yet more lesser-of-two-evil politico choices? Sure looks as though that's the way we're headed, doesn't it?

One House, Two Presidents, a Million Melodramas
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Hillary looks over at her husband.

He’s in a pretty good mood. He just finished a grilled chicken sandwich from the Dairy Queen near Grinnell, and as a reward for eating healthy, she gave him a bite of her Snickers Blizzard. Crowds all over Iowa have been clamoring for him. Here in the privacy of their black S.U.V., driving through flat Iowa farmland with the press bus trailing, she senses an opportune moment to iron out a few wrinkles.

As Bill works on The New York Times crossword puzzle, Hill tugs on the sleeve of his black shirt in what she hopes is a playful manner.

“Sweetie,” she says, smiling brightly. “Everything’s going really well. You abide by your five-minute limit and talk only about me. You’re still having a little trouble getting that adoring smile down. In fact, on our first stop you actually looked bored and fidgety while I was talking. But I think we solved that problem today by having you leave the stage as soon as I start speaking. If you can just refrain from looking so longingly at the microphone, our pas de deux will be perfect!”

Her smile fades. “Of course,” she frowns, “there was that awkward moment when I said Bush should not have commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence because he was elevating cronyism over the rule of law, and there you were, Mr. Elevate-Cronyism-Over-The-Rule-of-Law, sitting on a stool right behind me in that look-at-me Crayola yellow shirt, reminding everyone of that passel of pardons you sneaked in under the wire, including one for that fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was your fund-raiser and whose lawyer was — can it get any worse? — Scooter Libby! And as soon as we get out of cow country, you’ve got to start dialing for dollars. How could that pest Obama outraise us by $10 million?”

Bill looks dolefully at her, his pen poised in midair. “What’s a seven-letter word for ball-and-chain,” he asks. “Hillary?”

“ ‘Partner,’ ” she replies briskly. “Now listen, Bill, this is important. Everyone’s asking what your role in my administration will be, and I think it’s time we figure that out.”

“Oh, baby,” he says, taking her hand. “Don’t fret over me. I’ll be as happy as a tick on Al Gore. I’ll resolve some little conflicts here and there, stop some genocides, powwow with Tony Blair in the Green Zone. Maybe I’ll be U.N. Secretary General, or some little thing like that.

“You focus on the big stuff, sweetcakes. I’ll just be hanging with Vernon in the East Wing, or maybe in a suite at Blair House, organizing some spouse retreats. I think I could learn a lot from Cécilia Sarkozy. French, after all, is the language of diplomacy. And I could do some bipartisan outreach with, oh, I don’t know, maybe Fred Thompson’s wife? She seems smart.”

“You know, hon,” Hillary says, shaking off his hand. “Hillaryland has some ideas about Billville.”

“I have ideas, too,” he interrupts, excitedly. “I can redecorate the family quarters, get Kaki Hokersmith to come by with some leopard-skin swatches, get rid of all that boring stuff Laura Bush brought in after we left. Put up my Salma Hayek poster. Maybe have an open bar in the Lincoln Bedroom. Call it Club Mandela.

“I’ve been the first black president, the first female president and now I’m going to be the first man who’s First Lady, with my own staff of ladies — ”

“BILL!” Hillary shouts. “Enough! Hillaryland has spoken. You’re not going to have your own office in the East Wing or your own staff there. And don’t even think of pulling a Cheney and destroying the visitor logs. We’re going to set up a desk for you in the Oval. In Hillaryland, we say: Keep your friends close but your husband closer. You’ll have a nice little room of your own in the pantry. You were, after all, the guy who put the pant in pantry.”

“That sounds great, my little Arkansas watermelon,” he coos. “I love the time I spend with your big gang of chicks. But alas, I’ll have to be out of the country a lot of the time as your roving ambassador.”

“Speaking of roving, don’t even think about going on your Hollywood rat pack’s planes after I’m elected,” she snaps. “Strictly Air Force for you, mister, with extra federal marshals. You promised me two terms after your two terms, and I’m not going to get that if you’re caught Burkling or Binging. And Hillaryland wants you to use the title Mr. Ambassador after the corona— , I mean, inauguration. Two presidents in one White House will be too confusing.”

Her voice softening, she asks, “Do you know what your First Lad project will be?”

“ ‘Just Say Yes?’ ” he proffers. Going back to his crossword puzzle, he asks, “Do you know an eight-letter word for `loving wife?’ ”

“Overlord,” she replies, smiling lovingly.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, 2008 Presidential Election, Presidents, news, commentary, op ed

W. Learns From Students

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

A group of high school Presidential Scholars visiting the White House on Monday surprised President Bush by slipping him a handwritten letter pleading with him to not let America become known for torture and urging him to stick to the Geneva Conventions with terror detainees.

The president reassured the teenagers that the United States does not torture. Then the vice president unleashed a pack of large dogs on the kids, running them off the White House lawn, before he shut down the Presidential Scholars program and abolished high schools.

Since it’s rare that Mr. Bush ever sees groups that have not been prescreened to be nice to him, he made the mistake of opening the letter in front of the students and was surprised to learn that he has made many Americans ashamed by subverting values that the country has always held dear, like abiding by the Constitution and respecting human dignity.

Mari Oye from Wellesley, Mass., who is headed to Yale in the fall, handed W. the letter signed by 50 students as they posed for a group picture. She told John Roberts on CNN that her mother had been a Presidential Scholar back in 1968 and always regretted not saying something to Lyndon Johnson about the Vietnam War. She also said her grandparents were Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, so she has compassion for those “in a similar situation.”

“We asked him to remove the signing statement attached to the anti-torture bill, which would have allowed presidential power to make exemptions to the ban on torture,” she said. “I really feel strongly about this issue and also about the treatment of some Arab- and Muslim-Americans after September 11th.”

The president was trying to talk to the students about No Child Left Behind. Maybe that program’s working better than we thought if these kids are able to pull off such a knowing note left behind.

The White House got another unpleasant surprise Monday when the ordinarily compliant Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee who has gone along with the Bush administration on every Iraq vote, came to the Senate floor to upbraid the president on his Iraq policy in a 50-minute speech.

“Those who offer constructive criticism of the surge strategy are not defeatists, any more than those who warn against a precipitous withdrawal are militarists,” the 75-year-old senator told the deserted chamber.

Another Republican on the committee, George Voinovich, sent a letter to the president yesterday, suggesting it’s time to start pulling troops out. “My heart has been heavy for a long time,” he told Jeff Zeleny of The Times. “We’re talking $620 billion. We’re talking over 3,500 people killed.” He said he keeps a photo of an Ohio Marine killed in Iraq on his desk “so I don’t forget, O.K.?” Mr. Lugar said the ’08 race is on, so time is scarce for a bipartisan solution.

Dick Cheney, the president of the Senate, immediately expelled Mr. Lugar and appointed himself the new senator from Indiana. It was a busy day of Constitutional shape-shifting for the vice president, who had earlier nominated and confirmed himself to the Supreme Court, so that he could roll back judicial decisions tempering his desire for torture galore, and then morphed back into his executive branch role to bar the door to the Oval Office sandbox and prevent Condi and Bob Gates from giving W. the plan he wanted to close down Gitmo.

Once his BFF Rummy was pushed out, Vice mentally absorbed the role of Defense Secretary into his own portfolio. He allows Mr. Gates — that pragmatic meddler from the skeptical world of Daddy Bush — to keep Rummy’s chair warm, but the new Pentagon chief is certainly not included in the super-secret paper flow Vice created to always get his own way. And Mr. Cheney never acknowledges the power of any secretary of state, be it Colin or Condi. Diplomacy is for wimps.

The Black Adder, David Addington, the Vice’s enforcer of all things evil, sent a snippy reply to a letter from Senator John Kerry yesterday, asking why Vice says his dual role in the legislative and executive branches means he doesn’t have to catalog any classified papers. What could those papers be? Cooked intelligence on invading Iraq? Ill-gotten profits for Halliburton? More chicanery about Scooter Libby? Gitmo and Abu Ghraib torture memos? So many embarrassing options, so little oversight.

In essence, the bizarre response is that nothing applies to the vice president because the vice president is everything. Because he is everything, he relaunched the Swift Boats against Skipper Kerry.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Bush, Iraq, Politics, Dick Cheney, Freedom and Human Rights, Geneva Conventions, news, commentary, op ed

Invisible Cheney

A Vice President Without Borders, Bordering on Lunacy
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

It’s hard to imagine how Dick Cheney could get more dastardly, unless J. K. Rowling has him knock off Harry Potter next month.

Harry’s cloak of invisibility would be no match for Vice’s culture of invisibility.

I’ve always thought Cheney was way out there — the most Voldemort-like official I’ve run across. But even in my harshest musings about the vice president, I never imagined that he would declare himself not only above the law, not only above the president, but actually his own dark planet — a separate entity from the White House.

I guess a man who can wait 14 hours before he lets it dribble out that he shot his friend in the face has no limit on what he thinks he can keep secret. Still, it’s quite a leap to go from hiding in a secure, undisclosed location in the capital to hiding in a secure, undisclosed location in the Constitution.

Dr. No used to just blow off the public and Congress as he cooked up his shady schemes. Now, in a breathtaking act of arrant arrogance, he’s blowing off his own administration.

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who looks like an accountant and bites like a pit bull, is making the most of Congress’s ability, at long last, to scrutinize Cheney’s chicanery.

On Thursday, Mr. Waxman revealed that after four years of refusing to cooperate with the government unit that oversees classified documents, the vice president tried to shut down the unit rather than comply with the law ensuring that sensitive data is protected. The National Archives appealed to the Justice Department, but who knows how much justice there is at Justice, now that the White House has so blatantly politicized it?

Cheney’s office denied doing anything wrong, but Cheney’s office is also denying it’s an office. Tricky Dick Deuce declared himself exempt from a rule that applies to everyone else in the executive branch, instructing the National Archives that the Office of the Vice President is not an “entity within the executive branch” and therefore is not subject to presidential executive orders.

“It’s absurd, reflecting his view from the first day he got into office that laws don’t apply to him,” Representative Waxman told me. “The irony is, he’s taking the position that he’s not part of the executive branch.”

Ah, if only that were true. Then maybe W. would be able to close Gitmo, which Vice has insisted he not do. And Condi wouldn’t have to worry every night that she’ll wake up to find crazy Dick bombing Iran, whispering to W. that they have to do it before that weak sister Hillary takes over.

“Your decision to exempt your office from the president’s order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk,” Mr. Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to Cheney.

Of course, it’s doubtful, now that Vice has done so much to put our national security at risk, that he’ll suddenly listen to reason.

Cheney and Cheney’s Cheney, David Addington, his equally belligerent, ideological and shadowy lawyer and chief of staff, have no shame. After claiming executive privilege to withhold the energy task force names and protect Scooter Libby, they now act outraged that Vice should be seen as part of the executive branch.

Cheney, they argue, is the president of the Senate, so he’s also part of the legislative branch. Vice is casting himself as a constitutional chimera, an extralegal creature with the body of a snake and the head of a sea monster. It’s a new level of gall, to avoid accountability by saying you’re part of a legislative branch that you’ve spent six years trying to weaken.

But gall is the specialty of Addington, who has done his best to give his boss the powers of a king. He was the main author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects, and he helped stonewall the 9/11 commission. He led the fights supporting holding terrorism suspects without access to courts and against giving Congress and environmentalists access to information about the energy industry big shots who secretly advised Cheney on energy policy.

Dana Perino, a White House press spokeswoman, had to go out on Friday and defend Cheney’s bizarre contention that he is his own government. “This is an interesting constitutional question that legal scholars can debate,” she said.

I love that Cheney was able to bully Colin Powell, Pentagon generals and George Tenet when drumming up his fake case for war, but when he tried to push around the little guys, the National Archive data collectors — I’m visualizing dedicated “We the People” wonky types with glasses and pocket protectors — they pushed back.

Archivists are the new macho heroes of Washington.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Dick Cheney, National Archives and Records Administration, Vice Presidency, Politics, U.S. Government, Abuse of Power, Corruption, news, commentary, op ed

How We're Animalistic -- in Good Ways and Bad

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits. They love the ancients so much that they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.

But that doesn’t stop conservatives — especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq — from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics — while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy.

Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who taught political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”

In his prepared remarks, Mr. Mansfield did not mention the war, which is a downer at conclaves of neocons and thumos worshippers. But he explained that thumos is “the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat.” In thumos, he added, “we see the animality of man, for men (and especially males) often behave like dogs barking, snakes hissing, birds flapping. But precisely here we also see the humanity of the human animal” because it is reacting for “a reason, even for a principle, a cause. Only human beings get angry.”

The professor used an example, naturally, from ancient Greece to explain why politics should be about revolution rather than equilibrium: “What did Achilles do when his ruler Agamemnon stole his slave girl? He raised the stakes. He asserted that the trouble was not in this loss alone but in the fact that the wrong sort of man was ruling the Greeks. Heroes, or at least he-men like Achilles, should be in charge rather than lesser beings like Agamemnon who have mainly their lineage to recommend them and who therefore do not give he-men the honors they deserve. Achilles elevated a civil complaint concerning a private wrong to a demand for a change of regime, a revolution in politics.” Mr. Mansfield concluded: “To complain of an injustice is an implicit claim to rule.”

The most recent example of the Hellenization of the Bush administration is the president’s choice for war czar, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who says he loves the Greek military historian Thucydides.

Other Thucydides aficionados include Victor Davis Hanson, who was a war-guru to Dick Cheney when the vice president went into the bunker after 9/11 and got into his gloomy Hobbesian phase. (Hobbes’s biggest influence was also Thucydides.)

Donald Kagan, a respected Yale historian who has written authoritatively on the Peloponnesian War, is the father of Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq invasion, and Frederick Kagan, a military historian who urged the surge.

I called Professor Kagan to ask him if Thucydides, the master at chronicling hubris and imperial overreaching, might provide the new war czar with any wisdom that can help America sort through the morass of Iraq.

Very much his sons’ father, the classicist said he was disgusted that the White House, after a fiasco of an occupation designed by Rummy, “is still doing one dumb thing after another” by appointing General Lute, a chief skeptic of the surge.

Professor Kagan said that one reason the Athenians ended up losing the war was because in the Battle of Mantinea in 418 B.C. against the Spartans, they sent “a very inferior force” and had a general in command who was associated with the faction that was against the aggressive policy against the Spartans.

“Kind of like President Bush appointing this guy to run the war whose strategy is opposed to the surge,” he said dryly.

With cold realism, Thucydides captured the Athenian philosophy in the 27-year war that led to its downfall as a golden democracy: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

What message can we take away from Thucydides for modern times?

“To me,” Professor Kagan said, “the deepest message, the most tragic, is his picture of civilization as a very thin veneer. When you punch a hole in it, what you find underneath is hollow, the precivilized characteristics of the human race — animalistic in the worst possible way.”

Compared to Iraq, the Peloponnesian War was a cakewalk.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Greece, Republican Party, news, commentary, op ed

Bush's Fleurs du Mal

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a war that their leaders already knew could not be won.

So many died because of ego and deceit — because L.B.J. and Robert McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect Nixon’s re-election chances.

Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90 killed thus far in May. The democracy’s not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers get ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be blown up.

The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after long years of pretending that we’d “turned the corner” doesn’t believe there’s a military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an open letter to the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism and violence, even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from four months in Iran, rallying his fans by crying: “No, no, no to Satan! No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!”

W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of surrender — just as Nixon did — and dumps the Frankenstate he’s created on his successor.

“The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland,” he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. “The enemy in Iraq does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must fight the terrorists where they live so that we don’t have to fight them where we live.”

The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking: Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?

The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn’t know we’re leaving. Osama hasn’t been found because he’s hiding.

The terrorists moved into George Bush’s Iraq, not Saddam Hussein’s. W.’s ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then complaining your garden is toxic.

The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be “a credible messenger on the war” given all the mistakes and all the disillusioned Republicans.

“I’m credible because I read the intelligence, David,” he replied sharply.

But he isn’t and he doesn’t. Otherwise he might have read “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” in August 2001, and might have read the prewar intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently forecast the horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because they want to be seen as hard, not soft.

Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they accurately predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an “alien” idea that could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook up with Saddam loyalists and “angry young recruits” to militant Islam to “wage guerrilla warfare” on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda would be the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.

W. repeated last week that he would never retreat, but his advisers are working on ways to retreat. After the surge, in lieu of strategy, come the “concepts.”

Condi Rice, Bob Gates and generals at the Pentagon are talking about long-range “concepts” for reducing forces in Iraq, The Times reported yesterday, as a way to tamp down criticism, including from Republicans; it is also an acknowledgment that they can’t sustain the current force level there much longer. The article said that officials were starting to think about how to halve the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, sometime in the second half of 2008.

As the Hollywood screenwriter said in “Annie Hall”: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later turn it into an idea.”

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Bush, Iraq, Politics, news, commentary, op ed

Pass the Clam Dip

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

It’s no wonder Al Gore is a little touchy about his weight, what with everyone trying to read his fat cells like tea leaves to see if he’s going to run.

He was so determined to make his new book look weighty, in the this-treatise-belongs-on-the-shelf-between-Plato-and-Cato sense, rather than the double-chin-isn’t-quite-gone-yet sense, that he did something practically unheard of for a politician: He didn’t plaster his picture on the front.

“The Assault on Reason” looks more like the Beatles’ White Album than a screed against the tinny Texan who didn’t get as many votes in 2000.

The Goracle does concede a small author’s picture on the inside back flap, a chiseled profile that screams Profile in Courage and that also screams Really Old Picture. Indeed, if you read the small print next to the wallet-sized photo of Thin Gore looking out prophetically into the distance, it says it’s from his White House years.

A subliminal clue to his intentions, perhaps? He must be flattered that many demoralized leading Republicans and Bush insiders think a Gore-Obama ticket would be unbeatable. And he must be gratified that his rival Hillary has never cemented her inevitability, even with Bill Clinton’s lip-licking Web video pushing her.

But though he’s on a book tour clearly timed to build on his Oscar flash and Nobel buzz, and take advantage of the public’s curiosity about whether he’ll jump in the race, he almost seems to want to sigh and roll his eyes when he’s asked about it.

“I’m not a candidate,” he told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.” “This book is not a political book. It’s not a candidate book at all.”

Of course, his protestation was lost given the fact that he was sitting in front of a screen blaring the message “The Race to ’08,” and above a crawl that asked “Will he run for the White House?”

He is so fixed on not seeming like a presidential flirt that he risks coming across as a bit of a righteous tease or a high-minded scold, which is exactly what his book is, a high-minded scolding.

He upbraided Diane about the graphics for his segment, complaining about buzzwords and saying “That’s not what this is about.”

Diane was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: “Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, ‘If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he’s running.’ Lost any weight?”

Laughing obligingly, he replied: “I think, you know, millions of Americans are in the same struggle I am on that one. But look, listen to your questions. And you know, if the horse race, the cosmetic parts of this — and look, that’s all understandable and natural. But while we’re focused on, you know, Britney and KFed and Anna Nicole Smith and all this stuff, meanwhile, very quietly, our country has been making some very serious mistakes that could be avoided if we the people, including the news media, are involved in a full and vigorous discussion of what our choices are.”

He explained to James Traub of The New York Times Magazine that TV induces a sort of national trance because the brain’s fear center, the amygdala, receives only a fraction of electrical impulses from the neocortex, and couldn’t resist lecturing about the amygdala — “which as I’m sure you know comes from the Latin for ‘almond.’ ”

Mr. Traub said that, as he followed him around, the Goracle was “eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn’t know when his next meal will be coming.”

So if Al Gore is really unplugged and unleashed and uncensored, as Tipper and his fans say, then he is no longer bound by the opinions of gurus and focus groups. He can be himself, and inhale away and still run if he wants.

Barack Obama is as slender as an adolescent and exercises constantly, but he still sometimes seems strangely tired on the campaign trail. He blamed fatigue when he overstated the death toll of the Kansas tornadoes, saying it was 10,000 when it was 12.

Doug Brinkley, the presidential historian, said that even though the fashion now is for fit candidates, after the Civil War, there was a series of overweight presidents. “It showed you had a zest for life,” he said. The excess baggage may make Bill Clinton and Bill Richardson look roguish, but unfortunately, too many cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes make Mr. Gore look puffy and waxy. “Maybe,” Mr. Brinkley suggested, “Gore can sit in Tennessee and do it via high-definition satellite — like McKinley, just eat and sit on the porch.”

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Related:

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• AlterNet: MediaCulture: We Guarantee Al Gore Will Be Smeared Next Week


• The Hill's Pundit Blog �| The Gore Book: Sweeping Indictment, Rousing Challenge, Massive Best-seller

  The real presidential campaign begins now with the publication of Al Gore’s sweeping, passionate and uncompromising indictment of Bush, Bushism and American politics in the Bush era.
  
  This book will be a massive and gigantic best-seller as Americans vote with their book-buying bucks. This book will have dramatic impact on the presidential campaign by setting the gold standard for what a Loyal Opposition should stand for.
  
  If Congress again capitulates to Bush on Iraq policy, the juxtaposition of Gore’s massive assault on Bushism, his criticism of Congress for not presenting authoritative opposition and current events in Washington will unleash a major groundswell in many circles of Democratic and independent politics.
  
  This is not a book about politics. It is a book about American democracy in 2007....

• The Last Temptation of Al Gore | TIME

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Al Gore, 2008 Presidential Election, Politics, Barack Obama, news, commentary, op ed

Résumé of Doom

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing résumé he’ll be shopping around:

Work Experience

President of World Bank: 2005-2007

Responsibilities: Reining in European lefties, raining tax-free money on Arab girlfriend, and giving anti-corruption efforts a bad name.

Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus to the point where small countries had to max out their Visa cards to pay for malaria medicine. Learned the traditions of many cultures, including those of Turkey, where you apparently are not supposed to take off your shoes at mosques to reveal socks so full of holes that both big toes poke blasphemously through.

Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005

Responsibility: Starting a war.

Achievements: Mismanaged the world’s most powerful army. Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.

Demented Visionary: 1993-2001

Responsibility: Concocting a delusional plan for regime change in Iraq with pals like Shaha Riza, Ahmad Chalabi and his merry band of Iraqi exiles who conjured up phony intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D.

Achievements: Imagining an Iraq that didn’t exist.

Having Wolfie back on the job market is a tremendous opportunity. What do we want destroyed next? Could this walking curse on the world run Halliburton into the ground?

At the Pentagon, Wolfie tried to help Vice get rid of anything multi — multilateral treaties, multilateral institutions, multilateral alliances, multiculturalism. Multi, to them, meant wobbly, caviling, bureaucratic and obstructionist. Why be multi when you could be uni?

In the end, the forces of multilateralism took their revenge: Old Europe got rid of Wolfie.

But not before his gal pal played the multicultural victim card. In her statement to World Bank directors, Shaha complained that she had been denied promotions even before Wolfie got there. “I can only attribute this to discrimination — not because I am a woman, but because I am a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo both in the work of the institution and within the institution itself,” Shaha wrote.

She said that she had “met a wonderful American woman who told me that I should fight back for ‘us’: WOMEN. It never occurred to me as an Arab and Muslim woman that one day I would be asked by an American woman to fight on her behalf.”

Already aggrieved, Shaha got really furious when Wolfie came in 2005 and she was told she’d have to work out of the State Department.

“I was ready to pursue legal remedies,” she wrote in her statement, adding, “my life and career were torn asunder.”

According to Xavier Coll, the bank’s human resources vice president, Shaha outlined conditions for her departure that were “unprecedented” in terms of guarantees and rewards and way out of line with bank policy. Mr. Coll deemed it “inappropriate and imprudent for the president to offer Ms. Riza these terms.”

Bob Bennett, Wolfie’s lawyer, told Michael Hirsh of Newsweek that it was Shaha who “worked up the numbers” on a $60,000 raise to a $193,590 salary and cushy new deal. “She was outraged that she had to leave,” Mr. Bennett said.

The self-righteous Shaha played on Wolfie’s guilt, becoming “greedy in terms of power,” as a friend of the couple told Newsweek. Even though she had been a mere flack a few years ago and then a gender coordinator at the bank, Shaha mau-maued her man into giving her a salary that topped the secretary of state’s.

It’s like when Bill Clinton tells friends that he has to work hard to get Hillary elected president because he feels he owes her for bringing her to Arkansas in the 70s and interrupting her career. (But do we?)

Or when Tony Soprano gets Carmela some fancy piece of jewelry after he strays. Indeed, Wolfie sounded Sopranoish when he agitatedly told Mr. Coll to warn those at the bank he believed were attacking him: “If they $%#! with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to $%#! them, too.”

Wolfie used public compensation for private contrition. Gilt for guilt — not a good deal.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank, State Department, Hiring and Promotion, news, commentary, op ed

Loving, Fighting, Sulking, Dancing, Betraying

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

PARIS

The French can be very, well, French when it comes to the personal lives of their leaders.

They take affairs, illegitimate children and tumultuous marriages in stride.

But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. They do not like the idea of Nicolas Sarkozy entertaining world leaders alone at the Élysée Palace. It is not comme il faut.

Maybe that’s why this country is so mesmerized with the question of whether the beautiful Cécilia Sarkozy, a former Schiaparelli model who was for years her husband’s influential political adviser, is going to serve as the chatelaine of the Élysée, or run off again with a lover.

No one seems sure if she will bolt, leaving the entertaining duties to Sarko’s mother, an elegant lawyer, or agree to play a limited role at the palace.

“We have a hard time imagining an intermittent first lady at the Élysée,” sniffed Le Temps, a daily newspaper, online.

Cécilia was missing in action during the final weeks of her husband’s campaign. “I don’t see myself as first lady,” the 49-year-old said. “That bores me.”

Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.

Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.

Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.

When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.

Mr. Lagardère stepped in again to kill a story in another publication he owns, Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper was going to reveal that Cécilia did not bother to vote.

On the night Sarko won the presidency, Parisians were watching Cécilia’s every move. She was not there when he won or when he made his acceptance speech, and some of her friends were saying that the marriage was over.

But her two pretty blonde daughters from a previous marriage apparently prevailed on her to show up later that night at a victory rally. She came dressed down in a gray sweater and white slacks, in what one friend said had originally been her “escape outfit,” and looked distracted as her husband spoke, plucking at her sweater.

At the post-rally party, Paris Match — now following the Sarko script — was given an exclusive on their happy reunion. They were in a hotel suite, the magazine said, behaving “like lovers.”

“And the new president, regaining for an instant the taste of rhythm that invaded him in his youth, took a step in dance,” the story said. “In front of all their friends reunited, he dances for a single person: Cécilia.”

When Paris isn’t fixated on Cécilia and Sarko, it’s buzzing about the town’s other power couple.

As Ségolène Royal tries to build on her strong showing to become the Socialist candidate for president in 2012, her relationship with the father of her four children and the head of her party, François Hollande, grows more byzantine.

She brazenly bounded past Mr. Hollande — who wanted to run himself — and now she wants to eclipse him totally. This competition — the opposite of Billary — certainly did not help her candidacy. “Every morning I would open the newspapers and ask myself which Socialist was going to attack me over what I was saying,” she told a party conference the other day.

Their relationship is the subject of a new book, “La Femme Fatale,” by two respected political reporters from Le Monde. The couple is suing to have some passages cut.

“Disappointed in her private life, she chose to go into battle without worrying anymore about François Hollande, but also with the assertion that she was more popular than him, and he hadn’t been able to renovate the Socialist Party despite hopes of party activists and elected officials,” Raphaëlle Bacqué, a co-author, told a journalist, noting that the fact that Sego and Mr. Hollande were at each other’s throats, while keeping their status a mystery, had “serious political consequences. They should have been unbeatable. ... him at the head of the party, her a candidate. But instead we saw two teams in endless competition.”

The book quotes an interview in which Mr. Hollande was asked where he would live if Sego won. “At my house!” he replied.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, France, Nicolas Sarkozy, Segolene Royal, Elections, news, commentary, op ed