I'd be interested to know Dowd's definition of "tough column".
What constitutes "tough"?
Could it be when she has writer's block and she just can't think up any interesting new ways to distort reality and lie about the Bush administration?
That can't be. For Dowd, lies and distortions are renewable resources, no deep drilling required.
Her latest:
A Wolfie in Sheep’s ClothingPaul Wolfowitz is having fun.
"It's fun to have the chance to be a retail politician again," he told Andrew Balls of The Financial Times on a recent trip to India. It was an economic odyssey designed to warm up his image by tipping off the press to record his shirt-sleeve visit to a slum and his street dancing with children in Andhra Pradesh.
When the reporter noted that Mr. Wolfowitz's role as No.2 at the Pentagon must seem distant, he agreed, saying, "Yes, it does seem like a long time ago."
A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other woolly-headed war theoretician,
Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa.
Unlike the Powell maxim "If you break it, you own it," the Wolfowitz philosophy is "If you break it, walk away from it."
Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war? The neoconservatives have moved on to debates about China and Iran. Richard Perle has dropped out of sight, except to pop up, as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual meeting in May, to urge a military raid on Iran if it's "on the verge of a nuclear weapon."
The president and his generals are still offering gauzy assessments of our fight against an insurgency that grows ever more vicious, and dishing out loopy justifications for the war.
Before Mr. Bush was dragged out of Crawford this summer, he was making the case that we had to keep killing in Iraq to honor troops killed there. This week, Gen. Richard Myers offered more circular logic, warning that a U.S. defeat would invite another 9/11. The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and now says it can't leave for fear of spurring another 9/11.
Wolfie and fellow hawks turned Iraq into a harbor for Al Qaeda with an invasion they justified by falsely calling Iraq a harbor for Al Qaeda. General Myers said that America couldn't leave and allow Al Qaeda to dominate Iraq because "then in my view we would have lost, and the next 9/11 would be right around the corner, absolutely."
Here's the weirdest perversion: First Rummy, as President Reagan's Mideast envoy, was photographed with Saddam, supporting him in the war against Iran. Then Rummy and other hawks rushed the U.S. into war against Saddam and ended up turning Iraq over to Shiites intertwined with Iran. And now Richard Perle thinks we might have to bomb Iran.
The president spent years saying that Al Qaeda was on the run, and Rummy spent years saying we just had to finish off a few Saddam "dead enders." But four years after Mr. Bush promised to get "the people who knocked these buildings down," they are finally talking about Al Qaeda as a threat again.
Perhaps they have no choice, now that Al Qaeda has supposedly started its own weekly newscast on the Internet, "The Voice of the Caliphate," with an anchorman wearing a ski mask and an ammunition belt, and props like a Koran and a rifle pointed at the camera. Its top story was joy over Katrina damage.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Gen. John Abizaid called Al Qaeda "the main threat we face" in Iraq, citing its 400 suicide bombers deployed worldwide. So, when W. says if we fight them there we won't have to fight them here, that's just nutty.
Though the Bush gang has maintained that it would be hard for Al Qaeda to operate on the run, General Abizaid noted that the group is "empowered by modern communications, expertly using the virtual world for planning, recruiting, fund-raising, indoctrination and exploiting the mass media'' to break the U.S. will and try to form a haven in Iraq.
Al Qaeda is exploiting tribal tensions intensified by the bungled U.S. occupation. Mr. Wolfowitz's assumption that America could conquer Baghdad and install the Shiites at the expense of the Sunnis -- with bouquets thrown -- in a religious war that has been going on for centuries, was naive and dangerous.
The rest of us may be glued to the gruesome pileup of bodies in Iraq, but Wolfie has moved on. He told The Financial Times that he still thought the U.S. and the British did "the right thing" for "the right reasons," and "hopefully, it's going to turn out the right way."
He said that wherever he travels, from Burkina Faso to Bosnia, Iraq rarely comes up. How fortunate for him.
I guess it's official. Maureenie has declared the hostilities in Iraq to be a full-fledged civil war, the creation of neoconservatives.
Does she believe that her readers have no inkling about the history of the region?
Apparently, she is under that impression.
Hey, Maureenie! Hostilities in Iraq did not begin in March of 2003.
It's time for her to take a sabbatical for a remedial history class. In addition, I think she could benefit from some time with a therapist skilled in addressing the problems of compulsive liars.
Why do radical Left extremists like Maureenie have such problems with logic?
Do you think that one must originally be illogical to be a radical Leftist, or does the ideology of the radical Left promote the loss of reason?
Whichever, those on the Left, with Maureenie on the frontline leading the charge, clearly do not understand the roots, the reach, or the threat of terrorism.
Again, each paragraph of her commentary can be disputed.
She says that religious war in the region has been going on for centuries; yet she lays responsibility for it at the feet of Paul Wolfowitz and the Bush administration.
I am sick of Maureenie and those of her ilk betraying Iraq as a terrorist-free zone before the U.S. deposed brutal dictator, mass murderer Saddam Hussein.
I am sick of the promotion of the notion that al Qaeda had absolutely no connection with Iraq prior to March 2003.
Maureenie’s nonsensical ramblings are indicative of the depth of nuttiness on the Left.
I find her suggestion that "Wolfie" doesn't care about the tremendous sacrifices made by the men and women of our military serving in Iraq to be especially distasteful.
She writes, "The rest of us may be glued to the gruesome pileup of bodies in Iraq, but Wolfie has moved on.
Such a fallacious remark is positively contemptible, yet completely predictable.
Maureenie can sit around in her Emma Peel black leather catsuit and yammer incoherently to her heart's content. I don't care.
I do care that her misrepresentations have some influence.
It troubles me that Maureenie has fans that accept her drivel as gospel, fans too shallow to question her veracity.
Thankfully, the New York Times has chosen to limit the audience of her screwy columns.
Unwittingly, the Times has done the nation a great service.
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