The best thing about Dowd is that she takes up precious column space in the NY Times that would otherwise be occupied by the more formidable minds of the Left...
Posted on 11/30/2002 3:21:45 PM PST by Pokey78
WASHINGTON — It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside the box.
Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?
Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?
It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange—— I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.
There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much Metternich as Machiavelli.
They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's résumé: keeping the Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track down leaks on the Cambodia bombing.
If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself "a secret swinger."
In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade: "deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum," "flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The über-diplomat has even been criticized for dissembling in his own memoirs. But secretiveness is not a disqualification for jobs in this White House. Quite the contrary: only the clandestine and the conspiratorial need apply.
Mr. Bush, after all, worked very hard to suppress any investigation of 9/11. He had to cave to the victims' families, who were hellbent to hear what the president learned in his August 2001 briefing about Al Qaeda plans, and what wires were crossed at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and I.N.S.
Now Mr. Bush can let the commission proceed, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on a single dark corner, or failed to flatter a boss, in his entire celebrated career. (He was one of Mr. Bush's patient tutors in foreign policy during the campaign.)
If you want to get to the bottom of something, you don't appoint Henry Kissinger. If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of something, you appoint Henry Kissinger.
Mr. Bush learned about the diplomat's black belt in the black arts long ago, when he made a patsy of Bush père. As the ambassador to the U.N. in 1971, Bush 41 was accused of aggressively making the case for Taiwan and against Beijing, even as Mr. Kissinger, the national security adviser, was secretly traveling to Beijing and undercutting Taiwan.
Afterward, Mr. Kissinger told George H. W. Bush he was "disappointed" that Beijing had gotten Taiwan's seat in the U.N. "Given the fact that we were saying one thing in New York and doing another in Washington," Mr. Bush drily observed, "that outcome was inevitable."
Fortunately, Bush Jr. was not held back by the revulsion that many in his generation have for Mr. Kissinger's power-drunk promotion of bloody American adventures abroad. As the former fraternity president told GQ magazine, he stayed a retro 50's guy through the roiling 60's: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale."
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's principles: that the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S. media, that American diplomacy may be happily indifferent to American public opinion, that the great unwashed masses of our democracy are just a big old drag on the elites who know what's best, and that corporate pals are a help, not a hindrance, in government work.
For this administration, outside the box is inside the box.
IMMUTABLE LAWS OF DOWD1. Ashcroft never deserves credit.
2. Offering constructive solutions to problems, instead of whining endlessly about them, is a sign of weakness.
3. The People Magazine principle: all political phenomena can be explained with reference solely to caricatures of the personalities involved ("Dubya" is stupid; "Poppy" is an aristocrat; Cheney is macho-man; etc.). Any reference to the common good or even to old-fashioned politicking is, like, so passe.
4. It is much better to be cute than coherent.
5. Maureen knows best. Her long years as a columnist (doing basically what your great-aunt Tillie does in the nursing home bull sessions, but getting paid for it) have given her deep insight into foreign relations, politics, welfare, the Constitution, and all other topics. To disagree with Maureen in any way is not only a sign of being wrong, it's a hallmark of pure evil...or at least membership in the NRA, which is pretty much the same thing.
6. It is usually possible and always desirable to name-drop and name-call in the same sentence.
7. The particulars of my consumer-driven, shamefully self-involved life reveal universal truths.
TRUE
that American diplomacy may be happily indifferent to American public opinion,
as shaped by the NY Times perhaps?
that the great unwashed masses of our democracy are just a big old drag on the elites who know what's best,
A REPUBLIC, Maureen...
and that corporate pals are a help, not a hindrance, in government work.
As they should be.
Hmmmm.
What public opinion would that be, Maureen? Would this be the American public that just voted in an election, to oust the obstructionists to this President's foreign policy? Or is the only American public opinion you know, that in your own drug-addled retro-60's brain?
I think she used to be good for a few occasional giggles, but acting like the spurned cheerleader reject who's left panting after the quarterback (President Bush) and the rest of the first-string squad (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, etc.) who ignore her is just a waste of time when I want to read and learn something about the serious challenges we face from those who want to murder more of us.
The best thing about Dowd is that she takes up precious column space in the NY Times that would otherwise be occupied by the more formidable minds of the Left...
Dowd is Hezbollah's Agent at the NYTimes.
I lived under Pinochet. I know what was going on before he took power, while he was in power and after he stepped down. He is my hero.
With all due respect(which at the moment is zero)Ms Dowd, you don't know Jack.
a.cricket
Are you sure there ARE any?
*One must always post pictures of the woman that Michael Douglas dumped Dowd over. Gauranteeing that Dowd will always be an a bitter childless spinster, whose soul is as vacant as her womb.
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