Maureen Dowd, gameshow aficionado
Remember the 80s game show “Chain Reaction”?
I do. I liked it because you had to be a bit clever to play, and it was about words. In case you don’t remember, this might refresh your memory:
Maureen Dowd must be nostalgic for the 80s, because in her latest column she shows she knows how to play the game, if a bit awkwardly. She segues (although not seamlessly) from name-dropping based on a single encounter where she interviewed Robin Williams and he riffed on the topic of breasts, to a single remark Dowd made during that interview about journalist Michael Kelly, to a mention of the war in Iraq (where Kelly died), to a trashing of Hillary Clinton for her early support of that war, all in a few sentences:
As our interview ended, I was telling [Williams] about my friend Michael Kelly’s idea for a 1-900 number, not one to call Asian beauties or Swedish babes, but where you’d have an amorous chat with a repressed Irish woman. Williams delightedly riffed on the caricature, playing the role of an older Irish woman answering the sex line in a brusque brogue, ordering a horny caller to go to the devil with his impure thoughts and disgusting desire.
I couldn’t wait to play the tape for Kelly, who doubled over in laughter.
So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.
Dowd can’t stand either Hillary or Bill Clinton, and this has been true for decades. So it’s no surprise that a column of Dowd’s that starts as a tribute to Williams (or at least appears to start as a tribute to Williams) has as its secret end goal a trashing of Hillary. No matter that Clinton was only one of twenty-nine Democratic senators who voted for the war, among them current vice president (and possible Hillary primary opponent) Joe Biden, as well as current Hillary successor John Kerry, and current Majority Leader Harry Reid. And no matter that Dowd’s friend Michael Kelly, although not a senator, was a major booster of the Iraq War.
It’s a testament to how overwhelming the argument for the Iraq War was at the time. But that doesn’t fit the Dowd narrative.
Why not just directly tear into the Clintons? In the world of NY “elites,” I suppose that’s considered bad form.
So Dowd had to tart it up.
You regularly give us little tidbits which I didn’t previously know. MoDo and Mike Kelly were friends?! Yikes… I held Kelly very, very high. Still do and will. That said…MoDo was your friend, Michael?? Sheeesh..!
I think up until the election of Bush and then especially the time of the Iraq War, Dowd wasn’t all that hard to take. She went after both Bill and Hillary Clinton big time in the 1990s. So I don’t think it a huge surprise that Michael Kelly was her friend. And his article, “Saint Hillary”, in the NY Times in 1993, which was very critical of Hillary, is what shot him into prominence in journalism. He and Dowd had a lot to talk about.
I disagree- the argument for the Iraq War was never overwhelming, but that no longer matters.
Hillary’s attempt to distance herself from Obama was just laughable- nearly as laughable as Obama’s attempt to distance himself from Obama in regards to the pullout of all troops from Iraq. As much as I despise Axelrod, I was just laughing my ass off at how quickly he was able to bring Hillary to heel yesterday.
Yancey Ward:
It was overwhelming at the time, as evidenced by that list of Democrats who supported it. Most people who don’t think it was overwhelming rewrite history in hindsight, and also ignore and/or misrepresent the actual findings of the Duelfer Report re Saddam’s intent and the immanence of the end of sanctions.
Support was overwhelming at the time, not just here but in Europe. And no matter how bad it looks now, it could have been even worse. What might have happened if there had been no war? The Saddam regime was becoming increasingly aggressive, challenging the no fly zone, attacking the Kurds, sponsoring terror in Israel and who knows where else. And the sanctions were a joke. Given the direction things were going and the resources Saddam had at his disposal, things could be even worse now than they are.
And we, the USA, needs to take most of the credit for the deterioration in Iraq. We did not conduct ourselves very well in helping Iraq or protecting our interests the last few years. It didn’t go from war to the current chaos. Just a couple years ago Iraq was stable and beginning to prosper, then Obama. How different would it have been if Clinton or Romney had been elected?
The twenty-twenty hind sight of 2005 is clouding the actual incidents of the 1990’s. The endless cat and mouse games on “Presidential Sites”. The obvious corruption of the Oil for Food program that went into the family of UN General Secretary. The growing letahlity of al-Queda attacks: the African embassies and the bombing of the Cole are just two examples.
If these people were so damn smart on the WMD front, they would have called it a day after Operation Desert Fox in ’98 and been done with it, sanctions, over flights and all. But no. that was Boy Clinton and we had to march on.
So comes 9-11, and continued defiance, first from the Taliban, and then from the entire anti- occupation front. You all remember the rest, or do you?