Fight of the Valkyries
By MAUREEN DOWD
They are called the Amazon Warriors,
No one has ever called Hillary Clinton an Amazon Warrior. I wouldn’t discount the lesbian thing out-of-hand, though.
the Lady Hawks,
That sounds like a WNBA team
the Valkyries,
An off-shoot of the high-school literary magazine featuring “poets” with green hair, body image issues, and a trans-historical lesbian crush on Sylvia Plath.
the Durgas.
Of course, it would have to be Maureen Dowd that deifies the colossally flawed Hilary Clinton--twice. The religion of liberalism is in full force here.
There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.
You’re still stuck on the Valkyries and Durga, which you made up. Actually this simply proves that women are equally flawed in their executive judgments as men.
And there is something positively predictable about guys in the White House pushing back against that story line for fear it makes the president look henpecked.
Henpecked implies that he’s getting some. President Obama is simply a weak person.
It is not yet clear if the Valkyries will get the credit or the blame on Libya. But everyone is fascinated
No one is fascinated. I’d rather dress up in drag and play the lead in a theatrical rendition of The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath is really taking it on the chin this write-up) than be party to this political apotheosis.
with the gender flip: the reluctant men — the generals, the secretary of defense, top male White House national security advisers — outmuscled by the fierce women around President Obama urging him to man up against the crazy Qaddafi.
Except:
a) They’re about three weeks too late to be effective.
b) The US policy in Libya is both poorly defined and inconsistent.
c) The French emasculated Obama more than Hilary could ever hope to.
d) This is a war that in no way shape or form advances US interests.
How odd to see the diplomats as hawks and the military as doves.
Perhaps this would indicate that the Obama Administration is far out of its depth in a world that demands grown-ups with a mature understanding of foreign policy.
“The girls took on the guys,”
And the American people lost.
The Times’s White House reporter Helene Cooper said on “Meet the Press.”
Yes, a female reporter chose to take the woefully boring gender angle. We’re at war, but you’re right; girl power in the fractured inner circle of the Oval Office is super-important. Nay: fascinating!
Rush Limbaugh mocked the president and his club of “male liberals,” saying: “Of course the males were opposed. It’s the new castrati ... they’re sissies!”
Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador and former Clinton administration adviser on Africa, was haunted by Rwanda.
Was, or is? What soothed her burdened conscience?
Samantha Power, a national security aide who wrote an award-winning book about genocide, was thinking of Bosnia.
And to think we only bombed Kosovo. So close!
Gayle Smith, another senior national security aide, was an adviser to President Clinton on Africa after the Rwandan massacre.
With all this guilt, you’d think that it was the United States that was trying to systematically exterminate the Hutu and the ethnic Serbs.
Hillary Clinton, a skeptic at first,
Keep in mind that the genocide in Rwanda was 1993, while Hilary was focused on thrusing pre-Obamacare on a country that despises the notion.
paid attention to the other women (putting aside that tense moment during the ’08 primaries when Power called her “a monster”).
This has all the makings of a Lifetime movie.
She also may have had some pillow talk with Bill,
Samantha Power, or Hilary?
whose regrets about Rwanda no doubt helped shape his recommendation for a no-fly zone over Libya.
I’m confused. Is Bill Clinton a chick now too?
How odd to see Rush and Samantha Power on the same side.
We’re watching the French lead the free world into combat, and you’re disconcerted about agreement between Rush Limbaugh and Samantha Power?
We’ve come a long way from feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being “male” and conciliation being “female.”
Can I bridge the gap a little and just say that at least three of those chicks are kind of mannish.
And from the days of Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and nuclear-freeze activist who disapprovingly noted the “psychosexual overtones” of military terminology such as “missile erector” and “thrust-to-weight ratio.”
Great! We can all acknowledge that liberals were lunatics during the cold war! Can the theme of this column be “too little, too late?”
Caldicott wrote in her book “Missile Envy:”
How refreshingly clever! It’s a penis joke, but subtle. Very highbrow.
“I recently watched a filmed launching of an MX missile. It rose slowly out of the ground, surrounded by smoke and flames and elongated into the air — it was indeed a very sexual sight, and when armed with the ten warheads
I think there are some basic anatomical disconnects arising from the “ten warheads” concept. It’s not a goddamn hydra.
it will explode with the most almighty orgasm.”
By all means, please consult some aeronautics experts and construct your own rocket-propelled vagina if it soothes your ridiculousness.
There have been women through history who shattered gender stereotypes, from Cleopatra to Golda Meir to the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, whose critics on the left sniffed that she was not really a woman.
To be fair, the average leftist would have no idea what to do with a woman if she fell in his lap.
As U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright pushed back against Colin Powell on a Balkans intervention — “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Does the divergence from the gender stereotype excuse the fact that it was a profoundly dumb thing to say?
she asked him — and Condi Rice pushed ahead with W. and Dick Cheney on invading Iraq.
When President Obama listened to his militaristic muses, it gave armchair shrinks lots to muse about.
Which, after all, is the most important byproduct of going to war.
As one wrote to me: “Cool, cerebral president chooses passion and emotion (human rights, Samantha, Hillary, Susan) over reason and strategic thinking (Bob Gates, Tom Donilon).
Last week: “Cool, cerebral president chooses Butler over Old Dominion, Japan, Libya.”
This week: “Cool, cerebral president chooses Rio beach over America, job, responsibility.”
Is it the pattern set up by his Mom and Michelle — women have the last word?”
God it’s depressing that we’ve elected a man that reflexively subordinates his own opinion for that of others. Whether it’s a profound lack of confidence or a natural timidity, this man does not in any way resemble a leader.
White House aides smacked back hard on the guys vs. girls narrative. A senior administration official e-mailed Politico’s Mike Allen that Power, Smith and Hillary Clinton weren’t even in the meeting where the president decided to move forward and tell Rice to seek authority at the U.N. for a no-fly zone.
Ba-zing!
Wait, what was our intrepid Secretary of State doing while the President was making monumental decisions that affected our geopolitical standing and our ability to diplomatically engage the Muslim World? Backgammon? Spider Solitaire?
Maybe they were already nervous that the president was sightseeing in Rio with his own girls and watching drum performances while senators like James Webb and Richard Lugar were charging him with overstepping his authority in Libya, and Dennis Kucinich talked impeachment.
Let’s all agree that he’s an extremely narcissistic man who has no respect for the checks and balances provided by the legislature.
Keep in mind that the government is also going to run out of money in about two weeks without a budget.
Whatever the reason, the spinners were so afraid that the president would seem to be a ditherer chased by Furies that they went so far as to argue that three of the women were not even in the room for The Decision.
And like LeBron James’ ESPN primetime special, this decision has also been widely acclaimed as a smashing success , both in substance and style.
So the women were in their place? Where, the kitchen?
OH! Do I finally get to tell my women drivers joke?
As compelling as the gender split is,
It really isn’t. Not even a little.
it’s even more interesting to look at the parallels between Obama and W.
Why on earth would she bring this up with about 7 lines left in the column?
Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
Which, of course, was a factually inaccurate sound-bite designed to give cover to Obama’s desire to completely ignore the Iran issue. Still, no one called him on it then, so we might as well call him on it now.
Yet both men started wars of choice with a decision-making process marked more by impulse and reaction than discipline and rigor.
Hussein ignored a veritable deluge of paperwork backing UN resolutions and led the world to believe that he was on the precipice of making and exporting WMD materials. What’s more, he had already used WMD on his own people, making him a thousand times the monster that Kadafi is.
By contrast, Kadafi and the hard-liners of Libya collectively shat themselves after the invasion of Iraq. They ceased WMD activities and were docile house cats while President Bush was in office. With Obama’s brilliant idea that Muslim hostility was the byproduct of America projecting its anger and the accompanying Libya was a member of the UN Human Rights Council until it was “suspended” three weeks ago.
Also, you have yet to bring up anything about what President Bush said to compare against Obama.
Denouncing the last decade of “autopilot” for presidents ordering military operations,
That makes absolutely no sense.
Senator Webb
Oh. Now it makes sense.
told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC: “We have not had a debate. ... This isn’t the way that our system is supposed to work.’’
I’m bored. I’m gonna make a sandwich.
Oh that’s why I need to get married.
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