Rise of the She-Hulks

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.

Speaking of Shakedowns and Shutdowns...

After Robert Reich just got done telling us that shakedowns and shutdowns were the worst thing that could possibly happen to a government, I bring you an ideological kin making the argument for shakedowns and shutdowns. Awesome.

Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Oh Krugman, you rogue! It’s been too long. This is going to be fun.

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all.

If it takes you a colon, two commas, and an inappropriately antequated state abbreviation to say “I’m wrong,” this might be a good time to crack open The Elements of Style.

Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

In a middle east where Egypt is drifting towards state-sponsored extremism and Libya—which was a docile house cat in the wake of the invasion of Iraq—is descending into an anarchical bloodbath, are you sure this is the time to take on the only stable republic in the Islamic world?

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way.

What deft verbal judo! This is the rhetorical equivalent putting “not” at the end of a sarcastic statement. Let’s all watch Waynes World and listen to Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

…Actually, that sounds awesome.

Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war,

So to be clear, this is an argument against nation-building?

those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision.

Far from the liberal caricature, W was far from a conservative ideologue. Outside of the Bush tax cuts in 2001, he did virtually nothing to decrease the size or influence of government. Why would one believe that he would impose on Iraq what he refused to back domestically?

Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy,

For the record, viceroy is necessarily a monarchical term (from the latin vice- “in the palace of” and the French roi- “the king”). When you’re criticizing someone for too rapidly dismantling totalitarian institutions, it is downright counterintuitive to simultaneously criticize them for being monarchical totalitarians.

told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises”

When a government has a stranglehold on the economy, and the government topples, privatizing state-owned enterprises is synonymous with stimulating the economy. That of course leads to jobs and gets looters, vandals, and potential terrorists off the street. I was under the impression that economics was supposed to be your wheelhouse.

 — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

In other words, the Bush Administration’s goals were to erode the cultural tolerance towards totalitarianism and building the fledgling ideal of self-determination, which is the foundation of a culture in which a democratic republic can take hold. My goodness, that sounds almost like a well thought-out plan!

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,”

Can someone please stop professional writers from turning their columns into 8^th grade book reports on obscure drivel that no one bothers to read? Editors? Executives? Typesetters? Please?

which argued that it was part of a broader pattern.

I’m bored with this book already.

From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested,

That does involve the Iranian hostage situation as part of the “control group,” right. Given the Obama Administration’s callow response to the unlawful detention of an American diplomat in Pakistan, I’d say the precedent of indecision and half-measures from the left is far more unsettling. What about Clinton’s complicity with turning North Korea into a nuclear-armed rogue state?

right-wing ideologues have exploited crises

Of course, it was the great Republican thinker Sarah Palin who said “never let a crisis go to waste.” Wait…that doesn’t sound right.

to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises,

Seriously, how’d the Iranian Hostage Crisis get resolved, again?

and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal,

If we wanted to impose an equal society, we’d all be socialists.

less democratic society.

Again, how does an ideology permissive of totalitarian government interference at the expense of individual liberty promote a democratic society?

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011,

Actually, it takes you to the end of Ms. Klein’s book, which is currently selling it’s 162^nd copy for 85% off at Borders. Congratulations, Ms. Klein. If you want to transition to Wisconsin, you actually have to make the transition, not just state that one occurred.

where the shock doctrine is on full display.

Part of not turning your column into a book report involves avoiding the obnoxious verbiage from someone else’s work and applying it to something wholly unrelated.

In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers.

Keep in mind, these are public sector workers. And only select public sector workers at that. Police and Fire workers are excluded.

Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.

Unless these concessions are single-handedly enough to get the state of Wisconsin out of debt (they’re not), then the concessions are less important to the budget than giving the legislature the tools to cut the budget now and in the future.  Which means, if you’re playing America’s favorite drinking game “Paul Krugman is wrong,” you need to take two shots of Jagermeister and switch right shoes with the person sitting to your left. (The rules to this game are really tricky.)

Sadly, since the peace prize was awarded to Obama, I can no longer in good conscious advocate playing the drinking game “Nobel Lauriates are wrong.” Seven people died of alcohol poisoning during the State of the Union.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy.

Well it’s certainly a nice side-effect. The idea of public funds financing public union dues financing partisan political contributions should be loathsome to, well, anyone.

And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

It takes some stones to criticize Republicans for overly long bills. 144 pages? That’s 1/16^th the size of Obamacare.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

Funny. That actually was in Obamacare.

And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim.

Should state government really be a utility company?

Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”

While I’m not a fan of the language that opens the door to corruption, I understand the reasoning behind it. The language expedites the process considerably, because generally dealing with the government is as slow as it gets.

If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone.

This is an article about unions and you’re mentioning cronyism and profiteering without mention of the stimulus. Of course, that’s cool with me. Just acknowledge your biases.

Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push,

Which was completely refuted when a liberal activist called the governor posing as one of the Koch brothers and tricked the Governor into saying…exactly what he says in public.

felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?

Certainly it’s uncomfortable, but is it any more comfortable than Wisconsin tax dollars financing the Democratic Party through the public union siphon?

The good news from Wisconsin is that the upsurge of public outrage — aided by the maneuvering of Democrats in the State Senate,

Well that I agree with, but most of the outrage is coming from the right.

who absented themselves to deny Republicans a quorum

A fancy way of saying “shut down the legislature in a purely anti-democratic technicality.”

--has slowed the bum’s rush.

Great. In the meantime, the people of Wisconsin are due a budget, and the Democrats have taken their ball and gone to an out-of-state protectorate.

If Mr. Walker’s plan was to push his bill through before anyone had a chance to realize his true goals, that plan has been foiled.

Does anyone really believe that Governor Walker didn’t want any attention paid to this bill? He has majority support both in Wisconsin and nationwide.

And events in Wisconsin may have given pause to other Republican governors, who seem to be backing off similar moves.

Really? What’s going on in Indiana and Ohio?

But don’t expect either Mr. Walker or the rest of his party to change those goals. Union-busting and privatization remain G.O.P. priorities, and the party will continue its efforts to smuggle those priorities through in the name of balanced budgets.

Smaller government is the GOP’s priority. They said it throughout the 2010 campaign; this rallying cry was noticeably absent in George W. Bush’s second term, to the detriment of the party. But here’s the question that no one really has an answer for: how does stripping public unions of the right to collectively bargain on benefits hurt Wisconsin? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t.