There is something positively mythological about Maureen Dowd’s latest column. If Hillary Clinton were National Security Adviser or Secretary of Defense, she would have opposed intervening in Libya. That’s because the mission isn’t in our national security interests or something the military needs to take on right now. If you ignore those two rather relevant facts and focus only on our diplomatic concerns, then intervening seems like a slam-dunk. It’s not weird that the State Department disagrees with the National Security elite, and the genders of the players are basically incidental. That’s not to say that no one has any agency in what advice they give, but the primary motivation is to one’s own department, sometimes to the detriment of other departments or the country as a whole.
Finally, it wouldn’t have mattered what the women counseled if Gaddafi had kept his big, fat mouth shut. But he had to go on the air and threaten to exterminate his own people. It’s hard to ignore something like that, and Obama did not.
MoDo is so predictable. And so dated. Can’t the New York Times hire someone with an original thought? Why do they keep their columnists until they die?
While you are correct about MoDo, I found it curious that the White House disputed the “background” account of how the decision was made.
When you have White House that transparently manipulates discussion through leaks and a media environment filled with liars, finding the truth is almost impossible.
I’m increasingly seeing the “guys vs. gals” and “DoD vs. State” manufactured conflict stories intended to drive the plot of the journalistic narrative. In other words, a heck of a lot of hand-waving hyperbole when they could have been shedding light on the actual sequence of events or what the world knows about what Gaddafi has already done.
Which is why I treat the US media as irrelevant to understanding what is going on.
Certainly, Maureen Dowd is irrelevant to knowing what is going on. That’s been true for over a decade now.
Longer than that. Her fixation on Hillary (and I’m no Hillary fan) goes more like two decades.
Though it’s really unfair to single out the NYT for keeping columnists until they die. Not when Broder wrote for the WaPo.
Meanwhile, US media may be irrelevant to understanding what is going on, but it is discouragingly indispensable to understanding what Americans think is going on.
The information was fed to the NYT and Helene Cooper and another reporter wrote the article. The story was that Clinton was the Decider.and she had the ears of Samatha Power and Dr. Susan Rice. It made Obama lokk like an fool.
Obama was either about to go or was on his way to Brazil.
This has always been a CLinton tactic. To get information to a reporter and then be able to deny any knowledge of it.
The Clintons have a pattern.
When Kerry was starting to run in 2004, the intern story rose up. Several reporters said that it was the Clintons. Of course, the Clintons could deny it because the story was planted indirectly by someone else.
I have said it before, Hillary Clinton is trying to undermine Obama.
I am going to watch this play out.
Garance Franke-Ruta over @ theAtlantic:
And answering your question: yes, Keller should just fire her.