I’m getting the feeling that Maureen Dowd has written something exceptionally stupid.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
What Maureen wrote is stupid, very. However, her column is about Obama and Clinton thru one of these silly “sociological” frames of hers, so there’s little which is exceptional about its stupidity, since she has written many very stupid columns thru frames like this.
And any time you link an Althouse post to support your premise, you undermine the premise slightly. Nice to know that Dowd is so stupid today that even Ann can’t ignore it, though.
I thought I was bolstering my case by using Althouse.
How could it be otherwise?
If Ann says you’re wrong, that almost always means you’re right.
Yeah, but stupid x stupid= exceptionally stupid.
Ahhhh, I see your reasoning here. Thanks for showing your work. Both Dowd and Althouse are constant shovelers of Teh Stoopid, ’tis true, to the point that it is appropriate (and fun) to bring quantitative reasoning into play.
Everything Maureen Dowd writes is exceptionally stupid.
I will not read her or discuss her. Nay, not if even a thousand Boo Men encourage me thus!
Not going to squander one of my few free NYTimes reads on that.
Of more interest to me today:
IBTimes — Hawaii Military Helicopter Crash Update: 12 Reportedly Missing In Collision Off Oahu . Twelve marines missing and no calls from GOP POTUS candidates to bomb someone somewhere in retaliation.
FoxNews — Iran releases 10 US Navy sailors after boat drifted in Persian Gulf. An outrage according to the GOP POTUS candidates that US sailors that veered into Iranian waters were taken into custody and released within a day (without being tortured). Somehow all of them would have handled it in some undefined way (possibly including nuking Iran) better than Obama did. Clinton:
BBC News — Jason Rezaian and three other US prisoners freed in Iran. Nothing like that would happen on the watch of a GOP POTUS or presumably a President Hillary Clinton:
Oh, then she attempted to take credit for initiating the process that led to the release of the prisoners. Trump did as well but it was like the rooster taking credit for the sun rising.
I’m guessing the Shane Bauer isn’t planning to vote for Clinton:
Well, Hillary did start the diplomacy which concluded with the nuclear deal, a deal which she supports and would enforce as President. And the jobs of a Presidential Administration and a Presidential candidate are different.
That said, I agree Hillary’s statements about the prisoner swap are very irritating. I don’t think they’re good primary campaign politics, either. If she wants to tie herself to Obama as an electoral strategy, I think that’s workable, but not when she sails off on what she thinks are good general election strategies like this.
I’m sure if the Nobel Peace Prize committee considers the P5+1 and Iran negotiators worthy of the award, they’ll add Clinton as a co-honoree. I wouldn’t, but maybe they’ll listen to you.
That would only be just. She deserves a reputation as peacemaker right up there with Kissinger. Or is that Begin?
Unlike Kissinger she resigned before the negotiations began.
I provide a general agreement with a factual clarification, and I’m sarcastically attacked anyway.
Look, we discovered an underground enrichment facility in Iraq in 2009 right around the time Ahmadinejad gained a new four-year term. If you want to make the case that Hillary advocated war in response to this provocation then do so. I do not have that understanding.
If you’re not advocating war then you’re advocating diplomacy. Here’s reporting from the Wall Street Journal, not exactly a Clinton house organ:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-backed-key-u-s-shift-toward-iran-nuclear-deal-1441753099
Of course Kerry deserves the lion’s share of the credit for concluding a deal when we had an Iranian President who was willing to be a real negotiating partner. This does not mean that Hillary deserves no credit for advocating this policy shift, and for helping the U.S. hold the line against the pressure the Administration was getting for years to attack Iran militarily. It was a risk, a risk that she supported.
Again, you had me agreeing with you, but you couldn’t leave a factual clarification about Hillary alone. Your inability to put aside your dislike for the Clintons at any time is frequently demonstrated, and it causes you to walk away from the facts sometimes. That is your right, but you don’t have the right to drag everyone along with easy claims which are not true.
The thing is, there are plenty of things that you could attack Hillary on which are true. Re. foreign policy, I’d start with her advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria, which seems to me to be a dangerous policy proposal and unhelpful to our President. I didn’t find myself thinking I would be spending significant time on this blog defending Hillary, but the stacks of baloney just get too high sometimes.
No. What you do is pull out factoids, abstracted from time and what Clinton or Obama did and/or said before and after and connect that factoid to some later development that those on the left consider to some degree positive and then give Clinton or Obama credit for the development.
Then you demand that I accept your factoid, its link to the development, and your opinion as to who earns credit for it. That puts me in the position of having to go back through how it occurred and developed over time. And let’s be honest, it’s not possible to take whatever appears in the freaking NYTimes as credible.
Iran has long been under IAEA inspections. So, they missed one facility for a few years. (Israel refuses to allow any inspections which is just fine and dandy with us and we know that Israel’s secret nukes are weapons and not for power generation.) Plus, while our buddy the Shah was in power, we participated in building a nuclear program in Iran.
This latest agreement with Iran is the second one. The Fordow Plant agreement was made in November 2013. Don’t recall that Clinton took any credit for that, and I’m not going to put in the hours necessary to detail all her statements on this matter when she was SOS because it was clear in real time that she wasn’t seeking peaceful negotiated settlements.
October 2015 — Democratic debate:
I agree that Hillary’s rhetoric of the type you print here is problematic. It’s one of the main reasons I prefer Sanders. Yet you want to drag us into a more extreme view that there is little to differ Hillary’s record and campaign platform from the Republican candidates on foreign policy. Re. Iran, we can start with the fact that Hillary supports and would continue to enforce the nuclear deal, whereas every single Republican candidate is running on tearing up that deal.
Hillary’s record from her time as Secretary of State is that the United States did not attack Iran militarily despite the provocations in both actions and rhetoric by Iran’s military and political leadership. She and President Obama did seek a peaceful negotiated settlement to the nuclear situation. The United States gained that settlement. If Hillary had advocated, privately or publicly, for a military solution to this standoff, then it is likely that we would have had war. We did not.
Amazingly, we’re talking past each other here. On facts. It’s weird.
Thanks, that makes my piece long enough to put a fold in it.
Are you surprised, Booman?
I did rather enjoy the comments, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.
Good move. I never read Dowd, but occasionally indulge in most popular comments– which always rip her to shreds.
On a related note grass is green, and humans have bowel movements.
She just writse about hers, in her daily word salads.
I NEVER read her dreck. even if you point it out.
I believe you meant to say “re-typed something exceptionally stupid.” Or possibly “regurgitated.”