Witchcraft and Statecraft

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-Macbeth, Act V, scene v

Toil and Trouble
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 9, 2008

Maureen Dowd is feeling very Shakespearean lately and clearly obsessed with black magic. She recently called Hillary Clinton Lady Voldemort, which is clearly a portmanteau of Lady Macbeth and the villain from the Harry Potter series. Today she more explicitly compares the war in Iraq to Macbeth’s sorcery filled tale.

Maybe it was because I was sitting in the back of the Senate chamber with three war protesters — grim-faced, chanting women dressed in black hooded cloaks, white makeup and blood-red hands — that I felt as though I were watching a production of “Macbeth” rather than a hearing on Iraq.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the witches in the play said. “Hover through the fog and filthy air.” (Act I, scene i)

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were first called The Surge Twins (as opposed to the Glimmer Twins) back on September 12, 2007 (just a week before yours truly began documenting Dowd’s pop cultural fascination with Rude Names®). They are back for an encore:

The Surge Twins were back, but the daylong testimony of David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker before two committees seemed more depressing this time. As the Bard writes in “Macbeth”: “From that spring whence comfort seemed to come, discomfort swells.” (Act I, scene ii)

That’s two quotes from the first act. I don’t know if she is saving the rest of the play for a later column or if that is just as far as she got before getting tired of the sophomore English conceit. And I know Dowd doesn’t know enough comic books to make a deliberate Green Lantern reference, but I read this as “guardians of Oa” the first time I read it:

The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same — a post-Surge Pause or “consolidation and evaluation,” as the general generically puts it — and no answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.

And I have no idea whether a post-Surge Pause is anything like menopause, but they both seen to be rather chaotic events.

I’m not sure what Dowd has against the senator from California, but she gives her props here:

You know you’re in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

“Why is it,” she asked, “after all we have given — 4,024 American lives, gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people, but it’s the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?”

She warmed to: “He got a red-carpet treatment, and we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating is my point.”
Ambassador Crocker dryly assured the senator from California that he believed that Dick Cheney had also gotten kissed on his visit to Iraq.

Cheney may have gotten kissed, but it’s the American people that are getting screwed.

All The Kings Horses

The Dream Is Dead
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 12, 2007

`... There's glory for you!'

`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

- Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

Today's ire is focused on the man called by General Tommy Franks "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet" (with Maureen replacing the f-word with "[expletive] "). And when Dowd's dander is up we get alliteration.

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

Normally eggheads are pointy-headed with no experience with the real world. The neo-con variety comes with pointy chins instead. Like Feith, Humpty Dumpty firmly believed that he was in no danger because the King’s men would immediately come running and put together any mess he made.

Mishegoss means crazy or senseless activity or behavior. It’s a variation of the Yiddish word meshuga and was presumably picked for it’s consonance with egghead, but it also evokes another thread of the column.

Feith’s disdain for diplomacy and his credo that weakness invites aggression were shaped, Ricks reported, by personal history: “Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the Nazis.”

Completing the Fiasco Troika are fellow neo-cons sitting together like another duo from Wonderland, TweedleDee and TweedleDum.

His former boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat supportively in the front row.

And there they sat making excuses for the scrambled mess they left behind.

FlashBack: Mean Girls

Maureen Dowd took Turkey Day off, so let’s look back at a classic column.

Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd
22 October 2005

One of the major reasons used for the invasion of Iraq was the Saddam Hussein's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Much of the evidence of WMDs was reported by Judith Miller who used now-discredited Iraqi expatriate Ahmad Chalabi as a source.

Any good schoolyard battle between two queen bees always starts with sarcastic declarations of devotion:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

Becky Sharp is one of the most famous amoral social climbers in literature. It implies a rise strewn with discarded relationships in a quest for power. An implication Dowd makes more explicit in the very next paragraph:

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of and hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

And it wouldn’t be a cat fight without an argument over cafeteria table assignments.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

Which of course includes an alliterative attack, one of several including “hard work and hauteur” above and these:

This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Other trademark Dowdisms are the silly nickname:

She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

And the lowbrow pop-culture reference:

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame."

Perhaps it would be too much credit to think Judith Miller was as familiar with The Fantastic Four as Dowd seems to be. But as always, Maureen saves the heaviest salvo for last:

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

When the paper of record is caught carrying water, even the op/ed page has to turn up its nose at the bias.

Gossip Gurus

In the International Herald Tribune, Maureen Dowd reviews a new collection of journal entries by noted economist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Like the new TV series Gossip Girls, his journal kept all sort of catty comments about the Upper East Side circles he traveled in. The opening paragraph sets the tone.

It's hard not to like a book that expounds on Marilyn Monroe on one page and the Monroe Doctrine on the next. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ruminates on the realm of hemispheric affairs, the transition from one Monroe to the other is seamless, as is the slide from Bosnia to Bianca Jagger and from Alexander Hamilton to Angie Dickinson. His diaries are a Tiffany's window of name-dropping. This is not history so much as historical trail mix.

Three pairs of alliterative allusions in the first paragraph. That is fast and furious even by MoDo standards. You are on your own for each of those. But the pace doesn't let up:

The old-school, bow-tied liberal and Kennedy courtier had a weakness for cafe society and Century Club martinis served by Arthur the Barbadian drinks waiter.

Schlesinger got his fame for being a special advisor to President John F. Kennedy. By calling him a Kennedy courtier (and making alliteration number four), Dowd evokes the Camalot metaphor for the Kennedy administration, a metaphor which is mixed and matched and abused throughout the rest of the review.

Arthur was also a member of the ultra-exclusive Century Association that has a toney clubhouse at 7 West 43rd Street. Other members include Mayor Bloomberg, Henry Kissinger, and Andy Rooney. Picture the rich guys in Trading Places. Arthur the Barbadian has me completely baffled. The prime minister of Barbados is named Owen Seymour Arthur, but I think Dowd is trying to evoke a meticulously dressed Caribbean manservant in juxtaposition to a Schwarzeneggerian Conan the Barbarian.

Dowd makes a couple of comparisons between Kennedy era figures from the book and modern newsmakers:

• Adlai Stevenson = Barack Obama
• McNamara, Rusk and Dulles = Cheney, Rummy and Condi
• Schlesinger and The Bay of Pigs = Colin Powell and the invasion of Iraq
  

That Bay of Pigs/Iraq Invasion analogy is advanced by noting Schlessinger's reaction to the failure to overthrow Cuba:

"We not only look like imperialists . . . we look like stupid, ineffectual imperialists, which is worst of all," Schlesinger moans afterward.

In order to prove her point that the book is full of intellectual elitist gossip she mines the book for some of the dishiest stuff, much of it second hand, saving the subjects the need to look themselves up in the index:

Gary Hart is Gatsby. Walter Mondale is "a repressed and somewhat irascible Scandinavian." Mario Cuomo is "provincial" and "insecure," throwing inner obstacles in his own path. Bill Bradley is "dull," with "the deep thoughts of a bright sophomore."

John Kennedy calls Nixon "sick" and Johnson a "chronic liar." Jackie calls Nixon "a scurvy little thing."

Kissinger crowns Donald Rumsfeld "the rottenest person he had known in government"

And when you are called rotten by Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, that means something. Kissinger once said that faculty politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. In reviewing Schlesinger's gossipy tell-all, Dowd points out that there is plenty of pettiness even when the stakes are enormous.

Swamp Rat

Sinking in a Swamp Full of Blackwater
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 3, 2007

Blackwater is a term for wastewater contaminated with fecal matter and urine unsuitable for reuse. It also the name of a quasi-military training and security company.

Maureen Dowd goes all philosophical and quotes Nietzsche to illustrate the metaphorical quagmire that we are in.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” Nietzsche said. “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth century philosopher most famous for questioning traditional moral structures and developing the concept of man and superman. The quote used is from Jenseits von Gut und Böse, (Beyond Good and Evil) published in 1886.

Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

Hessians were mercenary troops controlled by German princes sent to assist the British crown in suppressing the American Revolution. George Washington in his Farewell Address warned America about getting involved with foreign entanglements. MoDo also invokes by allusion another famous general turned president.

Once there was the military-industrial complex. Now we have the mercenary-evangelical complex.

The phrase “military industrial complex" was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his final speech in office:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

By invoking both Washington and Eisenhower, Dowd is contrasting their thoughtful and experienced wisdom with the reckless actions of the current draft-dodging president who has subcontracted out large portions of the logistical support of the Iraq war to politically connected contractors. MoDo connects the dots for the slower readers:

Mr. Prince [president of Blackwater USA], a former intern to the first President Bush and a former Navy Seal, is from a well-to-do and well-connected Republican family from Michigan.

He and his father both have close ties to conservative Christian groups. His sister was a Pioneer for W., raising $100,000 in 2004, and Erik Prince has given more than $225,000 to Republicans.

Blackwater, in turn, has been the beneficiary of $1 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract with the State Department worth hundreds of millions.

A foreign entanglement driven by the profit motive of the military-industrial complex. Who could have predicted that would be a bad idea?