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Sunday, April 17, 2016

It's Been 25 Years and Maureen Dowd is the Same Hillary Hating Broking Record

I mean she is so predictable you'd think she might just try to break out of type once, just to prove she isn't. She doesn't believe Hillary is 'really sorry' for the usual imagined assortment of sins. She's not really sorry about using a private email.

How sorry is Colin Powell?

Dowd doesn't believe Hillary is really sorry for making money on a paid speech.

How sorry is Donald Trump for making $1 million dollars more for the same 'capital offense?'

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-hillary-wont-release-her-transcripts.html

When is Maureen Dowd going to start asking Trump about his transcripts? Spoiler alert: next never.

Dowd has played this tired game for the 25 years Hillary has been in national politics. She accuses Hillary of 'using her gender.' In fact Maureen Dowd uses her own gender. A man could not get away with the blatant sexist attacks against Hillary Clinton that Dowd regularly engages in.

Dowd is just another woman of a certain age who is ambivalent about a woman who actively seeks such a leading role in public life. Dowd's tired broadsides date her as part of a generation that still finds a woman's ambition 'unseemly'-kind of like Bernie's campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, does. Weaver seriously tried to argue that the only reason Souther blacks support Hillary is because she was First Lady of Arkansas.

Maybe Dowd and Weaver can compare Hillary hating notes over coffee.

It drives Dowd crazy that Hilary isn't sorry enough. She doesn't beat her breasts enough, apologize for being an uppity woman enough.

"Wouldn’t it be a relief to people if Hillary just acknowledged some mistakes? If she said that her intentions on Libya were good but that she got distracted by other global issues and took her eye off the ball? That the questions that should have been asked about Libya were not asked and knowing this now would make her a better chief executive?"

"Obama, introspective to a fault, told Chris Wallace of Fox News that not having a better plan after Muammar el-Qaddafi was overthrown was the worst mistake of his presidency. But as usual, Clinton, who talked Obama into it, is defiantly doubling down. As her national security advisers told Kim Ghattas for a piece in Foreign Policy, Clinton “does not see the Libya intervention as a failure, but as a work in progress.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/hillary-is-not-sorry.html

Actually one thing Hillary always said as Secretary of State I think is really important. There is a danger of overcorrection.

Dowd again chides her for 'being political.' Sure, we've done so well with all the non politicians we've elected the last few years.

I love Obama but as Dowd has observed herself: Obama loves to be above the fray, but politics is the fray. She can write fairly about Obama, just never Hillary. Not in 25 years has she made the slightest attempt to be fair to the woman.

In a way, public mea culpas-the kind that Maureen Dowd thinks Hillary should be engaging in all the time-are a case of politics. You know, you throw your own judgment and the judgments of knowledgable people who work for you under the bus, sacrifice them to the God of Public Opinion.

This isn't always a great thing. Remember when the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod based on a false story on Fox News?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_of_Shirley_Sherrod

You could argue that often apologies are the easy political way out. That Hillary is reluctant to play the game shows she is in a sense less going with the tide. This may come as a shock, but an inflamed public opinion can be wrong. I know it's a blasphemy to admit this.

This is no doubt why I'm such a impassioned supporter of Hillary Clinton. Her instincts are very similar to mine. With all the talk about the 1994 crime bill, here's how I feel about it.

1. At the time, I thought the crime bill was a major overreaction to the real problem of crime.

2. But I do feel that today there is danger of overcorrecting the other way. Some of the young Black Lives Matter protesters seem to seriously believe that these neighborhoods would be better with no police presence or very little.

That is assuredly false. It's gotten so that Bill de Blasio now has to defend the police.

That Hillary's tendency is always against the grain of overreaction is to the good.

As for Dowd's jibe about politics, I for one think it's not a bad thing at all to have someone in the White House who isn't totally contemptuous of it and the entire city of Washington.

Ever since Nixon, we've overcorrected and hire the fairest outsider of them all, every four years.

So many of our Presidents have had contempt for the place. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and yes, President Obama who has been a great President but knows himself that his desire to be above the fray has sometimes hurt him. 

Paul Waldman has this fascinating observation:

"Speaking to the New York Daily News editorial board, Clinton was asked a question about the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus package, with the questioner saying that much of the money "was divided up politically." Clinton responded, "Well, look. Politics has to play some role in this. Let's not forget we do have to play some role. I got to get it passed through Congress. And I think I'm well-prepared to do that. I was telling you about Buffalo. I got $20 million. Now I got that because it was political. But it worked. And it has created this amazing medical complex."

"Clinton may not have thought at that moment that she was speaking an unutterable truth, but she was. When was the last time you heard a politician say that there's something worthwhile about politics?"

"Most of the time, people who have devoted their lives to politics describe it as something unseemly, repugnant, even vile. They paint themselves as missionaries from the real world, nobly attempting to bring things like "common sense" to the Gomorrah of Washington, D.C., a place they can't stand to set foot in (no matter how hard they're trying to get us to send them there or let them stay). Any process, decision, or motivation involved in the operation of government can be dismissed with a sneer by saying it's "political." Worrying about "politics" is only for my opponents and other selfish, despicable characters; I'm just trying to do the right thing for the American people. The last thing I'd ever want is to become a part of the political system; I'm making the supreme sacrifice of getting elected only so I can "change the way they do business in Washington."

http://theweek.com/articles/618149/how-hillary-clinton-uttered-most-radical-truth-2016-election

Obama, too, ran against Washington. Indeed, he would bring in a 'postpartisan' Washington, that is, of course, a little ironic.

Having someone in Washington who has less than total contempt for the place, can't hurt.

P.S. As a purely historical point, while I trace the anti Washington fervor of American politics back to Nixon's fall, ironically, Nixon himself would have little trouble understanding how we got to Trump. Cruz, and Bernie.

He always wanted to frame himself as an outsider. He always believed the reason he lost to Kennedy in 1960 was that he had a record to defend. Although Eisenhower was a very popular President with a solid record, Nixon hated being in the position of having to defend it.

In 1968 he got to run against LBJ and Democrat dominated Washington.






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