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Week of August 23, 2009 - August 29, 2009

Score another FAIL for the Queen of Mean, Maureen Dowd


The New York Times' Maureen Dowd is, in my view, one of the worst journalists in the nation. When she's not "borrowing" words from Josh Marshall, she's being scolded by her own newspaper, or shamelessly admitting that she cares more about "the latest Neimann Marcus scandal" than about the economy. This week, one more FAIL is added to her rap sheet.

MoDo's topic choice for her first column following the release of the CIA Inspector General report on interrogations earlier this week, was...a woman who called another woman "skank."

But fucked up priorities are not even the focus of my entry today.

Instead, I'd like to bring your attention to Dowd's complaint about anonymous attacks on public figures:

Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody's character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

But as writer Liz Cox Barrett dutifuly observed, Dowd herself has a history of resorting to such ad-hominem attacks, which I may add are usually aimed at, but not confined to, Hillary Clinton. Here's one of the several examples cited, from last year's primaries:

DOWD; It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls [Hillary Clinton], giving up.... "It's like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes," said one leading Democrat...

"There's no love between [Al Gore] and Hillary," said one former Clintonista. "It was like Mitterrand with his wife and girlfriend. They were always competing for the affection of the big guy."

Frankly, I would have fired this irrelevant, overrated hypocrite a long, long time ago, if it were up to me.

Greenwald: Holder to investigate those who "tortured people the wrong way"


Glenn Greenwald reacts today to the just-announced investigation by Eric Holder, arguing it's based on the "Abu Ghraib" model. An excerpt:

This quite likely sets up, at most, a process where a few low-level sacrificial lambs -- some extra-sadistic intelligence versions of Lynndie Englands -- might be investigated and prosecuted where they tortured people the wrong way. Those who tortured "the right way" -- meaning the way the OLC directed -- will receive full-scale immunity.

Op-ed targets the Hillary-hating media


Naming names, former official during the Bill Clinton administration and  foreign policy expert David Rothkopf, condemns the media's anti-Hillary obsession. 

Sunday, August 23, 2009 

When it comes to Hillary Rodham Clinton, we're missing the forest for the pantsuits.

Clinton is not the first celebrity to become the nation's top diplomat -- that honor goes to her most distant predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who by the time he took office was one of the most famous and gossiped-about men in America -- but she may be the biggest. And during her first seven months in office, the former first lady, erstwhile presidential candidate and eternal lightning rod has drawn more attention for her moods, looks, outtakes and (of course) relationship with her husband than for, well, her work revamping the nation's foreign policy.

Even venerable publications -- such as one to which I regularly contribute, Foreign Policy -- have woven into their all-Hillary-all-the-time coverage odd discussions of Clinton's handbag and scarf choices. Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, while depicting herself as a Clinton supporter, has been scathing and small-minded in discussing such things as Clinton's weight and hair, while her "defense" of Hillary in her essay "Obama's Other Wife" was as sexist as the title suggests.

Indeed, sexism has followed Clinton from the campaign trail to Foggy Bottom, as seen most recently in the posturing outrage surrounding the exchange in Congo when Clinton reacted with understandable frustration to the now-infamous question regarding her husband's views. Major media outlets have joined the gossipfest, whether the New York Times, which covered Clinton's first big policy speech by discussing whether she was in or out with the White House, or The Washington Post, where a couple of reporters mused about whether a brew called Mad Bitch would be the beer of choice for the secretary of state.

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