Re: Dowd Criticizing Hillary Clinton

lwiner - 4:05 PM ET August 31, 2005 (#63970 of 63970)
Innovate or perish.

What Dowd is writing about HRC is mild compared to . .

What Dowd is writing about HRC is mild compared to the Rove machine would do to her if she came out for troop reduction in Iraq.

Is there any doubt in Dowd's mind that anyone at all who criticized this miserable war would be Swift-Boated instantly?

A Nobel Prize winner like Kissinger can get away with it, but no one else.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton, the probable Democratic candidate in 2008 said that it's time to pull our troops out, the Rove machine would descend on her like a piano falling out of the window of a high-rise building. She would become the main topic of all talk shows and political columns and the war would be forgotten for a few days. In the end, she would have to apologize and her political career would be dead. Why should she do it?

No, this is a mess the Republican made and they will have to clean it up. Sen. Hagel has started. It's time for the other Republicans to speak up. If Bush does not act, the Republicans should impeach him and Cheney too.

Furthermore, criticizing HRC is ok. She's a politician and if anybody wants to criticize her, it's allowed.

But realistically, compare Hillary Clinton with Bush, point by point.

Then compare Ms. Clinton with McCain, Allen and Giuliani, the Republican front runners, and whom would you choose?

That's all you get in politics: a choice. No use tearing everybody down because none of them meet your ideal.

Dowd helped to defeat Gore. Is Dowd happy about that?

In response to Brooks' column suggesting a new strategy for Iraq

You must have a clearly defined objective which (in a democracy) must have overwhelming popular support.

If you don't have such an objective, how can you choose a strategy?

This is basic decision making, which supposedly is the foundation of a good business school education.

Bush, a Harvard Business School MBA, should have learned this. Evidently, he either did not learn the most basic of business school concepts or he has forgotten.

Bush, along with Brooks and all other Bush advisors on strategy can review the fundamentals of decision-making at:

http://www.mbatoolbox.org/stories/storyReader$19

Then they may discuss objectives, strategies and tactics in a creative and logical framework.

The Posters

I have been reading and posting in these Forums for a few weeks and I have some observations that I would like to share.

There seem to be four types of posters here. For convenience, I will label and describe them (us) briefly.

1. The passionate patriots. These are the people who love the US, in spite of all the warts and zits on Lady Liberty's face. They yearn to improve our country in every way. They (we) tend to be more articulate in our posts. We show a higher level of knowledge and logical thinking. We like the columns of Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. We miss Maureen Dowd. We like Frank Rich's writing, too. We do not miss William Safire. We waver in our regard for Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof. We don't really accept that Brooks and Tierney exist only to deflect accusations of lack of balance on the Op-Ed page.

2. The knee-jerk Bush defenders. They express unstinting support for the Iraq war. They do not question any of Bush's lies, no matter how preposterous. They strongly believe that US fighting in Iraq keeps the terrorists from striking us here in the US. They insult their opponents freely. They use the term "liberal" as synonymous with imbecile, thug, wimp, impotent.

3. The die-hard Bush defenders. Even worse than "2" above. Totally out of touch with reality.

4. The irrelevants. They do not read the columns. Their posts deal with all kinds of stuff. They waste our time.

The Iraq situation, briefly

From your post:

"(Iraq) is made up of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, each of which group distrusts and dislikes the others."

That's a lot of simple minded bull$hit.

Here are the true facts:

1. Sunni Kurds, in the North have organized themselves into an independent nation. They have a democratic secular government and a strong militia. They also have less than half the oil. They want to maintain their independence from all Arabs, Sunni and Shia.

2. Shia Arabs, in the South have more than half of the population and the bulk of the oil. They are now following the Kurds' model and establishing an independent nation, most likely a theocracy, allied with Iran.

3. Sunni Arabs in the middle want to resume exploiting the Sunni Kurds and Arab Shias, who have all of Iraq's oil, in the North and South. Sunni Arabs are Saddam Hussein's people. They have been exploiting the other two groups for 80 years and especially brutally during Saddam Hussein's rule of 30 years. They see their control slipping away and the have mounted the insurgency in order to create chaos, which might enable them to seize power again.

The United States is irrelevant.