Why I LOVE Maureen Dowd!

A statue of Dan Quayle? What did the sculpture use for a subject? A potatoe? Even Dan Quayle looks good compared to W. Why W hasn't brought Danny Boy back into the fold is beyond me. Bush 41 had a knack for selectting real winners: Danny Boy, Clarence Thomas, and the Dickster. W has given us Tom Ridge, Dan Evans, and an assortment of mediocre former governors. The brain-damaged Governor of Indiana will probably go on W's shortlist for some appointment. I am sorry for Governor O'Bannon, but the W team will stop at nothing to make W look good. If this be (fair & balanced) poor taste, make the most of it!

[x NYTimes]

September 11, 2003

We're Not Happy Campers

By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON — The Saudi religious police are harassing Barbie.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is warning that the "Jewish" dolls — banned in Saudi Arabia for a decade — are a threat to Islam.

The A.P. reported that a message posted on the mutawwa's Web site chided: "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful."

This, from a hypocritical desert kingdom with more lingerie stores in its malls than Victoria has secrets.

It's probably useless to start correcting the inbred Saudis on facts, but just for the record, Barbie was a knockoff of a German floozy doll.

The place so eager to protect itself from "Jewish" toys and "the perverted West," the breeding ground of the 9/11 hijackers, is still the Bush administration's close ally.

Osama bin Laden is urging the Muslim world to pursue a jihad against America, even as America pursues a GWOT in the Muslim world. (GWOT is how some Pentagon documents refer to the Global War on Terror.) They're out to get us, and we're out to get them.

Far from being the swift and gratifying lesson in U.S. dominance that Cheney & Co. predicted, our incursion into Iraq is turning into a spun-out, scary lesson in the dangers of hubris. Democrats are combing through the $20 billion part of the White House request involving rebuilding Iraq, trying to make sure there isn't any Halliburton hanky-panky.

I've actually gotten to the point where I hope Dick Cheney is embroiled in a Clancyesque conspiracy to benefit Halliburton. Because if it's not a conspiracy, it's naïveté and ideology. And that means our leaders have used goofball logic and lousy assumptions to trap the country in a cockeyed replay of the Crusades that could drain our treasury and strain our military for generations, without making us any safer from terrorists and maybe putting us more at risk.

On 9/11's second anniversary, seven in 10 Americans still believe Saddam had a role in the attacks, even though there is no evidence of it, according to a Washington Post poll. That is because the president has done his level best to conflate 9/11 and Saddam and did so again in his speech on Sunday night.

Iraq never threatened U.S. security. Bush officials cynically attacked a villainous country because they knew it was easier than finding the real 9/11 villain, who had no country. And now they're hoist on their own canard.

By pretending Iraq was crawling with Al Qaeda, they've created an Iraq crawling with Al Qaeda.

As Donald Rumsfeld finished up an upbeat talk at the National Press Club here yesterday, brushing off hecklers and calling the global war on terror "well begun," cable began airing fresh Flintstones video of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri encouraging the Iraqi and Islamic fighters to "bury" American troops and send them to their mothers in coffins.

The Bush team's logic before the war was infuriatingly Helleresque, and it still is.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who was so alarmed about Saddam's W.M.D. before the war, is now so nonchalant that he said he did not even bother to ask David Kay, who runs the C.I.A.'s search for W.M.D. in Iraq, what progress he'd made when meeting with him in Iraq last week.

"I have so many things to do at the Department of Defense," Rummy told The Washington Post.

Asked at the press club why our intelligence analysts did not predict the extent of Iraq's decayed infrastructure, Rummy said dismissively, "They were worrying about more important things." Yeah, like how to get Dick Cheney off their backs.

Testifying before the Senate on Tuesday on the $87 billion request, Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official who pushed so hard to own Iraq and control it, said, "We have no desire to own this problem or to control it." There may not be much choice, given Colin Powell's pessimistic warning to Congress yesterday that no allies want to help us pick up the tab for rebuilding a country full of people who revile us.

I never thought I'd say this, but watching Dan Quayle's marble bust, unveiled yesterday at the Capitol — soon to join John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Spiro Agnew — I was nostalgic for the days when Murphy Brown's baby amounted to a serious mess.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company