To Show How Despicable She Thinks Cheney's Crew Is, Maureen Dowd Compares Them To Women
Below, in italics, is an excerpt from Maureen Dowd's 11/1/05 NYT column. My "Annotations" are in regular, bolded font.
...."Unless it's some catty attempt to undermine someone you're pretending to like, how to explain the Mean Girls cabal headed by Dick Cheney, Rummy and the Rummy aide Douglas Feith? These hawkish Heathers lured W. into war with hyped intelligence and then clawed out Colin Powell's eyes to take charge of the occupation, only to bollix up the whole thing beyond belief and send the president's ratings cratering.
So Dowd's claim is that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Feith are "catty," a "Mean Girls cabal" and "hawkish Heathers" who "clawed out Colin Powell's eyes." And she uses feminine descriptors to illustrate how awful she thinks they are, which has the added bonus of calling them girls, which she considers a huge insult.
"The former Powell chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who often verbalizes what Mr. Powell does not say because the ex-secretary of state does not want to be in a public catfight with the cabal, charged on NPR that the cabal issued directives that led to the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It was clear to me," he said, "that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms - I'll give you that - that to a soldier in the field meant two things: we're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence - and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it."
"Colonel Wilkerson called David Addington, the shadowy Cheney counsel who has been promoted to Scooter's chief of staff job, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
So the fact that Powell "does not want to be in a public catfight with the [Mean Girls] cabal," proves he is a better, more manly person? Or is she suggesting he is completely unmanly because he has Wilkerson do his fighting for him? I'm confused about Powell's gender assignment here.
"Heathers have their own rules. Having ignored the warnings that an invasion would cause an insurgency, the Vice squad stepped up the torture to try to stop an insurgency born amid the arrogant, incompetent occupation.
"The colonel also described how Vice shaped war policy. Mr. Cheney's fiercely ideological staff monitored the National Security Council staff in such Big Brother fashion that some of the N.S.C. staff "quit using e-mails for substantive conversations because they knew the vice president's alternate national security staff was reading their e-mails now."
"Colonel Wilkerson said that there was an N.S.C. memo that made a compelling argument for a large number of troops being necessary in Iraq, "and to this day, I don't know whether that memorandum ever got to the president of the United States."
So now she says "Heathers have their own rules," which apparently include being nosy and controlling, the "Heathers" being Cheney and company. Brace youself for Dowd's concluding sentence:
"Women are affected by hormones only at times. Vice's hormones rage every day."
Whew, in a completely unexpected narrative twist, she admits women are actually better people than Cheney and his minions, because our hormones rage less frequently. This must be why readers pay to read her NYT Select columns. Though of course you don't have to pay if you read them at Truthout, where you'll find Krugman, Rich, and Herbert among many talented columnists, as well.