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Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

OK, Boom, I'm calling her out through your vast gifts at plumbing the Internets.
Find me a serious piece of evidence PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES IN REAL TIME during the run up to the war in which Maureen Dowd shows that she "knew" about the administration's "trickery." (And "even I knew"? You're supposed to know, lady.)
Go. Boom, Go.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Fenian dare you doubt my research skills.

Here ya go :

Who Has the Hot Rods?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Colin Powell finally has the goods on the evil dictator.

He has spy satellite photos of trucks pulling up to buildings in the outlaw regime when inspectors aren't around, lots of bustling activity around those metal rods for the nukes threatening civilization.

Mr. Powell has all the evidence he needs to convince the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that we are justified in making a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.

Only one hitch: President Bush doesn't want to attack North Korea; he wants to contain North Korea.

He doesn't want to contain Iraq, he told reporters on Friday, because ''after September the 11th, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water, as far as I'm concerned.''

Except when it comes to North Korea, where Condoleezza Rice has proposed a tailored containment that can ''check Kim Jong Il.''

The Bush administration has made fuzzy evidence against Saddam Hussein sound scarier than it is, and scary evidence against Kim Jong Il sound fuzzier than it is.

All week the Bushies did Cirque du Soleil contortions to show that we need to drop 3,000 precision bombs and missiles on Saddam's fedora right away because he might someday hook up with Al Qaeda and might someday cook up nuclear weapons. Not wanting to deflect attention from savaging Saddam, the administration played ostrich on North Korea until Friday, when the Navy sent Rummy an S.O.S. for more forces to spook the spooky Kim Jong Il.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

cont,

President Bush, during his press conference with Tony Blair, warned that Saddam had ''weeks, not months'' before facing U.S. wrath, even as Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that it would be ''weeks and months'' before North Korea could begin churning out nukes faster than the chocolates hurtling down Lucy's conveyor belt.

Rattling off the diameters of nuclear parts, Bush aides argued that Mr. ElBaradei was wrong to say that Iraq's aluminum tubes were for making rockets, not nukes. Meanwhile, they claimed that the satellite evidence of Pyongyang's nuclear fuel rod activity was no big deal.

Some Bush aides wanted to rush to declassify spy photos of Iraqi trucks but were in no hurry to show photos of those North Korean trucks pulling up to the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Mr. Powell will use intercepted conversations to prove that Iraq is deceiving the U.N. Newsweek reports that the conversations consist of snippets like ''Move that'' and ''Can you believe they missed that?''

So Iraq, lying about nascent nukes, cannot stand. But North Korea, brazenly proliferating nukes, can?
Mr. Bush has a point: that Saddam might become a merchant of mass destruction to terrorists. North Korea is already one of the biggest dealers in the weapons bazaar, selling Scud parts to Yemen and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.

The one-legged Qaeda man who seems straight out of ''The Fugitive'' is part of an evidence bag on Iraq that is highly circumstantial. Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi may have had something to do with the killing of the American diplomat Laurence Foley, but there is no proof that Mr. Zarqawi is working with the Iraqis. He may have left Baghdad two months before the murder.

The president was asked pointedly by a British reporter if there was a tie between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers. He did not claim one.

Mr. Bush shouldn't reach for strained rationales. We're going to war against Saddam because we can. (If we go after Kim Jong Il, he could destroy Seoul.) We're going to war because conservatives will be happy only when they have a John Wayne ending to Desert Storm and make U.S. foreign policy less about realpolitik and more about muscularity and morality. We're going to war because we're a nation with a short attention span; we want to strike back at some enemy, and it is too hard to find Osama. (The Brits now say they and the U.S. knew Al Qaeda was working on a dirty bomb even before 9/11.)

No one will miss Saddam. But as the administration inflates Iraq, it should not deflate other threats: North Korea, Al Qaeda, the deficit, the freaked economy and the woeful failure to secure the ports, skies and borders of America from attack.

After Mr. Bush defenestrates Saddam and detangles Iraq's tribal chaos, Kim Jong Il and his six-pack of nukes will still be craving the American president's attention.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Mo Dowd is such a fluff piece of garbage. As many here have pointed out, she does have good stylistic points of merit.

She has an audience, sad to say. I'm sure there are plenty of people whom she serves as a prime source of information.

But her "50+ year old, bachelorette, 'girly-girl'" takes have really worn on me. How can you take her seriously?

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

And here I was so worried about spending Valentines Day watching AHL hockey.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

If I was your Beau - you'd spend Valentine's Day wondering how I learned to breathe through my ears.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Don't you have that backwards.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Ha ha. Nice retort, Boom.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Ah, Boom, Chris is, sort of, like, right there. Please pay attention.
And CL, you sensitive, giving male, you.
What's the date on that MoDo, Boom?
OK, never mind. I remember the Bush-Blair p.c.
However, I don't read that column as la Dowd knowing about the "trickery." I see her saying "Why Iraq and not NK?"
E.g. --
"President Bush, during his press conference with Tony Blair, warned that Saddam had ''weeks, not months'' before facing U.S. wrath, even as Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that it would be ''weeks and months'' before North Korea could begin churning out nukes faster than the chocolates hurtling down Lucy's conveyor belt.
Rattling off the diameters of nuclear parts, Bush aides argued that Mr. ElBaradei was wrong to say that Iraq's aluminum tubes were for making rockets, not nukes. Meanwhile, they claimed that the satellite evidence of Pyongyang's nuclear fuel rod activity was no big deal."

I don't see anything there from her saying that the aluminum tubes story was bullshit, which it was. I see coy. I see glib. I do not see an ounce of disbelief.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

2/2/03 was date of column .

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Nothing wrong with backwards.

Carry on.

 

Re: Mo Dowd Sticks a Pin in the Obama Balloon

Yep.

Love when trogs such as Boom rip her 364 days of the year but tout her today.