Losing Her Marbles!
July 22, 2003
by Bernard Chapin
Just
in case anyone’s worried about being too mean to our Nebuchadnezzar-like
friend, Maureen, I’d like to now reveal my sensitive, caring side
and exhibit the email that I sent to her this morning:
Maureen,
Just wanted to let you know that some of the guys at mensnewsdaily.com care about you and want you to be happy. I have decided to volunteer my friend, Johnny Q-bacca, to you for a blind date. I firmly believe you will enjoy his company as his nickname derives from the presence of effusive body hair. He could use an older and successful woman like you as he just declared bankruptcy. If you start dating him you could brag to your misandric friends in the office about the way you took advantage of a younger man. Please consider it as he and I anxiously await your answer.
Your friend,
Bernard Chapin
Hopefully bygones will be bygones after she reads my letter.
On a related topic, last week, the New York Times, in an article concerning Ann Coulter, once again unconsciously revealed their biased worldview through a simple sentence critiquing Coulter’s latest work. The writer stated, “[h]er sway with a narrow band of people who nonetheless number in the millions means she cannot be ignored.” I want you to think about that for a second. He describes her fan base as being a narrow band of millions! That becomes counter-intuitive when the essayist concedes that Coulter’s book was, at that time, number two on the NYT non-fiction list. I believe this bizarre statement sums up the paper rather well. If the NYT’s circulation is only 1.2 million, and thereby definitively not millions plural, then shouldn’t they label themselves as appealing to a narrow band of people as opposed to the author of Treason? Isn’t that just common sense? Sadly, I think we all know that that commodity is no longer available at any price at their elitist headquarters in the Big Apple.
Miss Dowd’s latest offering is as biased as they come from this supposed “Newspaper of Record.” She begins by mentioning that some soldiers are unhappy with the situation in Iraq and that they publicly criticized Donald Rumsfeld. Miss Dowd seems elated by this discovery. She is apparently surprised that some soldiers complain but this is often the case in situations where immediate objectives are fuzzy and the future is anticlimactic. She would do well to read some history and see that foot soldiers are not always the best battle planners. In the Civil War, Robert E. Lee initially had the nickname of “Granny Lee” and soldiers from the Army of the Potomac greatly admired their impotent leader, General McClellan. Neither perception by those in the field was accurate.
However, I for one, don’t blame any of our men in Iraq for complaining about the present. It’s beyond frustrating. I’m unhappy with the situation in Iraq and so are just about everyone else outside of the Democratic Party. It’s terrible to see soldiers dying every other day but at least the war is in our nation’s interest and is far preferable to a pointless venture in Liberia. It’d be nice if we could pull out a package of instant democracy, pour it out of a plane and get the heck out of the Middle East but such packages do not exist in the perilous world we inhabit. Yet in the minds of the post-industrial radicals from the sixties everything along with humanity in general is supposed to be perfect. Just ask Rousseau! The unexpected cannot exist and if it does they screech like bats all over our airwaves.
Miss Dowd politicizes our armed forces by saying: “…the coolly efficient Bush commanders have now been exposed as short-term tacticians who had no strategy for dealing with a war of liberation that morphed into a war of attrition.” The military is not a trendy newspaper. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are not cronies of President Bush. He doesn’t appoint generals like he does judges. To refer to Generals as being political pawns is to thoroughly misunderstand the relationship between soldiers and politicians in this country. An examination of President Johnson’s interactions with General Westmoreland would clarify that for her. Besides, what other strategy does she advocate? A magic wand? More Frenchmen? I’m all for that solution. Throw them into Iraq brie, line, and sinker.
Throughout the entire piece Miss Dowd does not offer one idea or solution. All she does is whine about current events. Dowd and her leftist friends’ way of dealing with Iraq would be to quit and then conjure up conspiracies to place blame where none exists. If she wants to find a conspiracy she should talk to William Jefferson Clinton who did absolutely nothing to make the world safer during his holiday in office. It would certainly be nice to know what Dowd thought of the Mogadishu situation and whether she felt that Clinton deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for the way he turned and ran.
Then she indicts a story that Matt Drudge allegedly mishandles as being the product of the Bush Administration. She says that the story was miscast to imply that the writer was gay. She thinks such an angle appeals to Bush’s base nature. Dowd believes that “the Christian right” might have something to do with it. The days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition are long gone but you’d never know it by the types of straw men that the left serves up as their opponents’ everyday. I would like to argue against this point more but I’m going to have to rely on the readers to do it as I make too easy of a target with a framed picture of Pope Paul VI behind my ugly mug.
Her accusation about Drudge’s story is outrageous and she has no basis for making it. If she has any evidence from which to make this claim she decided not to share it with her readers. What lawyers the NYT must have to print such mindless allegations. The only evidence she does issue disproves her assertion: “Scott McClellan, the new Bush press secretary, said that if Mr. Drudge's contention about his source was true, it would be ‘totally inappropriate.’ He added, ‘If anyone on my staff did it, they would no longer be working for me.’ He said he had no way to trace an anonymous source.” But Maureen knows better than he does. I’m sure she read it in the stars.
Then, perhaps responding to the popular comparisons made between them, she attacks Ann Coulter: “Let's hope the fans of Ann (Have you no sense of decency?) Coulter aren't taking her revisionist view of McCarthyism too seriously and making character assassination fashionable again on the Potomac.” Coulter’s fans can’t make character assassination fashionable again because the libelous left has been spiting venom from the top of its Hit Parade since McCarthy entered office.
On July 11, 1995, the Venona Documents were uncovered and the world discovered that McCarthy’s investigations into the communist menace were more true than false. Only Dowd and the mock politburo at the NYT would dispute these facts. It is Dowd who has no sense of decency by dragging everyone else into her mud.
Then a wonderful bit of projection is proffered when she closes with “[e]ven when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles.” If I were her I wouldn’t get within 10,000 miles of the phrase “losing their marbles.” Regardless, any Republican administration is automatically under siege the minute they take office with nearly the entire press corps berating them along with CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS. This is nothing unusual with their behavior last week and this “crisis” will in the future be remembered as a phony one.
She predicts that Republicans and President Bush are losing popularity due to the left’s ubiquitous whining about Iraq. I thereby lay down a challenge to Miss Dowd. Three hundred dollars says Bush wins in 2004 and I hope Maureen takes me up on the bet because I could use an extra car payment.
Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
