Today, in her New York Times op-ed entitled "Don’t Tread on Us" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/dowd-dont-tread-on-us.html?ref=opinion), Maureen Dowd observes that Clinton is vocally objecting to attempts to abuse and marginalize women in the US. Alluding to Hillary, Dowd concludes:
"Women who assumed that electing Obama would lift all minority boats are beginning to think: Maybe he’s not enough. If the desire of these conservative male leaders to yoke women is this close to the surface, if they are perversely driven to debase women even though it could lead to their own political demise, then women may require more than Obama.
If women are so vulnerable, they may need one of their own.
Is she inevitable?"
"Inevitable"? May the Lord have mercy on us! Consider Hillary's defense of Bashar al-Assad on March 27, 2011, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence at the time of the Syrian president's monstrous suppression of the revolt against his regime (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/syrias-reformer/2011/03/31/AFy4JFCC_story.html):
"Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer."
Here we have the US Secretary of State defending a ruthless killer of unarmed civilians, who had also ordered the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a friend of the West, in 2005. Why did Hillary go to bat for Assad? Because her boss had invested more than two years trying to demonstrate that Assad (and Iran's Ahmadinejad) had been "misunderstood" by the Bush administration and could be charmed into behaving civilly.
And while excusing Assad's petty excesses, what did Hillary, as Secretary of State, have to say of America's ally, Israel? Bear in mind that as a US Senator, no one had been more supportive of Israel than Hillary. Suddenly, as Secretary of State, Clinton was comparing Israel with Iran on account of the behavior of a tiny minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who had conducted themselves in the same way in Hillary's "home state" of New York without objection from Hillary (see: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/government-ministers-react-sharply-to-clinton-s-criticism-of-israeli-democracy-1.399450)
Israel the same as Iran? Yeah, right. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country, and in absolute numbers, is second only to China. Iran executed a total of 670 persons (homosexuals, women, Kurds, Baha'is, Sunni Muslims, political opponents of the regime, etc.) in 2011. How many persons has Israel sentenced to death since Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged in 1962? Answer: Zero.
Hillary was also infuriated by proposed Israeli legislation that would limit the funding of Israeli NGOs by foreign governments. The matter had come to the fore after it had been discovered that left-leaning NGOs in Israel were receiving most of their funding from European governments. Whereas you can debate the advisability of such legislation (the US Foreign Agents Registration Act demands the registration of foreign agents), such a parliamentary examination does not place Israel in the category of Iran.
Women "may need one of their own"? No problem, as long as it's not Hillary, who advocates on behalf of women while condoning murder.
Have you also no shame, Maureen?
Dowd suddenly has a soft spot for Hillary? Consider what she wrote of Hillary in a NYT op-ed entitled "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?" during the 2008 Democratic primaries:
ReplyDelete"Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons she is supporting Hillary is that she had 'no masculinity to prove.' But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.
Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama."