Alex Pareene, bashing MoDo for buying into the "Obama was henpecked into war" meme:
Was President Obama "henpecked" into waging war on Libya by his "Amazon warrior" female advisors? Only if you're shocked by the thought of women in positions of power actually asserting their power. It also helps if you consider skepticism of military engagement to be inherently "feminine" and think that getting convinced of something by a woman is in and of itself emasculating. And if you're Maureen Dowd you repeat all that stupid, backward cant, because you're the hard-charging award-winning New York Times columnist with the most retrograde conception of gender relations this side of Hays Code-era Hollywood.Frank Rich and Bob Herbert are leaving the NYT op-ed page- when will Dowd shuffle off? Posted by Stephen Silver at March 25, 2011 11:17 PMDowd's first paragraph is simply a list of clichéd terms for war-making women. In the rest of the column she purports to be simply compelled by the media attention paid to the role of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton in planning the Libyan campaign, but she is actually just reveling in the opportunity to call a Democratic male politician an effete weakling surrounded, as always, by ball-breaking bitches like Hillary. This is the primary theme of Dowd's work going back to the Clinton administration. There is little daylight between her "position" on the matter and Rush Limbaugh's, except that Rush is at least honest enough not to cloak his chauvinism in the trappings of irony.