GENTLEMEN, START YOUR FISKING

Speaking of drifting out of the mainstream, This column, by Tina Brown, titled, “Tough Time For Democrats” is ripe for satire. Check out this bit, from the opening paragraph:

I was at a media-heavy Manhattan dinner party that vividly dramatized the pre-spider hole mood. The guests — mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans — were unanimously kissing off Bush. It had been a particularly obnoxious week for a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations…

“A more metrosexual approach to foreign relations”?

That’s a staggeringly silly sentence–and Brown’s attitude throughout this piece (much like Maureen Dowd’s tone) is so 1990s in its lack of seriousness. But wait–she’s just getting started!

“Good riddance” may not be a particularly eloquent thing for Bush to say about Saddam — but comic-strip heroes don’t have to be eloquent. In his interview with Diane Sawyer, Bush was like a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think. Dirty Harry doesn’t talk much, and always in words of one syllable, but while the police commissioner is still fretting about getting a proper search warrant Harry has already offed the bad guy with his great big pistol.

But we didn’t “off” Hussein–he’s still alive, and no matter what his fate is, it will be more merciful than those that he put–feet first–into the shredder.

And as far as Bush being “a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think”, maybe Brown should read the recent article by Jonathan Rauch, which portrays Bush as nothing less than a latter day FDR.

Brown ends, astonishingly, with Hillary Clinton as staunch cold warrior (and die-hard American ally) Margaret Thatcher:

Planted solidly behind the lectern with only intermittent reference to her notes [Hillary] exuded the sense of a well-filled mind and life. Maybe not yet a credible commander-in-chief but at least a Democratic Major Barbara. Distantly one could hear the voice of Maggie Thatcher during the Gulf War in 1990, commanding Bush 41 not to “go wobbly.” She will wait this one out. Self-discipline, not self-doubt.

If Hillary had commanded her husband not to go wobbily, Al Gore would be far more likely to be president today, and either way, Bill Clinton would have gotten the glory (not the least of which would have come from Brown herself) that Bush is receiving from the American people–largely by cleaning up the messes in the Middle East that Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) ignored.

Brown, and her cocktail party coterie, “mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans”–in other words, RINOs–favor “a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations”.

Unfortunately, out in the real world, Saddam, al Qaida, the PLO and other terrorists rarely reciprocate such niceties. And Bush, (whose campaign slogan against would-be metrosexual Howard Dean could be, as James Lileks recently wrote, “He doesn’t moisturize. He doesn’t tweeze. And he never had a pedicure”), seems to get that.

Which explains the title of Brown’s cri de coeur.