Did Maureen Dowd have an article today?

if so,could one of you good people please post it or provide a link.

even when I register for papers my computer keeps locking me out whenever I clean the drives-so why bother

With "liberals" like them, who needs enemies? Any time they do something worthy of being called journalism, it's just misdirection so they can do something really bad like withholding proof of US government spying before an election.

I get them through my local public library's website via a service they subscribe to. You only have to have a library card. You have to do a fair amount of clicking and search for the columnist's name, however.

« The Hidden State Steps ForwardImpeachment Buzz »Vice Axes That 70’s Show
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times

We start the new year with the same old fear: Dick Cheney.

The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth’s database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld’s lair.

Vice is literally a shadow president. He’s obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.

Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.

“For a brief period,” they reported, “photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured.” So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.

Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it’s not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, “The view of the vice president’s residence in Washington remains obscured.”

Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.

Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man’s bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.

Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.

Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive branch’s ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back toward Congress.

The 70’s were also a heady period for the press, which reached the zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and exposed Watergate. Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger Freedom of Information Act.

Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged to the White House.

So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the deflated presidential muscularity. Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever. All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: “We know best. Trust us.”

The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times’s Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq’s oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.). Very convenient.

Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.

“I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,” he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they’re all so 20th century. Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.

Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?

Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.

http://nevadathunder.com/?p=833

And it occurs to me that I haven't expressed my (belated) condolences for the passing of her mother. This must have been (and remain) difficult for her. Yet she continues on with unbroken stride.

So let me express my sympathies for her loss -- and my admiration for the courage and self-possession with which she has handled it.

Moreover, while I'm being reflective, I think that I have been overly dismissive of the idea that men avoid marrying intelligent and successful women. Just because there is (perhaps) an element of personal involvement in an assertion, this doesn't mean that it is baseless. (Although one should always examine the acts of others looking for selfishness, as this may well drive their behavior.) And just because there are arrows accompanying the statement of an assertion (and perhaps some small lack of rigor in the argumentation), this doesn't mean that there isn't some underlying truth that warrants consideration. Moreover, Ms. Dowd's style is at its best when it's barbed, barbed even to the point of being paining. But then, so is the voice of conscience -- a voice which it seems to me is rather lost to (and on) so many of us.

Now, mind you, I see the issue as being just one aspect of a much larger problem, a problem involving a decline in community, the increasing demands placed on citizens to be mobile, adaptable, servile cogs in the modern economy -- and a culture and society generally going to hell in a troika with bells.

(For example, in days of yore, one had better, more direct opportunities to see people express their character in their acts over a period of years, and one could make life decisions based on this knowledge. (Although, of course, many people have always been caught up with the popular, the superficially attractive, the material, etc.) But today, people rarely look at each other in any but the most superficial and unseeing ways, and character and principles count for relatively little. We have become plastic men, living in a plastic world, holding-on to plastic dreams -- and expecting plastic partners.)

But pair-bonding (marriage being the traditional vehicle for this) is of great importance, and it can bring happiness, satisfaction and security... and even something resembling meaning. And it is ill that decent people who wish for it are unable to find it... especially if this results (in part) from systems (and a culture) gone wrong. For if we do not reward people with more than the material (self-gratification, the superficial, etc) for their success, then we can expect only those who seek the material (self-gratification, etc) to strive for success.

...

It's hard for me to give much credit to those that I see as being ambitious. But, I must admit, my own (relative) lack of ambition probably plays a role in this. And although ambition has brought much evil to this world, it has also brought many good things. It's just a question of balancing ambition with principle -- and of rewarding those who do well, even if their motivations are not beyond reproach -- and no matter how painful it is to feed their egos.

And if the world were to wait for men like me to rouse themselves, men who would rather have a smoke and take a walk in the woods, or read a book, than to press forward on some steady course -- then there would be much less good in the world.

Again, it's a question of balance... A balance that I am constitutionally unable to achieve.

I very much doubt that men are "intimidated" by her. Rather I think that most main distain her for her very limited insight and poor intellect.

Speaking only for myself, I would never dream of marrying someone who looked at the 2000 election and thought that the main issue was how Al Gore looked in a suit. Surprise, Maureen, it was a hell of a lot more than that.

Just because she's shifted her attention from creating a disaster to mocking a disaster does not mean she's a particularly valuable thinker. She isn't. She's a smart aleck who can't make critical distinctions.

Helen Thomas certainly didn't spend much time in her professional carreer airing her personal life in a public political column. Nobody gives a damn whether Helen Thomas is married or not, because Helen Thomas sparkles mainly for her professionalism and her sharp eye and her critical mind.

I suspect that Maureen's main problem is poor judgement. If her private judgement is anything like her public judgement, she is simply a loser, pure and simple.

you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

And I feel no obligation to defend what this or that person has done at some time.

Hell, I can't even defend what I've done from time to time.

And, perhaps, like almost everyone else, she has her good days and her bad ones, her moments of insight and her moments of pettiness.

But even on her good days, I am now (somewhat) inclined to believe that she is not taken as seriously as she would be if she was a man.

And, if this is true, it is not a good thing.