Posted on 01/10/2007 8:06:51 AM PST by meg88
It isn’t really a romance turned sour, because it was never sweet.
The American military’s cocky heroes were supposed to sweep in and carry off a poor, grateful Iraq to security and bliss, like Richard Gere did to Debra Winger in the finale of “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Yet the search goes on, in this country obsessed with hookups and breakups, for the right relationship metaphor to describe our deadly embrace of Iraq.
My colleague Tom Friedman wrote last week: “Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, ‘Hey, let’s have a baby, that will bring us together.’ It never works. If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won’t help.”
Juan Williams repeated Tom’s metaphor on Fox News, agreeing that “a bad relationship” cannot afford the “pressure” of a newborn.
Some women say that the Surge will not work because it’s like starting over with an old boyfriend: you think you’ve learned the pitfalls and can resume with more success — you can set benchmarks! — but instead you’re swiftly ensnared by the same old failures.
The favorite analogy of Rummy and others who pushed the war was parent-child. “If you never take the training wheels off a kid’s bicycle,” Paul Wolfowitz would say, “he’ll never learn to ride without them.”
With the Surge, as with the invasion of Iraq, W. is like the presumptuous date “who reserves a hotel room and then asks you to the prom,” as my friend Dana Calvo put it.
In other words, the president will ask us to the prom once he reserves the hotel room.
(Excerpt) Read more at select.nytimes.com ...
/s
It's fortunate for Maureen Dowd that neither intelligence nor accuracy is required of columnists on liberal newspapers. Should that ever change, she'll have to find another career.
People have been dying in Iraq for going on 30 years because of Saddam, and now these militias and terrorists, and here is Maureen Dowd thinking her rhetoric is "cute". I won't say what I think of her. This is, after all, suppose to be a family friendly forum.
Finally a topic she is capable of commenting on. The prom and motel rooms afterwards. She should hang up her keyboard and go home and do the wash.
And MoDo got invited to neither.
Okay, I'm only here to collect Zeta pictures for the old man.
But it's interesting that she compares everything to man/woman relationships.
Feel the "Surge" now, MoDo? (I sure do).
She's always had the hots for Bush.
Well, one thing Mo doesn't have to worry about is anyone wanting to "add a baby" with her.
I think MoDo missed her calling as a writer of country music lyrics. No matter the subject, she always manages to make it about "some man done me wrong." Pathetic.
Gee whiz, I wish I were so smart that I could reduce world conflicts to cliches about high school! Maybe I could be a Times columnist like Mo...
Maureen Dowd - Always hating Bush and hating America.
Gee! That's it, in a nutshell. Every morning I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking, "What is the right relational metaphor to describe our deadly embrace of Iraq?"
Wait a minute . . . I think it's coming to me. Damn. Maybe next time.
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