Here, the response would be, "If I've lost Maureen Dowd, I've lost my base in the Mainstream Media."
However, losing Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations is a whole other matter. When the CFR turns against a president, he's on his way out. Ask Nixon what happened when the Foreign Policy Community decided he was a liability. Considering that there is a dotted line relationship between the CFR and the Mainstream Media, the whole ballgame may be changing.
But clearly someone's interests have been tweaked, either lately with the developments in the Ukraine or of a longer-standing nature. Benghazi perhaps? That establishment regards even as young an ambassador as Stevens to be One Of Us. It may be that precisely why he was hung out to dry has suddenly become incontestable for one reason or another. The emails? A report none of the Unwashed has, or will read? Well, nobody's cut me in. :-(
Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to think of a single aspect of 0bama's foreign policy that has not failed ingloriously, even those few that actually are in U.S. interests. His not-Bush routine with regard to anti-missile deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic is now looking like the disaster most of us recognized at the time. His rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood was doomed from the start. His kowtowing apology tour served only to alarm our allies that there was a fool at the wheel. His Nobel Peace prize was a bad joke. His idiotic ROE in Afghanistan have cost lives and his abusive drone campaigning has taken them unnecessarily and hardened the Taliban without destroying them. I'm searching for a single, solitary positive development here and I'm not finding one even E.J. Dionne could spin into a success.