Our irrepressible Cathy Seipp is back, with this month’s delightful skewering of the New York Times’s airhead redhead Maureen Dowd. Read the June MoDo Watch and more on the IWF home page. Cathy’s Maureen-kabob is most tasty when she takes on Maureen’s Memorial Day weekend column, which happens to be chock-full of classic MoDo ignorance of both current events and history:
“This is the one that had her venturing out — Again! — to see the new World War II Memorial, which she hadn’t expected to like, but was won over by ‘all the adorable World War II veterans rolling in wheelchairs…’
“You know, I think if you survived Normandy or Iwo Jima you deserve better in your old age than to be clucked over by a condescending Maureen Dowd. But maybe that’s just me. The really rattle-headed part of this column comes a few graphs down:
“‘World War II had such stark moral clarity in history that it’s almost irrelevant in providing lessons about conflict in a grayer time,’ Dowd wrote. ‘The Japanese bombed us; they didn’t have putatively threatening “weapons of mass-desctruction-related program activities,” as President Bush said of Iraq.
“‘Although conservatives compared Saddam to Hitler, America did not have to be persuaded with “actionable” intelligence before confronting Hitler,’ she continued.
“Now of course World War II had ‘stark moral clarity’ in history; history often provides moral clarity, unlike current events. But what’s baldly stupid about this passage is its ignorance of the past.
“Dowd’s ensuing graph ignores facts set forth in the previous one — America did have to be ‘persuaded with “actionable intelligence,”‘ e.g. the attack on Pearl Harbor, before entering World War II — and seems entirely innocent of the isolationist sentiments in this country (and England) that, had they been resisted, might have stopped Hitler from beginning World War II in the first place.
“The reason conservatives compare Saddam to Hitler is not only because of his megalomaniacal ambitions and genocidal habits, but because of his apologists over here. As late as 1939, the German-American Bund held a Madison Square Garden demonstration of more than 20,000 people who booed FDR and shouted ‘Heil Hitler.’ More mainstream was the isolationist America First movement and its sympathizers, complaining about Jews trying to drag the U.S. into a European war.
“You’d have to be blind not to see reminders of this in every Not In Our Name rally or ‘She Is Not Your Enemy’ flyer printed up by ANSWER, picturing a winsome Iraqi child. Or maybe you’d just have to be Maureen Dowd.”
Yes. Read the whole Watch for even more.