OMG! Cheney on MTP

W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 28, 2007

Quod erat demonstrandum: a Latin phrase used at the end of a definitive proof

This week, Maureen Dowd’s dental fillings are picking up a Meet The Press episode that hasn’t happened yet.

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?
CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.
RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?
CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ’em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.

Dowd must be on a truly strange diet because she has become obsessed with vegetables. She has mentioned using carrots as a motivator with Iraq back during In A Dinner Jacket’s speech and earlier this week as well. The vegetable stew recall Condoleezza Rice’s testimony that the smoking gun in Iraq could be a mushroom cloud.

Another Dowd fascination is with the career backgrounds of Middle-Eastern dictators. She dismissed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an engineer with PhD, as a traffic planner.

CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.

Sure enough, according to Wikipedia, Syrian hereditary president Bashar al-Assad has an ophthalmology degree. Dowd’s preoccupation with mocking the previous jobs of politicians is intriguing. If being an engineer or doctor isn’t good enough to run a country, what is? Actor? Rancher? Housewife? Journalist?

We then get a brief lesson in the 20th century handling of dangerous dictators.

CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.
RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.
CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.

Both Sudetenland and Eurappeasers evoke the efforts of pre-World War II European leaders to satiate Hitler’s lust for territory. The Sudetenland was a part of Czechoslovakia that Hitler really, really wanted. ImaginaryCheney here has clearly lost the debate by invoking Godwin’s Law.

CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.

According to Dowd, Cheney is going to be the insane Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to Tehran. That must make Rudy President Merkin Muffley.

Riding The Crazy Plane

Madness as Method
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 24, 2007

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Today, Maureen Dowd levels her shotgun at Dick Cheney but with a wide spread takes on plenty of other familiar targets.

Dick Cheney’s craziness used to influence foreign policy.

Now it is foreign policy.

He may have lost his buddy in belligerence, Rummy. He may have tapped out the military in Iraq. He may not be able to persuade Congress so easily anymore — except for Hillary — to issue warlike resolutions.

According the the UK Telegraph:

[Senator Clinton] was the only Democratic candidate who voted for a resolution last month that called on Mr Bush to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group.

Clinton’s position on Iran lets her get pilloried on both the left and the right as Dowd later points out:

Rudy is using his more martial attitude toward Iran as a weapon against Hillary, painting her as a delicate ditherer on the topic.

And delicate ditherer is both our Alliteration of the Afternoon and a new Hillary epithet fitting with the Hamlet reference in the title. But the main thrust of the article is that not only does Cheney, as the biggest of the chickenhawks, want to bomb Iran, he’s crazy enough to do it.

Cheney seems to enjoy giving the impression that he is loony enough to pull off an attack on Iran before leaving office — even if he has to do it alone, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in “Dr. Strangelove” to the sentimental tune of “We’ll Meet Again.”

Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb is a Stanley Kubrick black comedy classic about a rogue Air Force officer that starts a nuclear showdown with the old Soviet Union. It’s full of classic ironic quotes like:

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.

See, even in the movies, the Times is undermining national security.

And then we start getting some callbacks like a stand-up comedian.

The neocons who have their heart set on bombing Iran to stop I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket and the mullahs from getting nuclear capability were thrilled and emboldened by the placid reaction to the Israeli air strike on Syria.

That is, of course, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose Couric-inspired nickname you will remember from the fruitbat column. That column also used a carrot and stick metaphor that gets trotted out again.

In his new book, the former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton scornfully accuses Colin Powell, and later Condi Rice, of appeasing Iran, including some carrots to get them to cease their nuclear plans.

Hit with sticks, the bogyman responded with sticks. He said that Iran will not negotiate with anyone about its right to nuclear technology.

And even though Dowd invokes Slim Pickens in the Dr Strangelove reference, the better comparison is to General Jack D. Ripper who says:

[Clemenceau] said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Substitute “Communist” with “IslamoFascist” and “bodily fluids” with “oil resources” and I think you have Cheney’s next speech, right before the rogue B-52s head for Tehran.

Fruitbat In A Dinner Jacket

‘Fruitbat’ at Bat
by MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 26, 2007

“Casey At The Bat” is a famous poem about a small-town baseball hero that endures humiliation when he strikes out in a clutch situation. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was called a fruitbat by Greg Gutfeld of Fox News upon the event of his delivering a speech at Columbia University.

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

According to Wikipedia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doctorate is in transportation engineering and planning, a subdivision of civil engineering. His undergraduate entrance exam scores ranked him 132 out of 40,000.

But while challenging the policies and ideology of the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan understood he had to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, not ignore or insult him.

Reagan was able to help the Soviet Union — and world communism — to fall apart. All W. has managed to do is destroy the country he wanted to turn into a democracy and make Iran more powerful than it was before.

In Iranian eyes, the U.S. has behaved in a way that continually diminishes their country” — from U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that reinstated the Shah to W.’s branding them as part of the “axis of evil.”

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in a speech on March 3, 1983. The Soviet Union dissolved amid political and economic chaos in 1991. Dubya described Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of the “Axis of Evil” in his State of The Union speech on January 29, 2002. The United States invaded and defeated Iraq in March of 2003. North Korea tested a nuclear device in 2006. Iran, well, that's the point.

Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?

“Carrot and stick” is a frequently debated metaphor that either means a combination of rewards and punishments is the best combination of motivations or it implies that the hope for a reward, no matter how illusory is an effective incentive.

Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me is a common schoolyard rebuttal to verbal insults. Maybe stones and carrots like in the stone soup fable would be the best solution.

The president’s irrelevant U.N. speech was a bad combo with the schoolyard name-calling of Lee Bollinger.

Complete the following the analogy:

Kettle:pot::Lee Bollinger:_________

(Hint.)