Oh, Gawd… MoDo has produced a POS called “”Oval Man Cave” in which she squeaks that after getting knocked for being traditionally male and for stories about a frat-house atmosphere, the president is finally willing to let women in on the games. Sweet FSM on toast points — she’s got the gall to use the phrase “frat-house atmosphere” about THIS administration? Cripes. The Moustache of Wisdom now says “Don’t Build Up,” and that the U.S. does not have the Afghan partners, the allies, the domestic support or the financial resources to justify a nation-building effort in Afghanistan. So I guess it’s only Iraq that gives him a little frisson of delight? Here’s that moronic bitch:
I felt a twinge of envy when I heard that my pal Tom Friedman had played golf with the president for five hours one September Sunday.
Tom learned a lot about Barack Obama’s positions on weighty issues and sporty ones. (This president doesn’t cheat and he does expect bets to be paid off.) My natural impulse was to shrug it off. Men have always craved private realms — the golf club, men’s club, garage, workshop, shed; a place to get away from the chatter and clatter of women and kids. (In Obama’s case, he may desire a testosterone break from his estrogen nest — a wife, two daughters and a mother-in-law.)
Gordon Thorburn, the British author of the book “Men and Sheds,” explained that the word shed derived from the Anglo-Saxon “scead,” or shade. It was, in a metaphorical sense, obscure, an “intellectual pantry” or “spiritual home” where a man could reflect and dawdle with tools and toys.
But I don’t kid myself that the presidential playing fields are merely about play. After Tom’s golf outing, Politico ran the headline: “Friedman jumps to the front of the influence list.”
Like other bosses, presidents surround themselves with people who make them comfortable. Poppy Bush liked racy humor, but was too gentlemanly to use it with women. So male advisers bonded with him by telling dirty jokes.
Obama likes to play sports, watch sports and talk sports. (Even his favorite TV shows, “Mad Men” and “Entourage,” are set in male-dominated worlds.) So the Obama aides who can do that, like Robert Gibbs, have a deeper personal connection with the president than someone like Rahm Emanuel, the former ballet dancer who prefers yoga to golf.
Just as some men can’t ingratiate themselves through sports, some women can. Condi Rice drew close to W. — nudging away Dick Cheney — by working out with him and talking football.
As long as I’ve covered politics, there were always women running up against “The Boys.” In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around. As first lady, Hillary Clinton had to deal with Bill’s coterie of cocky “white boys.”
It was a bit surprising that the same dynamic recurred with the first black president. But it is the very enormity of the change Obama represents that makes him cautious at times about more change.
Because Obama regards himself as the change, he didn’t immediately see the need to alter what his aide Anita Dunn calls the “optics.”
His race also gives him cover; it took quite a while for anyone to accuse Obama of being exclusionary.
After stories about the frat-house atmosphere in the spheres of economics and national security, and snipes about an all-male basketball pickup game at the White House with cabinet secretaries and congressmen, the president took Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy adviser, golfing on Sunday.
“I wanted women to still hold their heads up so I didn’t want to shoot triple bogies every hole,” said Barnes, who was hailed by the press for “smashing the grass ceiling.”
She told me she grew up golfing with her dad and shoots around 100. She and Obama were partners and beat White House trip director Marvin Nicholson and Obama’s Chicago pal Eric Whitaker.
“We laughed and gave each other a hard time and psyched each other out,” she said. “It was all on the line on the 18th hole and I made a clutch putt and now I’m $10 richer.”
Naturally, some men — and women — caviled that Obama shouldn’t have caved on his Man Cave.
“Will every game now have to have a certain number of Asians, atheists, vegetarians and public-option hard-liners?” groused one of my girlfriends.
Just as the hoops-playing president is getting knocked for being too traditionally male, the hula-hooping Michelle is getting knocked for being too traditionally female.
“She’s mostly played it safe,” Allison Samuels writes in Newsweek, “dabbling in traditional East Wing issues — much like the first ladies before her — without yet gaining much traction on any particular front.”
The First Couple is trying to let America digest the huge change that they signify. They know that Fox News is always ready to pounce with that “radical” label.
Besides, if Obama starts using a quota system for recreation, it will give fuel to the Republican campaign to paint him as a hand-wringing, Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy. Churlish Cheney charged the president with “dithering” on Afghanistan and nerdy potential 2012 rival Tim Pawlenty, the Terror from Minnesota, accused Obama of “projecting potential weakness” on national security.
Since the president is finally willing to let women in on the games, I offered up my own challenge: Scrabble. I’m curious about what X and Z words the smarty-pants Y chief executive can come up with.
There might even be $10 in it for you, Mr. President.
If that wasn’t enough to put you off your feed here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.
I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.
America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.
The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after Israel’s Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide Hassan Tuhami. Both countries decided that they wanted a separate peace — outside of the Geneva comprehensive framework pushed by Mr. Carter.
The Oslo peace accords started in Oslo — in secret 1992-93 talks between the P.L.O. representative, Ahmed Qurei, and the Israeli professor Yair Hirschfeld. Israelis and Palestinians alone hammered out a broad deal and unveiled it to the Americans in the summer of 1993, much to Washington’s surprise.
The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was preceded by an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. The U.S. surge gave that movement vital assistance to grow. But the spark was lit by the Iraqis.
The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to finally fight their own Taliban in Waziristan — because those Taliban were threatening the Pakistani middle class — were all examples of moderate, silent majorities acting on their own.
The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”
And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own futures, we win. When they won’t, when we want them to compromise more than they do, we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes.
That’s how I see Afghanistan today. I see no moderate spark. I see our secretary of state pleading with President Hamid Karzai to re-do an election that he blatantly stole. I also see us begging Israelis to stop building more crazy settlements or Palestinians to come to negotiations. It is time to stop subsidizing their nonsense. Let them all start paying retail for their extremism, not wholesale. Then you’ll see movement.
What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.
And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.
My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.
The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence. We simply don’t have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 — and we desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter. Let’s finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.
Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but expanding there will, too. I’d rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America.
