Susan Rice’s cowardly critics

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:39:00 +0000

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice isn't just facing down right-wing GOP attacks these days, she's taking incoming fire from pundits widely perceived as liberal. Maureen Dowd went all in on Rice in a nasty column Sunday, while the Washington Post's Dana Milbank termed Rice "ill-equipped to be the nation’s top diplomat for reasons that have little to do with Libya."

Dowd paints Rice as looking to close an alleged "stature gap" with her Benghazi Sunday show statements, quoting a colleague blaming her troubles on being "focused on the performance, not the content." Milbank says she's made "an impressive array of enemies — on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom and abroad." Both Milbank and Dowd seem to rely entirely on the anonymous testimony of such enemies; there isn't a single named source in either piece.

Pundit solves abortion wars in one easy column

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:33:00 +0000

Last year, states enacted twice as many anti-choice laws as they did the year before. But ladies -- says Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank -- don't indulge in "hysteria" about your right to reproductive freedom. (And yes, he uses the word "hysteria.") He says the pro-choice movement would "be wise to drop the sky-is-falling warnings about Roe and to acknowledge that the other side, and most Americans, have legitimate concerns."

What are these legitimate concerns? Milbank does not tell us. He does, however, amble through the schedule of Washington, D.C., events for the Roe v. Wade 39th anniversary commemoration, and attend (at least I think he did) a single press conference held by abortion provider and author Merle Hoffman. The resulting column has all the hallmarks of everything worth hating about Beltway punditry: Each side is solely represented by the D.C.-based organizations that send out the press releases. It's as if it's all a "West Side Story"-like face-off in which only rhetorical points are at stake, as opposed to the lives of non-professionals actually affected -- in this case, women. And Milbank concludes that if those two groups, both behaving ridiculously in allegedly equal measures, would just compromise and meet somewhere in the middle -- perhaps at a D.C. happy hour! -- he would stop having to listen to them caterwaul.

Salon.com > Dana Milbank

Susan Rice’s cowardly critics

Pundit solves abortion wars in one easy column