Maureen Dowd, "It’s the Loyalty, Stupid": Could Hillary Be a Good President?

Could Hillary be a good president?

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "It’s the Loyalty, Stupid," Maureen Dowd segues from a 1993 interview of Robin Williams, who tragically committed suicide on Monday, to Hillary's 2002 Senate vote to authorize the Second Gulf War, or what Dowd labels "that baloney war." Dowd writes of Hillary's vote at the time:

"For me to believe that Hillary would be a good president, I would need to feel that she had learned something from that deadly, globe-shattering vote — a calculated attempt to be tough and show that, as a Democratic woman, she was not afraid to use power.

Yet, she’s still at it."

Ouch.

Indeed, it was a "baloney war," which undermined the delicate balance of power in the Middle East between Sunnis and Shiites, and positioned a militant Iran to pursue regional hegemony. But is Hillary "still at it"?

In her now famous, or infamous, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, published by The Atlantic over the weekend, Hillary took the opportunity to deride Obama's inaction involving the revolt against Bashar al-Assad in Syria:

"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."

Well, in this instance, Hillary is probably right: Obama's decision not to influence events in Syria allowed events to take their own tragic course, including more than 170,000 people dead, 9 million persons who have fled their homes, and the rise of ISIS.

But if Obama's policy in Syria was so disastrous, how is it possible that Hillary declared in 2011:

"Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer."

Assad a "reformer"? Yeah, right.

Dowd's conclusion:

"After buoying Hillary, Obama is learning the truth of another unofficial slogan in politics: 'The Clintons will be there when they need you.'"

Although I have no plans to cut my life short, as did Robin Williams, we truly live in depressing times, when a spineless president stands to be replaced by a self-serving snake.