“YOU KNOW,” SAID FDR TO GEORGE MARSHALL, “I THINK I’M GOING TO TALK TO BARBARA WARD ABOUT THE HUMANITARIAN ASPECTS OF D-DAY. A LITTLE GENDER DIVERSITY CAN’T HURT, YOU KNOW?”

       So now we know how this presidential pillar of  uncertain, quivering Obama Jello reacts (I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it thinking). He was definitely against entering Libya on any pretext until three women pressured him—the most notable being the orange-haired ex-journalist, 40-year-old Irish born Leftist Samantha Power director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council (the wife of economist Cass Sunstein of the U of C)…about whom that legendary arbiter of Washington power NPR’s feminist Nina Totenberg said trilled about the women changing the presidential intention: she’s brilliant you know.   All three of them are!  Referring to co-producers of the Libyan engagement, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice UN ambassador.
          Indeed the three women brokered the deal getting the insouciant Obama to agree as he noodled over the NCAA matchups….and did it over the opposition of three men!   This titillates Totenberg…setting it up as a slam dunk for the women over Defense Secretary Robert Gates, national security adviser Thomas Donilon and counterterrorism chief John Brennan validating her lifelong labors to prove the superiority of women.
. Yesterday on ABC-TV you saw both Hillary and Gates sitting side by side, Gates not backing down from his contention that the humanitarian intervention is not of direct priority for the United States which is already engaged in two Middle Eastern wars.
       Just as Barbara Ward aka Lady Jackson,  was an idealistic disciple of rich nations sharing  their wealth with the poor…exhibiting a theology the depth of a pie-tin…she was revered as she lived as an authentic liberal Catholic saint….albeit her religious ideals had no quantitative measure attached just basic altruism.
        But while she lived she was mighty. She consulted with  Adlai Stevenson, JFK and LBJ.   Regarded as a great Catholic intellectual she evidently had a rupture with the Church and ordered herself buried in an Anglican churchyard.
         Samantha Power is the latest liberal intellectual to come kicking down the sawdust trail advocating that wherever human rights are trampled anywhere in the world and genocide exists, there the U.S. should be flexing its power.  Of course as an over-privileged good looking young female intellectual, she has gone on to great fame in liberal circles….writing a book that secularly canonizes a visionary UN staffer who vowed to fight injustice and who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq,Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira del Mello and the Fight to Save the World.  He was supposed to be a candidate for chief staffer of the  UN which adds a passionate wail to the book—things the left does particularly well:  Oh what we have lost!
         Chasing the Flame…and the Fight to Save the World.  Nice passionate title, isn’t it?  Powered by the media organs of the Left it won many prizes and faux intellectuals vie to be seen on New  York trains coming in from the suburbs with it in tow.   Another book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer for nonfiction in 2003 and quickly topped Sergio Vieira del Mello whom all those in the know wink at each other knowingly hoping that some dumb cluck will ask them who he was….thereby allowing them to show off their erudition.
         The three feminists scored a coup of sorts by turning Obama around.   When questioned about the coup by Diane Sawyer Hillary resorted to her first line of defense and lied volubly.  
        “Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert working with the Center for American Progress which has close ties to the Obama administration.  “Hillary got the Arab buy-in,  Susan worked the UN to get the 10 to 5 vote which was no easy thing” and the passion to intervene on humanitarian grounds came principally from Power who was the African adviser to Bill Clinton when he failed to stop the Rwanda genocide because public opinion turned against it here.
        Other things helped, too: such as Hillary’s spoiled child petulance saying she won’t serve in a second term and her incorrigible leaking to put heat on Obama despite the fact that the three men argued intervention has no military significance and that the Libyan rebels are unknowables and could well have ties to al Qaeda.   Talking with Sawyer. Hillary ratified the conclusion of the author of the finest book extending from the beginnings of Whitewater to the denouement of the Lewinsky, a book with an awful name—The Death of American Virtue by law school dean Ken Gormley… who concludes that the prosecutors were at the verge of giving up trying to nail Bill Clinton…far more captivated by the tissue of lies and deception surrounding Hillary’s fraudulent actions when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and they reverted back to Clinton—thus allowing this latter-day Mme. Defarge to move on up to our secretary of state.
        But Samantha Power (Harvard Law JD) who taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School and won the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 2003 and the J. Anthony Lukas prize for and did columns for Time is refreshingly passionate about these things squeaked Totenberg on this week’s Inside Washington. She has devoted her entire coverage of the Supreme Court to gender wars; it was she who sprang the Anita Hill surprise on Clarence Thomas and is the closest journalist to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.    Charles Krauthammer on the panel fretted what does it matter what gender these people share?
     Looking at Totenberg’s uncomprehending little pig eyes set too closely together on her 67 year old face  you get the unmistakable answer: Oh but it does! It really does!
       She’ll change her tune when it is discovered that by entering this imbroglio to spare racial slaughter, we may trigger more of it.  She likely will blame the male soldiers not the three women who pushed it. That’s because liberals never…ever…learn anything.