On why there are so few female columnists:
Ayad Allawi, the Shiite who was supposed to keep the government secular and bring in Sunnis to blunt the insurgency, has been marginalized. That leaves the government to be ruled by men rooted in the sort of conservative Shiite religious politics that will not produce a new dawn of equality for Iraqi women….
The bad news: This is not an Iraqi government that will practice Athenian democracy or end the insurgency. The other bad news: If Dr. Jaafari falls, Ahmad Chalabi will be there to pick up the pieces.
This is exceptionally dumb, even by Dowd’s low standards. Because as anyone with even a loose grasp on history knows, women didn’t vote in the Athenian democracy. And considering how much Democrats like Ms Dowd loathe the decentralizing power of general referendums, it’s highly doubtful that she’d approve of the Ecclesia, in which any male citizen was allowed to speak and propose legislation. Or, for that matter, of the Solonic reforms, which in addition to formally dividing Athenians into economic classes, made wealth the prime criterion for holding office.
Finally, I doubt that the new Iraqi government will be able to legally execute citizens of whom it disapproves on the mere basis of philosophical opposition. Apparently Ms Dowd has never heard of a certain philosopher, who was executed at the instigation of Athens’ pro-democracy faction subsequent to the anti-democratic turmoil wrought by his two prize students.
I would be remiss if I failed to point out that in the same column Ms Dowd also complains about the Bush Administration’s secret plan to benefit its oil-industry patrons with high oil prices, in direct contradiction to the left’s previous no-blood-for-oil argument which posited LOW oil prices as the real reason for the Iraqi invasion.
It would stand to reason that there aren’t many female columnists in the media today because their role model and standard bearer is a clueless, hysterical and historically ignorant waste of space.