1-900-SOT-MODO

Maureen Dowd "pays tribute" to Robin Williams in a column that cannot be called sober:

[Williams] was 42 then, wearing his Popeye outfit, a blue-striped T-shirt and black baggy jeans. Surrounded by kids, a rabbit and an iguana, we talked about everything from John Belushi to his father, a stern Ford Motor Company executive.

As our interview ended, I was telling him about my friend Michael Kelly’s idea for a 1-900 number, not one to call Asian beauties or Swedish babes, but where you’d have an amorous chat with a repressed Irish woman. Williams delightedly riffed on the caricature, playing the role of an older Irish woman answering the sex line in a brusque brogue, ordering a horny caller to go to the devil with his impure thoughts and disgusting desire.

I couldn’t wait to play the tape for Kelly, who doubled over in laughter.

So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.

Ms. Dowd appears to forget a couple of key points in her free hallucination association game.

Popeye didn't wear a blue striped shirt or black baggy jeans in that movie (nor in any other iteration), and Williams certainly wasn't sporting a costume from a movie filmed 13 years earlier.

More importantly, Dowd forgets that Michael Kelly was a cheerleader for the baloney war he died covering.  Witness "reporter" Kelly's writing on the invasion of Iraq:

We are in a position of triumph, and potentially much greater triumph. A few months ago, all was still in tatters. Hussein still defied with impunity, still ruled unchallenged over his torture state, still schemed to advance his dreams of himself as the atomic Saladin... The will of one man, George W. Bush, changed all this.

So Cheerleader Kelly didn't think of Senator Clinton when he thought of the baloney war.

MoDo continues:

It was obvious in real time that the Bush crew was arbitrarily switching countries, blaming 9/11 on Saddam so they’d get more vivid vengeance targets and a chance to shake up the Middle East chessboard, and that officials were shamelessly making up the threat as they went along.

Shame that MoDo didn't report on the obvious in real time, and left the field to the bloviating cheerleader. (Perhaps she demurred as a professional courtesy to Judy Fucking-Miller.) Equally a shame MoDo can't recall that Kelly was where he was when he died -- embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division -- precisely because his cheerleading was useful to the Administration and the Pentagon.

Secretary Clinton -- and Michael Kelly -- and many others share responsibility for the deaths of the American and allied soliders and the Iraqis who died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Clinton bears no responsibility for the death of Cheerleader Kelly.

For the sake of Robin Williams' survivors, let's pray that MoDo's rememberance of Kelly doesn't lead her to show up shit-faced at Williams' funeral.

Update: Others have already made these points, including here and here (and, as to Kelly, back in 2013, on the 10th anniversary of Kelly's demise, as linked above).  Great minds think Dowd is a dishonest hack. 

As for Clinton's role, see tristero.