Washington is buzzing with testosterone, happy to be engaged in a matter with more gravitas than Monica Lewinsky....
Further reading of this column will indicate who in Washington is buzzing with testosterone, and then who might not be. When MoDo says "Washington" does she mean the press corpse?
There are jitters, as usual, about the Clinton team's spine.
(No testosterone buzz on team Clinton)
''The White House is scared to death,'' says Senator John McCain, the Presidential candidate with the most military experience.
...
It's simply that in hard moments that require clarity, the Clintonites seem in soft-focus. Nero fiddled; Clinton golfed. The President and his Secretary of State are great at wagging fingers at strongmen, but you are left with the uneasy feeling that they may not be ready to do what it takes, or may not even know what it takes.
(And ... MoDo apparently does know what it takes, although, she ain't sayin)
''Credibility is our most precious asset,'' Mr. McCain says. ''We have purchased our credibility with American blood.''
...It wasn't reassuring when the President noted, the day the bombing began, that he had been ''reading up on the history of that area.'' ...
(Well, at least SOMEBODY is reading up on the history of the area -- this didn't exactly happen much during the course of the Vietnam War)
The Administration was caught off guard by the scale and brutality of Slobodan Milosevic's purge of Albanian Kosovars following the NATO bombings. ''There was a gross miscalculation about how he would react,'' says Mr. McCain.
It was disturbingly reminiscent of Robert McNamara's stunning admission in 1996 that the Vietnam debacle occurred because top Washington officials were not sophisticated about other nations' thinking. He said a major lesson of Vietnam was ''know your opponent.'' Isn't that why we have the State Department, C.I.A. and N.S.A.?
...''It detracts from our ability to carry out the mission if our first and major priority is to keep casualties down,'' Mr. McCain says. ''Wars, many times, do not go according to plan. This one has not gone according to plan.''
He calls the President and his team unfocused and ''feckless'' on foreign policy. ''They have had feckless behavior in Iraq, China and North Korea so there is a lack of confidence in this guy,'' he says. ''It is not so much his personal problems, but he has not handled foreign policy in a manner that a leader should and it has eroded people's confidence.''
If John McCain is elected president, expect it to be said of Americana, We Are All War Mongers Now. Sadly, too if Barack Obama is elected.
