Dowd Report

Number Three With A Bullet

2009-07-10T06:07:00.000-07:00

The new meta-news website Media-ite (which is just as hard to say as it is to spell has a running list of influential media personalities ranked Casey Kasum style. The top 3 are all New York Times columnists with Maureen Dowd running behind stablemates Krugman and Friedman. Here is their blurb on her individual page:

Maureen Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Then they have a very useless link to Wikipedia for more information. Because I'd never think of looking there.

The algorithm for this dopey horse rating system is highly suspect as it weighs various online metrics like Technorati and BlogBuzz (whatever that is) with things like print circulation and pageviews. And that is where this system falls apart. All the NYT columnists have the same pageviews and circulation which means they are just using the numbers for the Times as a whole for each individual. Lame.

Also, all three of these are widely syndicated and appear in newspapers all over the country, so their circulation numbers should reflect that. That is part of Dowd's influence. She is read widely outside the greater New York area, albeit on a delay as her column gets reprinted around the country.

And the real baffling part of the ratings is that somehow Michelle Malkin snuck her way up to number four. I understand that she is an internet phenom, but her print presence seems vastly overstated. Media-ite lists a print circulation of 763,530 which sounds wildly improbable. I have never seen her 'column' in a dead trees fishwrap anywhere.

The amazing part of Dowd finishing in the show position is that she does almost no online promotion at all. Her twitter is just links to her latest column, and those are probably produced in the bowels of the NYT online division somehow.

Still, bravo to Maureen for ranking so high. Even if it's only in Media-ite.

(h/t to The Zoo)

Something Fishy

2009-07-08T03:43:00.000-07:00

Sarah’s Secret Diary
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 7, 2009

Today's column is done in faux-Palin speak, a time honored Dowd gimmick guaranteed to keep wingnuts revved up about how Maureen Dowd is jealous and snobby and elitist. Therefore, it's helpful to review the source material to show that if anything Maureen with her innate need for complete sentences and coherent thoughts is actually undershooting the parody potential.

And there a few other pop cultural references to be illustrated.

I posed for a cheesecake shot in Runner’s World with short-shorts and a crumpled American flag that’s destined to be on the bedroom wall of every conservative 12-year-old boy. It’s the metaphor, stupid! Heck yeah, I’m running! As I learned when I was a beauty contestant — flags and gams show you it’s about country.

And before you say anything though about the glam shots of me stretching and preening on the waterfront in my cute running outfits, don’t bother. That would be a sexist double standard.

It’s just like when Obama, the One Who Must Be Obeyed, said his family was off-limits so everyone left them alone. But they never left mine alone. Thank goodness for that though because we hate being out of the limelight! It was a blast to see Bristol with my grandbaby Tripp on the cover of People as the ambassadress of abstinence!

But Maureen, through Fake Palin, knows what is really driving Sarah. Caribou Barbie has eyes fixed on an bigger race.

It’s about me running the country.

It’s about me running.

It’s about me.

The game Dowd is playing is that by posing phony Palin as a presidential hopeful it might force Sarah into some sort of non-denial that can be used against her latter. But then Maureen falls into wishful thinking.

The media doesn’t get Sarah Palin. I hear planes buzzing. Oh, no!! Have they all left??

If only we could.

The Drudge Attack

2009-07-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

It's a pretty poorly kept secret that Maureen Dowd's Sunday columns are often available late on Saturday to anyone that bothers to check out the NYT website frequently enough. This sort of advanced investigative journalism led Matt Drudge of his eponymous report to issue the following scoop Saturday afternoon:

MAUREEN DOWD TRASHES 'NUTTY' PALIN
Sat Jul 04 2009 14:40:36 ET

NY TIMES Op-Ed Queen Maureen Dowd runs out of adjectives and insults while ripping away at Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in an upcoming Sunday column.

Palin is "one nutty puppy", in the mind of Dowd, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT, with "erratic and egoistic behavior".

Dowd spits her holiday barbecue in 800 words, designed for fireworks.

"Exquisite battiness... solipsistic meltdown so strange... incoherent, breathless and prickly... Sarah's country-music melodramas... girlish burbling."

Developing...

Since the entire column was already available online (since yours truly was also able to get the post up early as well), I'm not sure what was 'developing', but it was enough to drive his minions into action.

I'm not shocked that Drudge took umbrage at a column ridiculing Palin. I'd be more shocked if Dowd hadn't opined about the resigning guv. What was amusing was how quickly Drudge's blogiteriat fell in line and spread his breathless excitement. Much of that brief item was reproduced nearly in full by the following blogs:

Chicago Ray Report (complete with some new-to-me tasteless photoshops)
The Virginian
Red Stater (my new favorite rabid wing nut)
Invincible Armor
Worcester Right
and others

Then, on the Washington Times website, Andrew Breitbart had this assessment:

Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey - Obama's Angels (featuring Joy Behar in the role of "Bosley") - used a potent mix of mockery, snobbery and vitriol to undermine Mrs. Palin's feminist bona fides.

They are what my wife calls "pad throwers," an allusion to the shower room scene in the Stephen King film "Carrie," in which the popular girls throw sanitary napkins and tampons at the film's namesake.

Maureen's one defender on the right is one Liz Trotta who also had not much good to day about Palin, but did have this to say about Dowd's column:

[Maureen Dowd's column] was a well written, funny piece. And, you know, there's one other element here, and I think most writers are afraid to bring it up. They sort of skirt the idea that this is a woman who has used her good looks and her gender to really get ahead in the political world. That's something, of course, the men don't want to admit, and certainly not the women.

(h/t to Freedom Eden for the transcript.)

One recurring theme in the counter-attacks on Dowd is that her single childless life makes her wholly incapable of empathizing with Palin who is presumably putting the needs of family first. It is most bluntly laid out by Scipio:

Poor Maureen can never admit what really drives her batty about Palin. It is so obvious. Dowd has the envy the empty wombed have for the fecund.

In their attack the messenger strategy, the wingnuts are going after Dowd's looks and age, blaming her bitterness on her lack of a spouse and kids, and calling her jealous of Palin's accomplishments. You know, the failed vice-presidential candidate that went to five colleges before getting a degree and has yet to complete a full term of an elected office.

The boomerang attack is noted Rovian tactic and by calling Dowd unhinged, they seem to be subconsciously projecting their fears about the stability of their favored (soon to be) X-GILF. Which only makes Maureen's theory that Palin is one 'nutty puppy' all that more plausible. But I think that most of the knuckle dragging defenders of Sarah are just hoping for a hair-pulling catfight because as Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother observes, never break up a a girlfight because you never know if they'll start kissing.

Crazy Town Critters

2009-07-04T19:59:00.000-07:00

Now, Sarah’s Folly
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 4, 2009

Maureen Dowd likes to go on little riffs where she puts in as many puns on a theme as she can. Today she has two different trends going based on Sarah Palin's surprise resignation.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

As is clear from the example above, in this column she is combining references to mental illness with examples from the animal kingdom. She is clearly trying to pack in as many of each as possible, so let's keep score. With the addition of 'caribou' that gives the critters a 2-1 lead.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

'Battiness' could go either way, so we will give each side a point there. And while 'gnawing' is often done by mad dogs, it doesn't rise to the level of a full reference.

The White House can drive its inhabitants loopy.

That's a slam-dunk for the crazy category. but then we have another tough call.

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.

Since 'salmon' isn't used as a metaphor, we are going to disqualify that, but we do give full credit for 'meltdown.'

On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness to a small group in her Wasilla yard. Gobsmacked Alaska politicians, Republican big shots, the national press, her brother, the D.C. lawyer who helped create her political action committee and yes, even Fox News, played catch-up.

Here we give the fauna a 'fowl' shot with 'incoherent' scoring on the rebound. No points for 'Cub' since that is an aviation reference and not an avian one. We would love to give 'Fox News' a point, but without an accompanying 'crazy as' it falls short.

She can hunt wolves from the air and field-dress a moose, but she fears being a lame duck? Some brickbats over her ethics and diva turns as John McCain’s running mate, and that dewy skin turns awfully thin.

Then the wildife goes on a hat trick tear with a bonus point coming from 'brickbat'. The crazy side gets a mercy score with 'diva.'

Maybe there’s another red Naughty Monkey high heel to drop — there’s often a hidden twist in Sarah’s country-music melodramas. Or is this a reckless high-speed escape from small-pond Alaska, where her popularity is dropping, to the big time Below?

The primate-named footwear call-out scores as does the 'reckless' remark, but 'small-pond' goes in the basket as well.

Even some conservative analysts admitted that the governor’s move seemed ga-ga before venturing the spin that Palin might be “crazy like a fox,” as Sarah’s original cheerleader, Bill Kristol, put it.

We finally get our 'crazy as a fox' call-out as a quote from the equally unhinged Kristol Meth. Under normal circumstances the use of 'cheerleader' would be worth mentioning as the second sports metaphor of the column, but the other trends are having a barnburner of match.

Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”

'Crazy Town' is also a Betty Boop short with this IMDB description:

Betty Boop and Bimbo take a wild streetcar ride to Crazy Town, where birds swim, fish fly, and everthing else reverses normal behavior.

The birds and fishes reference is too oblique to count so this one scores only on 'Crazy'. While that is stretch for a Movies With Maureen moment, the next paragraph is a clear Crossword Clue. That also doubles as an Alliteration Alert.

Palin’s speech is classic casuistry.

.The NYT handy pop-up dictionary defines it as "Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead" so we will give it to the unhinged side of the column.

Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town.

In another instant replay situation, 'milk' doesn't cut the mustard and 'fish' only scores once.

Sometimes, she explained, if you’re the star, you have to “call an audible and pass the ball” and leave at halftime, “so the team can win” somehow without you.

To round out the column, we get another misplaced sports metaphor, but then Maureen finishes strong.

The musher must jump out of the dogsled when warmer climes call. As Palin’s spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, says, “The world is literally her oyster.”

And the final score is:
Nutty: 10
Puppy: 14

But the real winners are the voters of Alaska who no longer have to deal with this batshit crazy squirrelly nutjob. Now if only the rest of the country could say the same.

Sex Scandal Survival Tips

2009-07-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

Rules of the Wronged
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 30, 2009

With Mark Sanford's serial weepy confession still playing out, Maureen Dowd is offering up advice to the overlooked victim in these scandals, the political wife. Here is an illustrated guide to some of the more salient points.

Stay away from the press conference.

Stoicism at the skunk’s side is overrated and, as Larry Craig’s wife learned, sunglasses don’t help.

The press is not your friend.

If you can’t maintain a dignified Silda Spitzer silence; ... go to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or even Deepak Chopra before crying to The A.P. A news wire is not a spiritual adviser.

Keep the kids at home.

Don’t bring the children into it. They suffer enough being the kids of politicians. Don’t trot out the family on “Oprah,” as Elizabeth Edwards did.

Really, keep the kids out of it.

Even if you’re a clever, competent woman, you risk sounding like a stereotypical harridan if you use the kids as a bludgeon and tell the press, as Jenny did: “You would think that a father who didn’t have contact with his children, if he wanted those children, he would toe the line a little bit.”

Stay above the fray.

Don’t trash a mistress, as Hillary and Elizabeth did, as a wacky stalker. No one — except the wife — blames the girlfriend as much as they blame the husband.

Bonus advice to the Other Woman: Keep the cameras in the drawer.

And just when you thought John Edwards could not sink any lower, there is news of a sex tape, in which Rielle Hunter shows off her skills not only in videography but pornography.

(See this post for some of her more tasteful filmic efforts.)

And finally:
Make lemonade out of lemons.

Cut your losses and keep going. Don’t let yourself get dragged into his drama or your reputation may follow his down the well. Hillary refused to let that happen. She salvaged her long investment in Bill Clinton and turned a profit when she became a senator.

There you have them, Maureen Dowd's advice to the wronged. Because two wrongs don't make a right, but do make a delightfully catty op-ed column.

Sanford's Roaming Holiday

2009-06-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

Genius in the Bottle
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 27, 2009

Maureen Dowd is practically cackling with Schadenfreude as she dissects the Mark Sanford scandal with both an Alliteration Alert™ and a Crossword Clue© combined.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

Her use of 'amante' for 'lover' also foreshadows her comparisons to come.

She also wastes no time getting right to her Movies With Maureen® Moment, a romcom from 2006, proving that Dowd has been to the theater since Audrey Hepburn died. (She does manage to namecheck Roman Holiday before the end of the column.)

He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie “The Holiday,” presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives.

And Maureen is often called emasculating but it rarely gets as obvious as this:

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

That rhetorical flourish is her patented Dowdversion® where she directly compares and contrasts two things using similar phrasing. The entire rest of the column is one long Dowdversion as she contrasts Sanford's parsimonious public political image with his Latin lover (or at least Latin-loving) alter ego who she dubs Marco.

penny-pinching millionaire Mark, who used to sleep on a futon in his Congressional office and once treated two congressmen to movie refreshments by bringing back a Coke and three straws.	Marco, international man of mystery and suave god of sex and tango.
Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment	Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires
Mark is a conservative railing against sinners;	Marco sins liberally.
Mark opposes gay marriage as a threat to traditional marriage.	Marco thinks nothing of risking his own traditional marriage, and celebrates transgressive relationships.
Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes and index cards...	Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress.
Mark is so selfish he tried to enhance his presidential chances by resisting South Carolina’s share of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, callously giving the back of his hand to the suffering state’s most vulnerable — the jobless and poor and black students.	Marco is generous, promising to send a memento of affection that Maria wants to keep by her bed.
Mark hates lying. As he said of Bill’s dalliance with Monica, “If you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.”	Marco lies with brio, misleading his family, his lieutenant governor, his staff and his state about his whereabouts, even packing camping equipment to throw off the scent from South America.
Mark, who disdains rascals, agreed that he wouldn’t [skip off to the other woman].	Marco, who is a rascal, skipped off.

Dowd sums up with the reason that Republican sex scandals are so juicy (even though she got her Pulitzer for Clinton's and has covered Edwards' with brio.)

Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.

Until then pundits will continue to play the Marco Polo game of catching hypocrites trying to weave and dodge when their transgressions are unmasked.

All The President's Women

2009-06-24T03:03:00.000-07:00

Vice and Spice
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 23, 2009
Warning: Link from picture at right is NSFW

Maureen Dowd made her mark and earned her Pulitzer prying over the peccadilloes of a President that couldn't keep his pants on. With our current president hopelessly squeaky clean (except for his occasional cancer stick, which we will discuss later), she has had to focus overseas for a suitably salacious sex scandal. Previously Dowd has fixated on France's Sarkozy, but now she moves down the boot to Italy with a nice Alliteration Alert™.

Our president is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi, whose Vesuvial vices spurred a trio of women academics in Italy to write an “Appeal to the First Ladies.” It urges Michelle Obama and other wives of world leaders to boycott next month’s G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, to protest the Italian prime minister’s “sexist” and “offensive” manner toward women.

What's so fun about this one is that even the wronged woman is not exactly in the right, since she is a forme mistress of his.

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet whom he later appointed as Minister of Equal Opportunities; and again last month when Lario charged her randy hubby with “consorting with minors” after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace.

Said birthday girl was one Noemi Letizia. In addition to the 6,000 euro necklace, he gave her a rather creepy souvenir according to a gossip site.

Silvio Berlusconi, 72, also signed a photograph of himself for Noemi Letizia as well as a book in which he had written a goosebumps-raising dedication to her saying: ‘To my little Noemi, my little graphic artist, your little daddy teacher.”

It takes more than some intergenerational hanky-panky to qualify as a scandal in Italy, so it helps that there are call girls to check out.

And a comely 23-year-old starlet named Barbara Montereale told La Repubblica this week that she got paid by a hospital equipment vendor for going to the villa in January — an incident now under police investigation.

In her interview (available on YouTube for those of you that speak Italian or just like to watch women speak Italian) she names another woman wishing to exchange favors.

She claimed she went with another girl, an “escort” named Patrizia D’Addario, who told her that she had had sex with the 72-year-old prime minister and asked for a favor about a building project but never got it. Now a disillusioned D’Addario has released a secret recording she made in which Berlusconi’s voice is heard saying: “Go and wait for me in the big bed.”

But even all this salacious detail doesn't get Maureen to 800 words, so in clumsy contrast, she excerpts long transcripts of Barack getting the third degree over his smoking habits. And to make the transition, she employs her latest favorite Crossword Puzzle Clue© (which she helped get on the NYT list of most looked up words).

Given Berlusconi’s louche ways, L’Aquila is a safe place for President Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit.

Maureen has been on Barry's butt over his butts for at least a year. Instead she suggests a closer venue for the random nic-fit.

It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke.

But Dowd did make it through an entire column of scandal (big or imagined) without mentioning The Big Dog once. Perhaps she is on the road to recovery.

Seven In One Blow

2009-06-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

Obama’s Fly Move
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 20, 2009

In Maureen Dowd's last column she packed it full of her trademarked alliterative alertness but it was missing her equally famous references to old movies. To compensate, she has used her latest missive on a trivial Obama related news item to pack in as many cinematic Movies With Maureen® moments as possible.

While being interviewed, Obama, annoyed with a fly, swatted at it and killed it. Maureen finds transcendental meaning in it.

And there are others who see a mystical, metaphorical dimension to the way the president nonchalantly lasered in on the meddlesome insect after it ignored his admonition, “Hey, get outta here.” Without even uncrossing his legs or lunging about, the Chill One caught it, crushed it and kicked it aside and then said to Harwood, “Now, where were we?” before returning to his point about regulatory reform.

Jon Stewart, her late night faux news crush, gave her an opening with his reference to the Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick.

“It’s like he’s got one of those Fly Terminator targeting systems in his eyes,” marveled Jon Stewart.

So that allows her to trump it with a call-out to a insect themed comic book movie franchise.

Maybe the president who collected Spider-Man comics as a kid couldn’t resist the age-old face-off with a fly.

Echoing her nickname from the campaign that evokes the Eddie Murphy stinker, she invokes a certain mysticism.

The moment had echoes of parables in which the ordinary one becomes the golden one.

But the most famous filmed fly swatter is the zen master Mr. Miyagi.

In “The Karate Kid,” a teenager whose father has died learns lessons about the body and spirit from his surrogate father and karate teacher, Mr. Miyagi. His lessons are about not going to the dark side, the importance of discipline, and catching flies. “Man who catch fly with chopstick,” Mr. Miyagi says, “accomplish anything.”

This bit was so obvious even Jimmy Fallon found a way to use it.

But for our Maureen, it's not enough to mention one famous fly-swatting scene. While obviously inspired by the Disney Mickey Mouse version, she cleverly disguises it by referencing the original Brothers Grimm version.

In the Grimms’ fairy tale, “The Brave Little Tailor,” a tailor brandishing a rag kills seven flies swarming around his jam-smeared bread. The little man admires his own bravery so much — “For joy his heart wagged like a lamb’s tail” — that he wants the whole world to know of it. So he stitches up a belt for himself embroidered with the legend “Seven at one blow!” and saunters out.

We even get a little Clint Eastwood bravado out of the Flyswatter In Chief.

Then [Obama] solicited more snaps for what Harwood called his “ ‘Make my day’ moment” from his press secretary off camera: “Whaddya think, Gibbs?” After the interview was over, he continued his superfly moves by cleaning up the carcass with a napkin.

But wait! There's more! Having already namechecked Jon Stewart, she gets to also mention her occasional guest writer Stephen Colbert.

The “shocking murder in the White House,” as Stephen Colbert dubbed it, was a small moment. “All they want is to be loved and to feed on our waste,” Jeff “The Fly” Goldblum said in a dry defense of the exoskeletal creatures on the Colbert Report.

Dowd tries to tie it all up with some mumbo jumbo about acheiving agendas, but it's clear she's proud to make as many movie allusions as possible. Perhaps even seven in one blow.

Lettuce Alliterate

2009-06-17T18:41:00.000-07:00

Hold the Fries
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 16, 2009

When Maureen Dowd is feeling particularly playful she deploys her debatably daring Alliteration Alerts™. Count the ones in this paragraph.

It was easy to imagine a scenario where the president and his body man, Reggie Love, would have their own early-morning TV show called “Downward Facing Dawn,” coaxing a reluctant nation into a regimen of yoga and yogurt.

And if the yoga pose pun weren't bad enough she spreads another delicate-tessan dollop.

He boosted the business of Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va., after he took Joe Biden there in a monster motorcade for lunch and ordered a cheeseburger with Dijon mustard (a spicy detail that amused Republicans).

The "mustard/amused" pair is particularly well played. However, it's not just Barack that brings the milkshake to the yard.

Michelle sometimes takes her staff on impromptu lunch trips to Five Guys or other burger and barbeque spots.

But it's not over yet. There is more consonance to come.

Yet maybe when Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer come next week to broadcast a special on health care from inside the White House, the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas.

Oh, snap! Oh, please! Or should I say oh, peas!

Pretty President

2009-06-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

Can The One Have Fun?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 9, 2009

Maureen Dowd has returned from her three-week sabbatical and she comes out swinging defending Obama from criticism over taking his wife out to dinner and a show. And she does it with plenty of Alliteration Alerts™:

With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?

And no good Maureen Dowd column is without a Movies With Maureen® moment:

I loved the “Pretty Woman” romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived an entitled life where he could afford such lavish gestures, throwing off his tie and whisking his wife, in a flirty black cocktail dress, to sip martinis in Manhattan, as Sasha hung over a White House balcony and called out goodbye.

You can almost hear the Roy Orbison in the background.

Another mandatory component of a Dowd column is the Crossword Puzzle Clue©:

[Richard] Wolffe limns what those of us who traveled with Obama could see: He was often grumpy on the campaign.

Choire at The Awl suspects that Maureen Dowd has been abducted and replaced with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani because 'limn' is Kakutani's signature style quirk. But Maureen has worked had to make it her own. She used it about a year ago during the campaign, again in context to Barack.

But even as the Republicans limn him as John Kerry, as someone who is too haughty and too “foreign,” Obama is determined not to repeat what Kerry thinks was a big mistake: not having enough money to compete against the Republicans in 2004.

But finally, like a Mortal Kombat character, Dowd has her finishing move. The Dowdversion® is such a powerful rhetorical device that it must be used sparingly. Here she uses it to tie together the criticism of Obama for his stylish escapades against W's briar patch abandonment of golfing.

Date on and tee it up, Mr. President. It’s O.K. if they’re teed off.

And with that Maureen proves that even after an extended absence she can still bring her A game.

He Says It Like It's A Bad Thing

2009-06-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

If you were a beleaguered New York Times columnist fighting off mean attacks after inadvertently borrowing the words of another writer (and they were borrowed because she gave them right back), what would be the best way to get back in the good graces of your base? If you answered "Get attacked by Karl Rove" you win the big prize at the pundit carnival booth.

In case you can't play video or if the sight of Satan-spawn Turd Blossom raises your blood pressure to emergency room levels, here is what he had to say:

I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for The New York Times who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for the conservative side of the aisle

He then tells of trying to buy her affections with flowers like she was a cheap whore. Sorry, you gotta do better than that. For Maureen, it's shoes or better to get in her good graces. Just ask Aaron Sorkin.

He then goes on to say:

I admire her writing, but she is a very nasty, snarky person.

And that is what we love about her.

Hat tip to Politico who beat nine million other links to my inbox.

Prickly City

2009-06-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

You know you have made it when you are a Scott Stantis punchline.

Maureen Mimics Marshall

2009-05-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

In what is the signature line of Maureen Dowd's column today, she actually took a stand and called for action. Many bloggers were taken aback by her rare advocacy of an actual position. But it seems Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made the same demand almost word for word on Thursday:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Maureen's version (with the differences in bold):

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

And the current online version:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Note that the handy little explanatory 'the Bush crowd' is now gone.

The Huffington Post has Dowd's denial of outright thievery, but it sure smells fishy:

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

So her defense is that she stole from a friend rather than from a blog. So in her mind, she's only a second hand plagiarist. Either that or she is from the Doris Kearns Goodwin School of Sloppy Notekeeping. I'd easier believe that she is incompetent than a thief.

The story was broken by thejoshuablogs, a TPM groupie (like I have room to cast stones) that points out the irony of Dowd's role in the Biden plagiarism scandal.

So far Editor and Publisher, Gawker, the nytpicker, and Shakesville have made note of the issue. By morning every blogger in the known universe shall have chimed in. We'll see how the Gray Lady handles the storm. Dowd has weathered kerfuffles before but this one seems particularly clear cut and egregious.

Dick Dastardly and His Amazing Torture Machine

2009-05-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Cheney, Master of Pain
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 16, 2009

Dick Cheney is so comprehensively evil that Maureen Dowd has run out of villains to compare him to and has resorted to Hannah-Barbara cartoons of the 1970s.

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.

And like the Snidlely Whiplash knock-off, Dick Dastardly Cheney has picked Nancy Pelosi to be his Penelope Pitstop. And like the lip-stick obsessed ingenue, Nancy engages in stereotypical female hopelessness.

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time.

And we get a truly dastardly Alliteration Alert™ out of it.

That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

And in a deeply veiled allusion we get our Movies With Maureen® Moment from the Harry Potter villains that doubles as a Dowdversion®.

The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.

And while Maureen is often slighted as being the dimmest bulb on the Times's Op-Ed Murderer's Row, she has clearly and unequivocally cut to the quick on what all this torture was about.

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Torture was never about saving American lives. It was about justifying Cheney's delusional paranoia. And that is truly dastardly.

Phantom Of The White House

2009-05-13T03:00:00.000-07:00

Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

Rogue Diva of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 12, 2009

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets a little carried away with her RudeNames® and epithets to the point of being too obscure. So here are the people she is really referring to in today's column.

Dick Cheney: Doomsday Dick, W.’s dark surrogate father

Rush Limbaugh: a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem

Colin Powell: a four-star general who spent his life serving his country

Sarah Palin: Rogue Diva (dethroned)

George W. Bush: W., Bush Junior

George Herbert Walker Bush: Bush 41, Poppy

Jeb Bush: the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother

In other Dowdisms, we get a Dowdversion™ (in addition to the sensible/scamp brother one above):

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up.

And the Crossword Clue© Of The Week means lacking maturity or childish.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

And in a major metaphor shift, Dubya has been accused at least three times of wrecking a symbolic car into either the globe, the global economy or diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf. Now we find that those weren't his hands on the wheel.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

And let's get this sneering face phantom off of his road show and back into his coffin.

Ready For Her Close-Up

2009-04-28T03:10:00.000-07:00

Slouching Towards Oblivion
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 25, 2009

Maureen Dowd continues her California vacation hunting for the perfect metaphor for the end of the newspaper industry. Being a fan of old movies, it only makes sense that she would stumble upon Sunset Boulevard, the classic Gloria Swanson movie about an aging star unwilling to adjust to the reality of a changing marketplace.

Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.
Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.

That paraphrase of the classic line gets hammered into metaphor one more time.

...old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.

With the Movies With Maureen® reference out of the way, she goes for the distance record for a Dowdversion™ compare/contrast. She starts with...

Journalists are still hot in Hollywood.

And an entire paragraph later sums up with...

But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill.

And to get that walking past the graveyard feeling she takes a newsroom tour with her Celebrity Quote of the week, Phil Bronstein, whose claim to fame is that his celebrity ex-wife tried to feed him to a reptile.

“This is called the Komodo Dragon Room, for obvious reasons,” he said dryly, referring to the time his ex-wife, Sharon Stone, gave him a meet-and-greet session with a Komodo dragon, who mistook his foot for a snack.

And what better metaphor could you ask for than for a denizen of the newsroom to be devoured by a dinosaur.

Road Tripping With Maureen

2009-04-22T03:28:00.000-07:00

While Dowd Central has been shuttered for Spring Break, Maureen Dowd has taken to traveling the highways and byways of this great nation hobnobbing with the common people like Silicon Valley billionaires to get her hand on the pulse of the nation, among other places. Let's catch up on the tour and see where she's been.

Striking It Poor
JAMESTOWN, Calif. (April 8)

Single Sentence Synopsis: Panning for gold is harder than digging for quotes.
Classic Dowdism: A Movies With Maureen® Moment as she goes all Fred C. Dobbs.

I’d seen “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the 1948 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. (“Badges? ... I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”) That movie was the best meditation on prospecting for gold, and falling prey to greed, ever done — until the Bernie Madoff story.

Cocktail Reference: Ramos gin fizzes and a lemon drop martini

Amazing Insight: Her foray into Kirsten Gum territory is a bust. Maureen's going to have to find another way to fund the 401(k)

Demi in Des Moines?
SAN FRANCISCO (April 12)

Single Sentence Summary: Ames is the new Castro Street

Classic Dowdism: With Iowa allowing gay marriage, Maureen makes with the Dowdversion™.

Now it’s flyover country that’s starting high-flying trends.

Celebrity Source: Max Mutchnick, the co-creator of “Will and Grace"

Cocktail Reference: “Vitamin V” vodka

Her Amazing Insight: Gay people are just like her. Single and envious.

Dinosaur at the Gate
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (April 15)

Single Sentence Summary: Google is destroying newspapers just in time to keep Maureen from retiring in luxury.

Classic Dowdism: A double Alliteration Alert™ over Google's gameplan.

Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.

Celebrity Source: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Cocktail Reference: Wheat-grass shots

Her Amazing Insight: The effort required to program a DowdBot is trivial, only nobody has bothered to do it yet.

The Aura of Arugulance
BERKELEY, Calif. (April 19)

Single Sentence Summary: Peace can be reached through peas.

Classic Dowdism: Quoting a coined word and making it her own.

[Alice Waters] says wryly: “I’m just put into that arugulance place..."

Celebrity Source: George Lucas (explaining that Dick Cheney is too evil to be Darth Vader, he's really the Emperor)

Her Amazing Insight: I don't know, but the column made me hungry.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet
SAN FRANCISCO (April 22)

Single Sentence Summary: Twittering is amazingly annoying, especially in column form.

Classic Dowdism: A formatting conceit that can be loosely described as clever. In this case, doing the interview in Twitter length questions and answers. Sample exchange:

ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?
BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?

Celebrity Source: Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter.

Amazing Insight: At ages 35 and 37, the Twitterers-In-Chief are prime cougar prey.

Taken individually, these recent columns can be seen as an innocent way to expense a trip to the Left Coast. But here at Dowd Central we sniff book deal research disguised as Friedman level reporting. Can Is Silicon Valley Necessary? be far behind?

She Said 'Hummer'

2009-04-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

No More Hummer Nation
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 31, 2009

Maureen Dowd has stumbled on a cute little portmanteau of a Crossword Clue complete with a definition she lifts straight from Wikipedia.

As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

Somehow this ties into Obama's Sunday night massacre of the former GM president. Rick Wagoner was clearly in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.

And later in the column:

Wagoner showed no foresight or willingness to curb an unhealthy appetite for the big. He failed to eliminate brands and launched the Hummer line in 2001.
{snip}
Wagoner stuck to gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.’s long after it was clear that higher gas prices meant he should vary the fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles.

So that they could sit around unsold when gas prices drop again. Anyone else see the fallacy here?

But it's not a Dowd column without at least one Movies With Maureen® moment.

I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.

And the mention of anything French sends Maureen's reptilian brain free-associating to her longstanding crush for Carla Bruni.

How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?

How many rhetorical questions can you fit in one column? At least two more.

How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?

How do you fill eight hundred words when your only news pegs are a trip to the G20 summit and a fired executive? You do a fashion report.

But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.

At least next week we will have Michelle's inappropriate hugging of the Queen to discuss.

photo from Mrs.O.org

Don't It Make Her Brown Eyes Blue

2009-03-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
-The Who "Behind Blue Eyes"

Blue-Eyed Greed?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 28, 2009

Maureen Dowd goes on a classic rock bender this week. The impetus is a third world dictator making some crypto-reverse-racist statements substituting eye color for skin tone.

At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain — who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots — [Brazilian president] Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.

The first classic rock allusion is just a hint at the Procul Harum signature tune.

As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.

She interrupts the flow to use her new favorite Crossword Clue® to again slap at the morals-free actions of AIG and their ilk.

And it is true, of course, that the upper-crust, underwhelming Anglo-Saxon leaders who allowed America’s financial markets to morph into louche casinos, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, were very, very white men with blue eyes.

And the blue eyes finally push her into typing out the tune cootie in her head.

As the Who sang: “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man behind blue eyes. No one knows what it’s like to be hated, to be fated to telling only lies.”

And being a little more free-associative than usual she rambles past Jesus and Barbie to land on her favorite interview and Hollywood crush.

The cerulean-eyed Paul Newman once wryly predicted his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

And it's been a while since Maureen's mother made a guest appearance with her words of wisdom. This time she comes up with a great maternal ugly duckling-beautiful swan aphorism.

I obsessed on it so much, cutting out a picture of a beautiful brown-eyed model and keeping it in my scrapbook, that my mother finally reassured me:
“You look at blue eyes. You look into brown eyes.”

And the memory of her Irish mom sends her right back to the classic rock apple crate for that Celtic crooner of the 70s.

Later, of course, there would be the thrill of Van Morrison serenading a “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Maureen ends the column with a wistful Alliteration Alert™ that is all peace, love and understanding.

With Michelle urging students to aim for A’s and the president promising to make school “cool,” brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners.

But she could just as well have used a different Who song:

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again

Bonfire of the Bailout

2009-03-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Click on the image to read the revised tagline.

Toxic R Us
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 21, 2009

Maureen Dowd's fury at the titans of industry that have wrecked the economy has not abated and she blames Barack Obama for not being tougher on them. We get a nice little Dowdversion® aimed at the robber barons.

Barack Obama prides himself on consensus, soothing warring sides into agreement. But the fury directed at the robber barons by the robbed blind in America has been getting hotter, not cooler.

And she places a share of the blame on Timothy Geithner for being too cozy with the Wall Street weasels.

And that’s because the president and his Treasury secretary have been coddling the Wall Street elite, fretting that if they curtail executives’ pay and perks too much, if they make the negotiations with those who siphoned our 401(k)’s too tough, the spoiled Sherman McCoys will run away, the rescue plan will fail and the markets will wither.

Sherman McCoy is the famously benighted and clueless hero of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities made into a bad, bad movie starring Tom Hanks. And as part of the Movies Wiht Maureen®, she takes from the film one of its catch phrases only substituting 'shafters' with 'masters'.

The shafters of the universe have been treated with such kid gloves that they remain obnoxiously oblivious.

Ending that line with an Alliteration Alert™. And she says Geithner is a little to sympathetic to said masters.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who grew up as a Republican and was head of the New York Fed for five years, sees things from the point of view of that wellspring of masters of the universe, Goldman Sachs.

In the bonuses, Maureen sees not only bad movies about the excess of greed, but also a fair amount of the theater of the absurd, citing its premiere writer.

Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance behemoth that had $59 billion in losses last year when the government was forced to take it over, and since has asked for $15 billion in taxpayer money, brazenly intends to give $1 million apiece in retention bonuses to four top executives, even though the word retention in a depression is pure Ionesco.

My guess is that her favorite play of his is La Lacune or maybe Frenzy for Two or More.

And it wouldn't be a decent Dowd rant on corporate excess without a Bling Report©:

Vikram “Pandit the Bandit” at Citigroup, which received $50 billion in bailout money, is pulling a Thain, spending $10 million to renovate his Park Avenue offices, complete with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and premium millwork (whatever that is).

While the grifters are remodeling in New York, the gardeners are planting an upscale vegetable patch at the White House.

It’s an image that could have come straight out of a McCain campaign ad: Barack Obama growing organic arugula at the White House.

But there was Michelle on Friday, the first day of spring, with a bunch of fifth graders, digging a veggie garden on the South Lawn.

Dowd says that perhaps Barack Obama needs the weapon Michelle is wielding.

The tableau of Michelle Obama hoisting a pitchfork on Friday with her sinewy arms and warning that the commander in chief would be commandeered into yard work left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.

I can hear the howls now that Maureen is again emasculating Obama. But until he plants some blame on the bonus babies, he is going to keep getting rolled. Maybe Maureen can talk Michelle into taking a break from gardening and marching pitchfork in hand on the masters of the bailout.

Darby O'Gall

2009-03-18T10:26:00.001-07:00

No Boiled Carrots
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 17, 2009

Like a good Irish lass, Maureen took St. Paddy’s Day off, but it was a working holiday for her as she covered Obama’s latest address on the financial bail-outs.

On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

Gawker notes that the Moneygall pun was used in her Irish Times interview, but in these tough economic times, who can blame her for a little recycling. She continues with the Blarney theme with an extended leprechaun metaphor.

But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well.

And she digs into her well of quaint sayings from the Old Sod to quote her Irish dad:

[Obama] should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”

Now there is a mental image for the ages. Normally, this is a carrot and stick metaphor, but the executive excesses have got her blood boiling. And while other columnists are content to brandish pitchforks, Maureen has the oxcarts rolling up to the guillotine.

He’s got to lop off some heads.
{snip}
Mr. Obama belatedly tried to stop the tumbrels that began rolling toward the Potomac after Larry Summers went on Sunday talk shows to assert that there was nothing the administration could do about the blood-sucking insurance monstrosity’s venal payout.

Summers, who inspires lusty dreams of A.I.G. tormentor Eliot Spitzer, asserted that the government “cannot just abrogate” contracts with financial vampires.

All this blood sucking and carrots makes be think of Bunnicula.

What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”

Which rolls right into the combo Alliteration Alert™ and Crossword Clue® since 'louche' not only fits well with London but also means 'immoral'. One thing this crisis is doing, it’s making Maureen dig deeper into her thesaurus than ever. She's as mad as hell and she's willing to make the March Madness metaphor to prove it.

[Obama's] lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards.

And there is nothing a righteous financial fury to make Dowd get her Irish up.

Maureen The Irish Rose

2009-03-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

In honor of St Patricks Day, Maureen Dowd gave an interview with her sister to the Irish Times website. She also unearthed this photo of her at the age of two that appeared in the Washington Post. What a cute shamrock on her dress.

In the article, she talks about the Irish lad that got away:

Somewhere in Australia there's an Irish lad called Rowan McCormick who broke Maureen Dowd's heart. When she went back in the early 1970s to visit her homestead in County Clare, hard by the majestic Cliffs of Moher, she met him and fell madly in love.

{snip}

Sadly, like most summer romances, Dowd’s didn’t work out, and her beau departed for Australia. But when she was Down Under a few years back on a book tour she put out an all points bulletin and he came running.

Alas, he was married now and settled down. Dowd still sounds disappointed.

The Dowd patriarch nearly didn't make it to America from Ireland:

Michael from Clare was the son of a poor farmer in a poor country, the second child in the family named Michael after the first died. He was booked on the Titanic in 1914, but his mother cried all night and he couldn’t leave her.

Once in America, her dad became a cop that hung around a neighborhood bar (no Irish stereotypes at work there) where he found love:

The cop and the barkeep's daughter were both champion Irish step dancers. In 1934 they married; the age difference was 18 years. They raised five kids together – Maureen, the youngest, Michael, Martin, Kevin and Peggy.

From her mother's side, angry politics runs in Maureen's blood:

Her mother was an Irish rebel. In the 1970s Peggy Dowd led a demonstration at the British Embassy after Bloody Sunday when 14 were shot by British forces in Derry. To her eternal satisfaction the then British ambassador had to sneak in through the underground garage.

A tradition she carries on:

The old Irish rebel still lives on in the daughter. Mike Quill, the great union leader and 1920s IRA activist, is alleged to have told the immigration man letting him into America that, “if there’s a government here I’m against it.” Sometimes it seems Maureen feels that way too.

Ain't that the truth. So on this Saint Paddy's Day, raise a pint and toast "Maureen Go Bragh!"

Danziger Does Michelle

2009-03-15T03:23:00.000-07:00

This syndicated cartoon by Jeff Danziger is dated March 12 and appeared online and in the Washington Post yesterday:

It looks familiar. Where have I seen it before? Oh, yeah. On the March 8 post of this very blog:

Great minds think alike.

All About Douthat

2009-03-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd took the day off, but that doesn't mean there wasn't news coming from the Gray Lady's Op/Ed page. In a stunning and daring upheaval of the existing paradigm, the Times has replaced a conservative Harvard grad with, wait for it, a conservative Harvard grad. While hardly anyone will argue that anybody brighter than J. Fred Muggs would be an improvement over the lazy and tired scribblings of Kristol Meth, some vetting of Douthat needs to be done. Lets see how he matches up.

Bill Kristol	Ross Douthat
Harvard '73	Harvard '02
The Weekly Standard	The Atlantic
The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (with Lawrence F. Kaplan)	Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
"[Obama's] selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff suggests that Obama’s not going to be mindlessly leftist."	"Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue."

All I can say is that Bill Kristol had a rock-solid reputation about never getting anything right. And for the new blogger on the right, those are tough shoes to fill. Someone as young as Douthat is a blank slate still. At just barely over half of Maureen Dowd's age, this baby-faced newcomer could be around for a long time.

The Right To Bare Arms

2009-03-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

Should Michelle Cover Up?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 7, 2009

Maureen Dowd apologizes up front for stealing stablemate Thomas Friedman's schtick.

Journalists are never supposed to start a piece with a scene in a taxi because it signals either laziness about gathering facts or a tendency to embroider facts.

Nonetheless, I’m going to. David Brooks and I were sharing a cab to the British Embassy the other day to meet with Gordon Brown.

And that kicks off a special All-Crossword-Clue© edition of her column (many of the definitions today are courtesy of Merriam-Webster Online). She starts out with what could be a Movies With Maureen®, but since she was just on Broadway to catch Will Farrell's one-man skewering of W., it it probably more a tribute to the current Angela Lansbury/Rupert Everett stage production since it's unlikely that Gordon Brown was really blithe in the sense of "lacking due thought or consideration."

The dour prime minister was a blithe spirit despite a mutinous British press corps that was whingeing about the president snubbing the prime minister.

Whinge being Dowd's favorite form of "complaining fretfully"

The press also conjured paranoia that the president’s “Lady MacBeth” had been behind the clipped treatment because, as James Delingpole snipped in a Telegraph blog, “Her broad-brush view of history associates Brits with the wicked white global hegemony responsible for the slave trade.”

Since the villainess of The Scottish Play is in quotes, that means Maureen is referring to James Delingpole quoting an American talk show host.

I discovered that Obama's judgment is pretty dreadful - but this? My favourite theory so far - suggested by presenter Greg Garrison - was that it was a move calculated to please his Lady Macbeth.

Delingpole also let go the great word "hegemony" which infers a certain level of economic or cultural imperialism. But a different British columnist saw Michelle in a different light.

The British tabloids carped that, while Sarah Brown gave the Obama girls Top Shop dresses and necklaces, a “solipsistic” Michelle merely gave the Brown boys models of Marine One.

The person calling Michelle "egocentric or self-centered" is Sarah Vine of THE Times who had this to say:

Short of giving the boys Action Man models of her own husband smiting the evil forces of neoconservatism, Mrs Obama’s gesture could not have been more solipsistic or more inherently dismissive of Mrs Brown.

But Maureen doesn't blame Michelle for the paltriness of the parting gifts.

(Step it up, Desirée).

Maureen's rebuke on the chintziness of the Obamas is aimed at East Wing social secretary Desirée Rogers.

And Maureen's extensive (if occasionally faulty) Austen expertise allows her to trot out a literary allusion personifying Wall Street as "a silly flighty person."

As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America’s macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her “poor nerves.”

And what would think of Maureen's vocabulary if she didn't trot out her very favorite word for "concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious."

Wall Street is weak and jittery, rejecting the vague and laconic courtship of Timothy Geithner.

But back to the taxi-cab and the real point of the column. She quotes David Brooks (who shows a surprising familiarity with body-building vernacular) as inferring that Michelle needs to be more decorous in her dress.

In the taxi, when I asked David Brooks about her amazing arms, he indicated it was time for her to cover up. “She’s made her point,” he said. “Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning.”

This allows Dowd to channel fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan and give some fashion reporting.

David was not smitten by the V-neck, sleeveless eggplant dress Michelle wore at her husband’s address to Congress — the one that caused one Republican congressman to whisper to another, “Babe.”

She continues to quote Brooks getting increasingly cattier.

He said the policy crowd here would consider the dress ostentatious. “Washington is sensually avoidant. The wonks here like brains. She should not be known for her physical presence, for one body part.” David brought up the Obamas’ obsession with their workouts. “Sometimes I think half the reason Obama ran for president is so Michelle would have a platform to show off her biceps.”

And Brooks is not the only one obsessed with shoulder skin.

I’d seen the plaint echoed elsewhere. “Someone should tell Michelle to mix up her wardrobe and cover up from time to time,” Sandra McElwaine wrote last week on The Daily Beast.

But Maureen comes to Michelle's rescue.

I love the designer-to-J. Crew glamour. Combined with her workaday visits to soup kitchens, inner-city schools and meetings with military families, Michelle’s flare is our depression’s answer to Ginger Rogers gliding around in feathers and lamé.

The Ginger Rogers call-out subtly evokes Ann Richards famous feminist quote.

After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.

But Maureen also has in mind an even more famous icon that rolled up her sleeves, get the job done, Rosie The Riviter whose Can Do attitude lead the US out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II.

Her arms, and her complete confidence in her skin, are a reminder that Americans can do anything if they put their minds to it.

Maureen sees no dichotomy between brains and brawn.

Michelle has soared every day, expanding the job to show us what can be accomplished by a generous spirit, a confident nature and a well-disciplined body.

I also have no doubt she can talk cap-and-trade with ease and panache.

And with a certain "dash or flamboyance in style and action", she ends our Sunday vocabulary lesson on a high note.