Hillary The Killer Rabbit

That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent
you ever set eyes on!

-Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 11, 2008

As the entire world, including lagging indicator the Time magazine, declares Barack Obama the de facto Democratic candidate, Maureen Dowd moves on to the next phase: picking a running mate. One possibility would be Hillary Clinton. The thought of that makes Maureen rabid.

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

Dowd wonders if Hillary wants to be thrown in that briarpatch.

But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting? (Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn’t she be, in Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?

The flaw in the Trojan Rabbit plan was that the Knights of the Roundtable forgot to hide in the rabbit.

BEDEVERE: Well, now, uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I, uh, wait until nightfall, and then leap out of the rabbit, taking the French, uh, by surprise. Not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!

Monty Python also features the killer rabbit that is a cute little bunny with a ferocious temper.

Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

Barack is still the Golden One, which is a promotion from Golden Child. Earlier in the column, Dowd had made a veiled Basic Instinct call-out:

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Proving once again that there is no political situation that can’t be compared to an old movie, today’s feature Movies With Maureen® is Pat and Mike.

It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in “Pat and Mike.”

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, “You are the wrong jockey for this chick.”

“You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,” he says, later adding, “When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?”

Dowd is saying that Hillary would knock Obama off his game.

The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He’s no good around her, see?

The best advice for Obama would be to meet any overtures from the Clinton campaign with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Then, count to three. No more. No less.

The Scorpion's Nature

"But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable! It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty."

"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."

-Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

Butterflies Aren’t Free
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 7, 2008

I’d been worried about Maureen Dowd. The stress of the campaign seems to have interrupted her Movies With Maureen® marathon, but returning to form, we have Vivien Leigh night. Maureen compares Hillary to Vivien Leigh with her tenacity to do anything to get a role.

In his memoir, the legendary Elia Kazan wrote about directing Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” While he did not think that Leigh was a great natural actress, he was impressed that she would crawl through glass to get the role right.

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right.

But Blanche DuBois from A Steetcar Named Desire just doesn’t seem Clintonesque enough to Dowd, so she goes back to the Vivien Leigh costume drama she has used on more than one occasion, Gone With The Wind:

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. “Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,” Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver.

And just to prove that she can, Maureen comes up with yet another baffling metaphor. While the column title evokes the Goldie Hawn romantic comedy, Butterflies Are Free, the real source for the column title is this inane comparison:

The Democratic race has been a scorpion and a butterfly in a bottle. Hillary tore Barry’s wings off, and so psyched him out with her silly goading — “Enough about the speeches and the big rallies!” she cried — that he gave up his magical trump cards.

The more famous tale of a scorpion is about the frog and a scorpion crossing a river (as told here by Luis Aguilar Leon):

A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs.

``Don't be scared,'' the scorpion says. ``If something happens to you, I'll drown.''

Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river.

Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, ``How could you -- you know that you'll drown?''

``It's my nature,'' gasps the sinking scorpion.

In this better example, Clinton is the scorpion that will sting Obama and force them both to drown just because that is what she does.

The more familiar Dowd themes get touched on just to keep them current. We have a reference to Obama refusing food:

Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter.

Which also included the Crossword Clue Or The Week® for 'diaphanous' which is evocative of butterflies and gauzy flightiness. While not completely efeminizing Barack, it will do.

Maureen Dowd is no darling of Media Matters, the left wing Truth Squad and enforcer of political correctness. They have been on her for daring to call Clinton a vampire (here’s my take on that column and a typically rabid Media Matters over-reaction). She seems to be daring them to come after her for quoting an Indiana voter that thinks Barack is Muslim.

In a restaurant in Greenwood on Tuesday, Obama approached an older white guy who waved him off, muttering afterwards to a reporter: “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Dowd does nothing to dispel the obvious misimpression this voter has. And really that sort of mistake is beyond correction. It is a Big Lie spread among rabid right-wingers that has taken hold in the zeitgeist. I’m just waiting for the accusations that Dowd is a foot soldier and dupe for the McCain campaign for observing that the meme is out there. Hand-wringing liberal outrage in four, three, two, wait for it…

Knocking Dowd for pointing out the weaknesses of Democratic candidates is a fool's game. It's her nature to do so, no matter who ends up drowning. Just like the scorpion.

Dowd Defends The Funny

The Harvard Review printed an interview with Maureen Dowd that presumably took place when she was in Cambridge giving a speech back in October. I've heard of long lead times, but really. In it she professes her well documented love for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

Well, I watch the Colbert Report and the Daily Show more than I watch the nightly news. And I really think the alarm about that is silly, because I think if you watch Colbert and Stewart, you learn a lot.

Plus you can talk them into writing columns for you. She thinks humor has a place in political discourse.

When I first started my columns, Michael Kinsley and Bill Safire said to me, “You have to stop doing humor columns because you’ll be seen as too girly.” And I said I would never take humor out of politics. I think it’s a fantastic way to tell the truth, but to take a fresh angle that can lure people in and tell them something true. And I grew up loving Johnathan Swift and Evelyn Wong, and I think we can use humor and satire to get at the truth and a larger and different audience.

And by "Evelyn Wong", she (or the under-educated transcriber) means Bennett Cerf.

But I'm not expecting her to drop into the comments section of this blog anytime soon. While recent columns display a dazzling skill with Google and YouTube, she professes to be technologically ignorant.

I’m not very technological. Someone gave me an iPod a year ago but I’ve only just learned how to turn it on. And I don’t blog or anything but I think journalism is about the story or the narrative.

But she doesn't dismiss the power of blogs:

It doesn’t matter to me what the delivery system is. The more, the better, the more populist, the better, the more people engaged, the better, but in the end, it’s about the story and about human nature.

And who should now more about human nature than her.

Beer With Obama

George Stubbs. Horse Attacked by a Lion. From Olga's Gallery.

This Bud’s for You
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 4, 2008

In her amazingly clever scheme to beto expense all her bar bills, Maureen Dowd still on her Vice City tour of the Democratic primary has tracked Obama to a VFW hall straight out of an episode of The Honeymooner’s or All In The Family depending on your age and reference point.

Bleeding white voters in North Carolina and Indiana, the Illinois senator headed Thursday evening to V.F.W. Post 1954 in North Liberty, Ind., consisting of a bar, a pool table, a Coors Light clock and a couple of dozen curious white guys.

Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.

As the campaign reaches the Groundhog’s Day state of déjà vu with it’s endless cycle of predicting, exit-polling, and pontificating, Dowd herself is getting trapped in a self-referential loop of repeated motifs. “Assimilate” was used in the Wright Rampage earlier this week and “delicate” refers back to one of the more feminizing lines Dowd scripted back on January 30:

But Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.

Which fits in well with Maureen’s perception of the Clinton Stategy Du Jour:

Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.

It seems that Hillary’s Obama Bashers are late to the party, but what they lack in delicacy they are making up in gusto. Dowd hunts down three examples to make her point:

Cherry-bombing the word “pansy” into the discourse, Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina said Hillary made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”

James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”

I think Dowd is just jealous with admiration. This long slogging campaign has nearly run her dry of metaphors and she is resorting to obscure pieces of artwork:

The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.

While Lioness of Cappaqua and The Chicago Gazelle would make good Rude Names®, they lack a certain panache. And the lion in the Stubbs painting is really attacking a horse, but Dowd changes that to a gazelle because gazelle are skinny and hop around too much and look like Bambi. And while this passage may seem a little phoned in, she then writes what may be her most brilliant paragraph ever:

Then came the Big Dog, crazy like a fox, for the coup de graceless. Campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., he said that his scrappy wife can win working-class voters, as compared with Obama’s Viognier-and-Volvo set.

I called Maureen’s April 23rd outing The Perfect Column, but this is the Perfect Paragraph. For starters, we have not one, but three, Alliteration Alerts®. And Viogner-and-Volvo deserves special attention. I had to go to Wikipedia to discover how pitch perfect the word was:

Viognier is a white wine grape. It is the only permitted grape for the French wine Condrieu in the Rhone valley.

In addition to it’s allusion to pretentious effete wine-swilling liberals, there is something magical about the Big Dog/Crazy Fox/coup de graceless run that is poetry. And when Maureen gets on a roll, she just can’t help recalling Big Bill’s decade old indiscretion, apropos of nothing:

Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity. And don’t you love this paean to rules coming from a man so tethered and humbled by rules that he invented an entirely new sexual etiquette to suit his needs in the Oval Office?

She doesn’t stop at Bill, she lays into Hillary as well (no surprise there) and even her beloved Poppy Bush.

In reality, as first lady, Hillary was renowned for her upstairs-downstairs tussles in the White House, and her high-handed treatment of the little people in the travel office, on the switchboard and on the residence staff.

Yet George H. W. Bush’s attempts to paint over his patrician style with a cowboy veneer was a silly sort of masquerade, obviously engineered by Lee Atwater, who brought the props of pork rinds and country music.

All of this is in service of some theme that Obama should be allowed to be his high-brow self and not have to pander to all the hicks and yokels that actually vote. She even reruns previous Crossword Clue Of The Week® “ensorcel” to get her point across:

Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile.

That smile is definitely ensorcelling Maureen as she positively drools over the tux-clad handsome politico with the movie star looks. I couldn't find any GoogleImages of Obama in a tuxedo, so I think that is a figment of Maureen's fevered imagination:

It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.

There are plenty of pictures of the Hawaiian-born, Chicago-raised candidate in a cowboy hat, so the corny photo-op part rings true. But that is not the real him, whoever that is.

It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.

I think Maureen has hit upon a new campaign theme that Obama needs to roll out:

To Good To Have To Campaign.

Angry Young Man

I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am. That's what I believe. That's what this campaign has been about.

Yesterday, we saw a very different vision of America. I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday.

And the fact that Rev. Wright would think that somehow it was appropriate to command the stage, for three or four consecutive days, in the midst of this major debate, is something that not only makes me angry but also saddens me.

-Barack Obama, April 28, 2008

Praying and Preying
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 30, 2008

Maureen Dowd has been searching for a new moniker for Obama for a while. Obambi (which she stole from John Kass) is getting a little stale. She tried Golden Child for a bit, but now with Barack making a clean break from Reverend Wright she has a new Rude Name®. Let’s see if we can figure it out:

Barack Obama has spent his life, and campaign, trying not to be the Angry Black Man.

On Tuesday, the Sort Of Angry Black Man appeared, reluctantly spurred into action by The Really Angry Black Man.

Dowd notices that despite, or because of, his anger, the latent nicotine need is still there:

Speaking to reporters in the heart of tobacco country in Winston-Salem, N.C., the poor guy looked as if he were dying for a smoke. “When I say I find these comments appalling, I mean it,” Obama said. “It contradicts everything I am about and who I am.”

Dowd says that having to distance himself from the controversial preacher is difficult because since he was raised in a white household, Wright was his touchstone to African American culture:

At Trinity, he may have ignored what he should have heard because he was trying to assimilate to black culture. Now, he may be outraged by what he belatedly heard because he’s trying to relate to the white lunch-pail set.

Having been deserted at age 2 by his father, Obama has now been deserted by the father-figure in his church, the man who inspired him to become a Christian, married him, dedicated his house, baptized his children, gave him the title of his second book and theme for his presidential run and worked on his campaign.

That book was titled The Audacity Of Hope and was taken from Wright’s signature speech “The Audacity To Hope.” At least the good reverend got the preposition right. The more grammatically correct title would have been The Audaciousness Of Hope. (Audacilious?) You would think a Harvard-trained lawyer would know better.

This was all in response to Reverend Wright’s barnstorming tour over the weekend. Dowd says this was motivated by anger of his own:

He was certainly sore at Obama, after helping him get connected in Chicago politics, for distancing himself. But he was also clearly envious that Obama has been hailed by his flock as the halo-wearing Redeemer of America’s hope.

And I use that quote just so that I can recycle my halo photoshop.

Dowd makes at least one old school reference to one of Bill Clinton’s many campaign kerfuffles as well as Hillary Clinton's claim that she is fully vetted, a prediction that is starting to carry some weight.

Tuesday was more than a Sister Souljah moment; it was a painful form of political patricide. “I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency,” Obama said.

In a campaign that’s all about who’s vetted, maybe he should have.

Sister Souljah, a Clinton supporter way back in 1992 had said:

If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?

Her defenders said the quote was taken out of context. But like many of Reverend Wright’s more inflammatory statements, it’s hard to think of a context where it isn’t offensive.

But if Maureen was really as down with the hip-hop scene as she pretends to be, she would have renamed it a Sister Souljah Boy Tell ‘Em Moment. Crank that.

This Week With Maureen

Maureen Dowd was a member of The Roundtable on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos". The full video segment is available here.

When asked about Obama on the campaign trail, she mashed up some recent columns and said:

It was very painful watching [Obama] carbo-loading all the time. This week in Indiana he was reduced to saying that he really does like pot roast and jello and pleading with the reporters that he's not a GQ cover. I think that that basically when he had that cris de cour(sp?) about "Why can't you just let me eat my waffles?", he was saying "Why can't I just be President?" or maybe "Why can't I be ex-President?" and get rid of the pesky reporters and Hillary and everyone.

On Bill Clinton's contribution to the campaign, she says:

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that in the suburbs where [Bill Clinton] worked really hard, [Hillary] got a larger margin of the vote. So even though he was the first politician in history to play the Caucasian Card {Stephanopoulos chuckles}, some Democrats think he is really hurting her, there is some proof otherwise.

And back to Hillary:

That's the power of Hillary Clinton. That even though rationally we think that she can't possible make it mathematically, irrationally we keep saying "How is she going to make it?" I think she has done real damage in turning him from incandescent to ineffectual. She has repainted him as Bambi.

About McCain trying to distance himself from 527 groups running ads featuring the speeches of Reverend Wright:

Having been beaten that way by Dubya in 2000, a very painful way for him, I don't think he's going to to do that again. He does want the best of both worlds. There was a story in the Washington Times about how he can't get control of his party again. On the other hand, I think this is good for him the more Wright is on TV.

She was looser and more forthcoming during the Green Room segment. Asked if McCain is doing a good job getting the message out about the economy.

John McCain is not doing a good job and I don't think Barack Obama is either. He should have had a great economic speech ready to go in that last week in Pennsylvania. And he should have had a great patriotic speech ready to go also. He had one he was working on and delayed it after the San Francisco "bitter" comments. He thought it would seem to opportunistic to do it so soon, but he shouldn't have. His campaign is very static and stale on the economy.

It should just be an organic part of what he is talking about. He has a real problem relating to lower class people. Somebody said after the bitter thing, a Pennsylvania voter said, he makes us feel like we just fell off the apple cart.

On if the campaign is fun:

Well, I'm having more fun than Obama.He finds it so painful. And I'm carbo-loading. I had two cheesesteaks to do a taste comparison between the two places. He gave away his french fries. But you try to make it look fun.

Asked for suggestions, she said, "Get rid of that hi-def."

The Green Room handler said, "But you look great."

She replied, "We'll see. My hand was shaking according to Matt. It was sheer terror."

Matt then confessed that it was just a ploy to hold her hand. And who could blame him?

Disclaimer: The transcription is my own and has been editted for clarity and continuity. Any errors are mine alone.

For a backstage look at the production of the show read this blog entry by Dowd Report contributor yellojkt.

High School Bites

Desperately Seeking Street Cred
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 27, 2008

Maureen Dowd is frequently accused of treating politics like high school. But she is even more in tune with the teen set than we realized. She is up on all the reading trends:

Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there’s something eerie going on in this race.

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?

While it would seem that teenage vampire chick lit would be a rather narrow niche, it’s a real one and full of title like Dangerous Girls, Midnight Predator, and Uninvited, all of which would make great campaign bio titles.

In Maureen Dowd’s high school, Obama is the fashion conscious Gossip Girl that smokes too much and eats too little.

He looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road.

Barack will continue to be tagged with the label of the kid who doesn’t clean his plate despite his protests:

He dutifully enthused about carbs, assuring reporters that when he had dinner as a child with his Kansas grandparents, the food “would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana. A lot of pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

It doesn’t play very plausible. On the other hand, Hillary has no qualms about eating on the road:

The Nixonian Hillary has a ravenous hunger that Obama lacks. Literally — at a birthday party in Philly for her photographer, she was devouring the chips and dip with two hands — and viscerally.

“Ravenous”, “devouring” and “viscerally” would all be great words for a teenage vampire chick lit book. And the invocation of an undead Republican is not an isolated incident. Dowd also name checks another blood-sucking ghoul from the GOP:

Even some Obama fans find Hillary’s toughness and shameless shape-shifting compelling. Having lost the White House twice to brass-knuckled pols, the Dems may be drawn to a woman who thinks like Karl Rove.

But Obama is not without his mystical charms. He is also the sports star who is magic on the court, if not in the lanes.

He tried to recapture the magic — and erase the bowling debacle — by shooting hoops with kids in Kokomo on Friday night.

We have a nice underplayed Alliteration Alert® with "kids in Kokomo" and we milk the sports metaphor for one more paragraph:

As a basketball player, he should know he’s in overtime in his race with Hillary — and overtime is not the period to indulge in whining.

Which leads us to a new feature (h/t to Grace Nearing), the Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week®:

But then he resumed wry whingeing about his 37 bowling score, explaining that he finished only seven frames, including two that “were bowled by a 10-year-old” and another by a 3-year-old.

From American Heritage Dictionary Online:

Whinge: Chiefly British To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.

Once again, Dowd searches through her thesaurus to find just the perfect word and nails it. “Annoying” and “persistent” complaining hits just the right note. And Obama’s defense of his bowling skilz would be more plausible if there weren’t Dukakis-riding-a-tank quality video of the event.

The endings of recent Dowd columns have been a little soft because so much in this campaign is still unsettled. She does finally tie the search for street cred into the Madonna-tinged titular Movies With Maureen®. Here she sums up ambiguously:

“I don’t want to go out of my way to sort of prove my street cred as a down-to-earth guy,” he said, after going out of his way. “People know me.”

Not yet, but we will, one of these years.

Is Dowd predicting plenty of Barack for the next four years or is she saying it will take that long to find the true colors of this street-wise Harvard lawyer? Whatever the answer, we will have Maureen on hand to keep a handle on the state of his life forces and aura (and let's not even touch precious bodily fluids). And to keep us update on supernatural chick lit trends.