Blog Watch: TEAM Report

Say what you want about MoDo, people have firm opinions about here. How about a round up of recent calm rational assessments of her talent:

Geoffrey Kruse-Safford calls her “the ridiculously vapid Maureen Dowd”

Chuckling offers the more nuanced assessment:

Although it’s true that so many of [Dowd's] columns are superficial and harmful to progressive politics, she is a sharp, funny writer and her quips, like the one above, can be quite entertaining and sometimes illustrate the truth of the matter.

Jennifer Hunter of the Chicago Sun-Times has an opinion more to our liking:

Dowd trashes every one, Democrat or Republican, with acuity and enviable style.

Finally, Guy Rundle, of Uppsala, Sweden, in a letter to the International Herald Tribune (the European arm of the NYT empire) takes her to task for occupational prejudice:

Maureen Dowd did such a good job excoriating both Mahmoud Ahmedinajad's record and his self-defeating critics on the right that one could almost forgive her for the elitist slight that the Iranian president has a Ph.D. in "traffic studies."

Well, what of it? Quite aside from the fact that political leadership is open to anyone, why should the well-established profession of traffic engineer be such a ridiculous profession? Given that it focuses on the management of complex public systems, it is just possible that it might make someone a better candidate for higher office than, say, a New York-based freelance writer?

I predict the formation of a group called TEAM – Traffic Engineers Against MoDo.