Maureen Dowd's speech at Harvard last week is now available on the web. She presents the Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics. The complete archive of that event is available here in streaming Real Player, Windows Media video, mp3, or Quicktime audio. The archive is of the entire event and runs over an hour and includes the presentation of Dana Priest with the third annual David Nyhan prize for political journalism.
A long winded introduction by fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Jones delays Dowd's entrance until over 24 minutes into the event. Maureen looked stunning, of course, in a sleeveless Little Black Dress with her Harvard crimson hair falling in her eyes like a nervous goth girl giving a valedictorian speech. She opens self-deprecatingly in her inimitable whine calling herself a sniper and a kibbitzer, "someone who gives unwanted advice at a card game. Perfect."
She milks her Schlesinger review by repeating some biting comments about Harvard and quotes extensively from him throughout the speech. Other political and pop cultural call-outs include Marie Osmond, Michael Kinsley, Bush I, Stephen Colbert, Iago, Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Harriet Miers, Jeff Gannon, Ellen Degeneres and others.
The speech is also peppered with classic bon mots and epithets familiar to her readers and her admirers. Watch and listen.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Dowd Speech Online
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1 comment:
Jeff Gannon's GoogleAlert for his name must be as good as mine is for Maureen Dowd. The comment above is a repost of his latest blog entry.
The Maureen Dowd speech I linked to was taped before the FEMA phony press conference scandal broke and Dowd does not make the connection he is defending himself against.
Dowd was recalling an earlier incident where she had angered the Bush Administration enough that her White House press badge had been taken away, but Jeff Gannon was still getting day passes to press conferences. She points out that Jeff Gannon was later unmasked as a gay male prostitute. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It just shows where NYT columnists rank in the White House pecking order.
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