BlogWatch: Steaming Piles

Launching vitrolic verbal volleys at Maureen Dowd is a bit of an cottage industry, but the greatest act of invective I have seen in a while comes from Melissa McEwen at Shakesville who rants thus:

Echidne pointed me to the latest steaming turd pile dropped on the pages of the Times by Maureen Dowd in place of an actual piece of journalism. In today's plopper, she wonders "Deign or Reign?" and cobbles together a jumbled mélange of folksy anecdote, selective quoting, and indiscriminate smears, held together with her usual adhesive of smug judgment and crazy, to arrive at the gobsmackingly insipid rhetorical: "Will Queen Hillary reign? Will Prince Barack deign? And who is owed more?"

And the best part is that she nailed the column. She uses Dowd’s whining about “entitlement” to springboard a discussion of other candidates that have felt they were owed a nomination only to get shot down in flames in the general election. She returns to Dowd's column to sum up:

In fact, I will assert she does know that, but has chosen to ignore it in order to make "Deign or Reign?" work. Not just the pithy title, but the entire churlish concept, wrapped around the idea that Clinton and Obama believe they are owed something they are not. Dowd has delivered the talking point for every "progressive" bigot who doesn't like the idea of some uppity bitch and uppity negro thinking they're fit to run the country. It's not their failure to be white men that leaves the bad taste in the mouth; it's just their sense of entitlement, you see.

Sure, good liberals like Dowd support equality. Just as long as no one actually wants to use it or anything.

Particularly harsh since Maureen has been writing Obama mash notes for quite some time while ignoring Haircut Edwards as much as possible.

No slouch when it comes to DowdBashing, Echidne’s critique of Maureen’s Iowa handicapping was how content-free it was:

It may be interesting, especially if you live inside the Beltway and live your life in those little social circles, but it offers nothing about how Clinton and Obama would govern, what their policies are and which of them (or of the other candidates) would be best for a particular voter. I know that some think we live in a post-modern era, but maybe we could at least deconstruct the candidates' policies instead of their private lives or the gossips about their characters?

McEwan’s diatribe inspired a lot of me-tooism, including the Carpetbagger Report and Lawyers, Gun$, and Money, but there was at least one dissenting opinion. Bat One of Say Anything had this to say:

Whenever I run across the name Maureen Dowd, I invariably think of my other favorite Fred’s brilliant column in which he describes Dowd as “the professional spinster of the New York Times”, and her writing as “… the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry.”

But like the proverbial blind squirrel, even Dowd can occasionally stumble across something worth holding on to. Occasionally.

[snip]

If the NYT’s signature liberal feminist finds the Clintons and the Obama’s tiresome in their arrogance and their presumptuousness, I can’t help wondering if even the average Democrat voter isn’t getting a bit bored and apathetic too.

Thanks for the kind words. I think.