Saturday, May 17, 2008

BlogWatch: New York State Of Mind

After a long dry spell, the more vociferous DowdHaters® in the blogosphere have turned their attention back to the redheaded one. Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire feels that Dowd is too safely esconed in The Establishment to speak for the great unwashed:

Of all Maureen's poses, the ones where she attempts to capture The Spirit of the Heartland© are perhaps the most annoying. Face it, Maureen: you're a Feng Shui-living Manhattanite with 100 pairs of shoes and the best dye job your inexplicably large paycheck can buy, which is to say: still a dye job. You have no secret window into the souls of West Virginians to determine why they vote as they do, and should not pretend to.
Molly does get one little fact in her diatribe wrong: Maureen is a Feng Shui-living Georgetowner, raised and educated in the District of Columbia. And I have no idea how many shoes she has. If she's like any woman, it's too many but I'm not sure how that affects her judgment adversely.

Digby of Hullabaloo is even more indignant:

"Bitter Hillary," "Fast Barry," "diffident debutante" --- this is what the Village dinner parties are tittering about these days. The old hag, the new fag, the same old shit.

And by Village, I assume he means Greenwich Village as if Maureen is some trust-funded hipster. While Maureen is part of the media elite, it seems everybody expects her to be living in New York. Digby goes on:
Dowd always says she's speaking truth to power. Not so. She speaks truthiness to power and doesn't even know the difference.
I guess if it fits your argument, it's better to put Dowd at Village dinner parties in Manhattan to make your point. That adds to the truthiness of the outrage.

1 comment:

Rob Wolfe said...

slight corrections ...

Digby is a she and "The Village" is a fairly common term that she (and others) commonly uses for Washington, more specifically in discussing those Villagers such as David Broder, MoDo and other DC insiders that specialise in pretending that they understand "ordinary americans" despite being gruesomely well off.

BTW, how close to Mission Statement Accomplished are you now?