Pardon Her French

Simply the Worst
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 12, 2011

While the rest of world was fixating on the revolution in Egypt and its ramifications, Maureen Dowd was amortizing her purchase of Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs. About the unrepentant former Defense Secretary, she had this to say:

As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award.

Running that French phrase through the astoundingly incompetent Babelfish translator gets the English abomination of "I regret nothing not." Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun takes issue with her lack of translation talent saying:

If Maureen Dowd is going to use French in her column on Rumsfeld, you would think she could consult with somebody who knows the language, or at least Google the Edith Piaf song.

To which he links to the famous Edith Piaf song.



This is not the first time Dowd has alluded to the French chanteuse's oeuvre. Back in 2008, she referenced "les imbeciles de regime cowboy" (pidgen French for 'idiot cowboy administration') when she said:

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Note that the phrase is used slightly differently then. Suitably pedantically, The Iconoclast at the New English Review diagrams the error:

It was the first month, or possibly first week, of first-year Freshman French. For her howler today -- "Je Ne Regret Rien Pas" -- was wrong in not one but several different ways. It was wrong as to the spelling of the verb, and even more embarrassingly wrong with the pleonasm of the negation: no "pas" is necesary, and the verb regretter requires a first-person singular "regrette" -- so that if she were writing correct French, the line attributed to the man she condescedingly calls "Rummy" would read "Je ne regrette rien."

Somewhere there is a French teacher at Catholic University hanging her head in shame while Edith Piaf spins in her grave.

Who Needs A Cigarette?

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 27, 2008

Maureen and Barack are getting pretty chummy on the campaign trail. After a particularly chummy press conference with French president Sarkozy she asked about the post-coital bliss:

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

The scene was so steamy that Maureen began filming it in her head:

It could have been a French movie.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.

Maureen never passes up a chance to show off some French. In this case, “cinq à sept” literally means “five to seven” and refers to the time for informal socializing in France. And “tant pis” has the connotation of wistful regret. And this leads us to a special Franco-American Movies With Maureen®.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

Claude Lelouch is the famous French director of Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) which explains the politirotic allusion between the two leaders. The second feature on the bill is suggest by Barack himself as he recounts how he got stalked in the hotel gym.

In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”

Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”

The original article by the blonde reporter and her picture can be found on the Bild website. The money quote is:

I put my arm around his hip – wow, he didn’t even sweat! WHAT A MAN!

But it was a different woman that Obama, or at least his staff, missed out on meeting. And we know that Maureen has a crush on the French First Chanteuse as well.

[Obama] did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

For one column there sure is a lot of sweating and heavy breathing in this Obama-Sarkozy-Bruni-Dowd lovefest. Perhaps if and when Barack is a head of state he can arrange a more formal ménage à tête à tête. Because that sure would make an interesting French movie.

Crushing On Carla

Note: Some photos in this post may not be work-safe.

The Carla Effect
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 22, 2008

Maureen Dowd is back from her Euro-Junket with George and she returns with a crush on the wife of prominent politician. No, not Michelle, Laura, Cindy, or even Bill, but Carla Bruni. Maureen fauns over the French vixen that has won the heart (among other organs) of Nicolas Sarkozy. This is a story too good to just let words paint, so we bring a special illustrated edition of Dowd Report today.

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” to sweeten her image.

Carla Bruni was a model who posed for many “tasteful” nude pictures before becoming First Madame. When you do a GoogleImages search for Carla Bruni with SafeSearch off, it's harder to find pictures of her with her clothes on than off. Trust me on this. The photo below recently sold at auction for $91,000 dollars to a Japanese horndog collector.


One of Carla’s album covers where she is fully clothed, but just as sultry (and a little bit chilly):

And this is all in contrast to the rather tame fist-bumping Michelle does with the cacklers on Baba Wawa’s estrogen-laden talk-fest where bloggers get their undies in a wad because the potential First Lady likes to wear clothes sans sleeves.

Or if Michelle gave an interview, as Carla did in a new book, “La Véritable Histoire de Carla et Nicolas,” revealing that she fell in love with her husband for his many fertile brains.

One chapter of the book is called “Le Diable s’Habille en Carla,” or “The Devil Wears Carla.” And the most repeated anecdote is the one where Carla slyly teases the French justice minister, Rachida Dati, a Sarko protégé, as they pass by a bed in the Élysée: “You would have loved to occupy it, wouldn’t you?”

Rachida Dati (left) and Carla in formal wear.

According to British tabloid Telegraph, the incident is meant as a dig at the rather glamorous Dati for not being able to close the deal with Nicolas while Carla snuck in and snatched the brass ring, er, wedding band.

At the funeral of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, Sarkozy got some catcalls when he got out of his car, while Carla, a former model for the designer, who calls herself “nothing more than a folk singer,” got applause and oohs and aahs.

The applause and gasps may be more for her rather daring choice of formal mourning wear that does not seem to include underwear.


As far as folk singer goes, she does like to strum the guitar even if her lyrics are more Kurt Cobain than Edith Piaf.

It’s hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child”; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white. .../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.”

Carla, sensing the potential explosiveness of the songs has declined to tour until her hubby is out of office.

The magazine Le Point had a cover with Carla’s gleaming face and the headline “La Présidente,” with a picture inside of Sarko standing docilely behind his wife, as she sat at his desk and offered that assured feline gaze to the camera.

Alas, my navigation skilz for the French language magazine web archives were not l33t enough to find the feline gaze picture mentioned, so the cover picture will have to do.

Just as Carla charmed the Queen of England and Princes Charles and Philip with her demure French schoolgirl look, she charmed George and Laura Bush on their visit, inviting Laura 30 minutes early for a girls’ tête-à-tête, and then sitting next to the American president and keeping him entertained with a spirited conversation in English, one of her three languages and sort of his one language.

The barely pregnant Carla wowed the Royal Family on their recent visit.

At a press availability the next day, W. interrupted his own boring observation about “the importance of the Doha Round” to smilingly tell his pal Sarko: “It was a great pleasure to have been able to meet your wife. She’s a really smart, capable woman, and I can see why you married her. And I can see why she married you, too.”

Phony caption: “Come on Nikki, can’t we just swap for one night?
Those librarians can surprise you.”

No matter what Dubya thinks, Carla sure has had an effect on Maureen. She seems smitten with this sexually and politically liberated wife of a world leader. As Maureen states:

The French are different from you and me.

And as the French say: Vive la Différence!

Cowboy Diplomacy

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

-Kris Kristofferson

W. Regrets Almost Nothing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 15, 2008

George Bush went to France and Maureen Dowd got to tag along. I hope it goes better for her than their trip to Saudi Arabia did. Today’s column has a Paris dateline so she must be there. W is making a greatest hits tour of Europe, but it’s not exactly selling out to packed houses.

A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV.

President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty.

Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.)

The Dowdversion on the song made famous by Janis Joplin also recalls its cowboy poet author, Kris Kristofferson. And speaking of cowboys, for this piece Maureen breaks out all sorts of cowboy metaphors.

He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.

We are going to ignore the Movies With Maureen® potential of “blazing hostility” and go on to the faux French which loosely translates as “idiot cowboy administration.” Maureen dips into her nun-taught French one more time to use a phrase which means “No regrets.”

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Alluding to the Edith Piaf classic "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is triply ironic because the song has its roots in French Foreign Legion lore as France tried vainly to hang onto its empire. From Wikipedia:

Piaf dedicated her recording of the song to the French Foreign Legion. At the time of the recording, France was engaged in a military conflict, the Algerian War (1956–1962), and the 1er R E P (Premier Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes, First Regiment Foreign Paratroopers) — who had backed a temporary putsch by the French military against the civilian leadership of Algeria—adopted the song when their resistance was broken in April 1961.

Dowd claims that Dubya is trying to play on France’s sympathies as one failed imperial power to another:

He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.

The parallels between France and the US in Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere would seem to be a cautionary tale that Dubya is deaf to, but Maureen sees a deeper drama happening.

In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem. The actions were the problem. W. was really anxious for war. He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.

Because his dad failed to march to Baghdad, Bush the Younger is determined to stick by his own course of action.

A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered. “I will never do that to them,” 43 said.

Sounds like Oedipal déjà vu all over again.

And Greek tragedies, even when translated into French and set in the Old West, never end well.

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.

Eye Of The Tiger

Rocky: I can't do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can't beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin' around, thinkin'. I mean, who am I kiddin'? I ain't even in the guy's league.
-Rocky (1976)

The Hillary Waltz
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 2, 2008

Movies With Maureen® has become like shooting fish in a barrel with Hillary Clinton running around comparing herself to Sylvester Stallone. Someone should point out to her that Rocky Balboa the punch-drunk boxer lost in the first movie. With movies out of the way, Maureen Dowd resorts to middlebrow opera call-outs:

Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

The opera synopsis includes yet another French lesson that doubles as a hidden movie reference to Dangerous Liasons, either the Roger Vadim or Glenn Close version. We also get The Hillary Waltz which is a sequel to the Nepotism Tango. Maureen does like those old fashioned dance steps. Back in November, she pointed out how Condi let Rummy "waltz away with the occupation". And Dubya and Dad are in an "Oedipal tango."

With the obligatory pop culture references out of the way, she can get on with the main agenda, cataloging Hillary’s faux pas and emasculating the nominee apparent. Time to pull out the pink highlighter once again as Maureen goes for the feminine adverbs and adjectives.

His strenuous and inadvertently hilarious efforts to woo working-class folk in Pennsylvania have only made him seem more effete. Keeping his tie firmly in place, he genteelly sipped his pint of Yuengling beer.

We last heard effete on March 9th as Dowd equated Obama with other unmasculine Democratic losers:

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

But before that, the "e-word" was leveled against John Edwards a year ago in her “Running With Scissors” hatchet job on the Breck Girl.

In presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to put the man into manicure. Be sensitive, but not soft. Effete is never effective.

Dowd is also well known for her obsession with Barack’s attempts to maintain his girlish figure:

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

But Dowd can’t stay away from the boxing metaphor and makes this assertion:

Winning has no margin of error, as the Democrats should have learned by now. And the winner gets to decide his or her running mate.

But the ultimate favor Hillary can do for the Illinois freshman is to fight him full-out until the finale and then gracefully release him so he can find happiness with another.

And then, just like the The Cavalier of the Rose, he can move on to the general election by waltzing or skipping or "imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around." But he might want to buy some boxing gloves instead of dancing shoes when he tangles with the Fruitbat in a Dinner Jacket:

Hillary’s work is done only when she is done, because the best way for Obama to prove he’s ready to stare down Ahmadinejad is by putting away someone even tougher.

When the Iranian Anti-Semite in Chief is considered a cakewalk compared to Hillary, that makes her one tough sparring partner.

Magic Man

When I was much younger, The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie. I just loved imagining myself being there with Dorothy and being part of that great adventure she had.

-Facebook: Hillary Clinton

Surrender Already, Dorothy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 30, 2008

Every now and then Maureen Dowd likes to throw in a little Third Year French just to keep us on our toes. Todays lesson en Francois is:

Pas si vite, mon vieux.

Which roughly translates as “Not so fast, old man.” It was said in response to this:

Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a strong supporter of the United States, recently observed that President Bush has done such a number on our image in the world that no one will be able to restore the luster.

“I think the magic is over,” he said.

Maureen thinks there is someone with some fairy dust that can save us:

It’s all about the magic, really.

And whether we can take a flier on this skinny guy with the strange name and braided ancestry to help us get it back.

There is a type of stock character in the movies that Spike Lee calls the "super-duper magical negro.” This is the wise, noble African American that tells the hero where he has gone wrong and what he needs to do to get right with the universe. Think Sydney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. Think Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance. Think Morgan Freeman in about anything. In the 2008 Democratic primary it is Barack Obama.

Of course, there is good magic and there are the Dark Arts, the type that Hillary practices:

Many voters decided last week to stick with Obama despite his less-than-convincing explanations about the Rev. Wright — even as many soured on Hillary, casting her as Lady Voldemort.

And the comparison to the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz just comes too easy when Hillary serves up softballs like this:

Hillary sunnily riposted that she likes long movies. Her favorite as a girl was “The Wizard of Oz,” so surely she spots the “Surrender Dorothy” sign in the sky and the bad portent of the ladies of “The View” burbling to Obama about how sexy he is.

And given Maureen’s poor memory about “Surrender Dorothy” signs, maybe she needs to stay away from Oz references.

But Maureen thinks Obama is the Knight in Shining Armor that will save us from the Clintons reseating themselves on the throne:

Obama, like the preternaturally gifted young heroes in mythical tales, is still learning to channel his force. He can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?

And maybe we can get Denzel Washington to play him in the movie version. That would be magical.

Photo Credit: Todays illustration comes courtesy of Iowa Presidential Watch PAC, which posted it December 14, 2007. Clearly it takes more to get rid of Senator Clinton than merely throwing a bucket of water on her.

C'est Moi

Savior or Saboteur?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 23, 2007

C'est moi! C'est moi!
I'm forced to admit
'Tis I, I humbly reply
That mortal who
These marvels can do
C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I
I've never lost
In battle or game
I'm simply the best by far

-Alan Jay Lerner
and Frederick Loewe

Maureen Dowd returns to what she does best, Billary bashing. She claims to be reluctant to draw from this well again.

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Methinks she protests too much, since he does it with such relish and gusto. Her thesis is that the Clintons symbiotically thrive on crisis.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline.

She identifies Hillary’s biggest weakness as the person without whom she would never even be considered a candidate, Slick Willie. Bill of course has a different opinion.

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

With the “C’est moi!” interjection, Dowd is not implying that Bill thinks he is the Sun King. Instead, she is comparing him to the very arrogant Lancelot from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, which provided the central metaphor of a much older Democratic dynasty.



In this case, history is repeating itself not as tragedy, but as “endless soap opera”.

And Billary bashing brings out the best in in Maureen’s alliterative alacrity:

Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt.

He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well.

And in that line, Dowd gives Bill a new moniker. In 1992, he flopped in Iowa only to show promise (but not winning) in New Hampshire. He dubbed himself the Comeback Kid. Now as the Boy That Can’t Help Himself, he is the loose cannon prone to friendly fire. Not only can’t he help himself, he will end up hurting Hillary and sinking her hopes for higher office.

French Letters

Hillary la Française, Cherchez la Femme?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 31, 2007

“Cherchez la Femme” is a French phrase roughly meaning that behind any odd behavior or other problem, you can usually find a woman involved if you look hard enough. The Phrase Finder website explains its origin:

The expression was coined by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le Monte-Cristo, 1857:

"Vous connaissez sa maxime, lorsqu'il veut découvrir un secret quelconque: cherchez la femme; dans ce cas la femme n'a pas été difficile à trouver."
(You know his maxim, when he wants to discover an unspecified secrecy: seek the woman; in this case the woman was not difficult to find.)

The phrase was adopted into English use and crossed the Atlantic by 1909. It was well enough known there by that date for O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) to use it as the title of a story - Cherchez La Femme, which includes this line:

"Ah! yes, I know most time when those men lose money you say 'Cherchez la femme' - there is somewhere the woman."

Maureen Dowd compares Hillary Clinton with the ex-wife of the current French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Cécilia Sarkozy got divorced over the philandering ways of her husband. Hillary got elected Senator.

Cécilia Sarkozy acts so American, while Hillary Clinton acts so French.
Cécilia at one point left her marriage to go to New York and seek love American-style, while Hillary lost the public love in the ’90s when she tried French-style health care reform.

Love American Style was a television comedy anthology show that featured the trials and tribulations of romance in the sexually liberated 1970s. While estranged from her husband, Cécilia and her then-lover briefly lived in New York. According the French Embassy website, the French health care system is a single-payer universal coverage system financed by a combination of payroll deductions and sin taxes. It is very similar to the system Hillary Clinton’s health care commission proposed during the first term of her husband’s presidency.

Dowd then plays up Hillary’s campaign strategy of appealing to women by trying to soften her harsh image.

She returns to Wellesley tomorrow to launch Hillblazers, a bid to attract young Hillarys to the campaign. She will be back in the setting of her 1969 feminist triumph as the commencement speaker who described her class’s desire for a “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living” and who spoke truth to power, chastising Edward Brooke for being out of touch.

The Edward Brooke incident was a watershed event in Hillary Clinton’s life as it gave her her very first national exposure. The details have been described in many places, but most recently in the October 21st edition of the International Herald Tribune, which is the European edition of the New York Times. Good to see Dowd keeps up with the house organs.

On May 31, 1969, [Clinton] gave the student commencement speech. She was preceded at the dais by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, who spoke that day against "coercive protest." Rodham later wrote she waited in vain for any mention of the pain and soul-searching of the time — Vietnam, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the podium, she peered out through thick glasses and said: "Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."

The speech was a sensation. She was featured in Life magazine.

Dowd says that Hillary’s strategy of appealing to every possible microgroup is at odds with her former tough talking ways.

Hillary doesn’t speak truth to power any more. Now that Mark Penn believes women can carry her to victory, Hillary speaks girlfriend to girlfriend.

Mark Penn is the author and Clinton strategist that Dowd wrote about recently. To round out the First Ladies Club, Dowd quotes Argentinean President-elect Fernández de Kirchner:

“And why not?,” former first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said about Hillary yesterday. “Another woman wouldn’t be bad.”

After an extensive quote from an Atlantic article on Clinton by Caitlin Flanagan, Dowd points out a telling detail:

Ms. Flanagan … was particularly bothered by Hillary’s callousness in dumping Socks, the beloved White House cat and best-selling author, on Bill’s former secretary Betty Currie.

Not only is Hillary wrong for not dumping Bill on the curb, she’s a bad pet owner too. But Dowd sees Senator Clinton’s toughness as her strength:

Few are concerned that Hillary is strong enough for the job. She is cold-eyed about wanting power and raising money and turning everything about her life into a commodity. Yet, the characteristics that are somewhat troubling are the same ones that convincingly show she will do what it takes to beat Obama and Rudy. She will not be soft or vulnerable. She will not melt in a crisis.

And to drive home the point about who the real man in the campaign is, Dowd goes back to the {verb}-up phrase she has become enamored with and emasculated Obama once more just for old time’s sake.

And, unlike Obama, she doesn’t need to talk herself into manning up. Obama whiffed in the debate last night when Brian Williams and Tim Russert teed up the first question for him to take on Hillary — something the debate dominatrix never would have done.

And with the final alliteration, we see who really wears the pants suits in the campaign. Hillary is a strong-willed political opportunist that stayed with her philandering husband just for political gain, and those are her good points.