Liz Cheney: Desist!
By MAUREEN DOWD
March 6, 2012
Maureen Dowd has some harsh words for Mitt Romney about a recent warmongering speech, but here is her real beef:
“I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door,” he said as if he were playing Risk. Not afraid to employ “military might” (or alarming alliteration),Be careful, Mitt. Maureen is working that side of the street. Remember what she did to Clinton. Don't make her pull her Pulitzer out on you.
Tension on the Tarmac
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 28, 2012
Our Miss Maureen loves her some alliteration, starting right from the titillating title. Some days she tries to fit in as many fanciful phrases as she can. She starts by waxing nostalgic for the days when Clintons were campaigning.
But No Drama Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.But it's not until the middle of the missive that she really builds up a head of steam. Check out these cheeky chestnuts:
Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.
But Hillary did not like it, feeling she was being held in place and patronized, even “manhandled,” as her aide put it to a reporter.Having rehashed a Hillary Clinton anecdote, Dowd turns to the newer tempestuous contretemps at an airport, the one with Arizona governor Jan Brewer.
The toxic dominatrix of illegal immigration, the woman who turned every Latino in her state into a suspect, was flustered and gesticulating at the president as he put his hand on her arm to chill her out.Culminating in this colorful collage:
After his brouhaha with Brewer, dubbed “the dust-up in the desert,” he became a hero to the Hispanics he had gone West to court. They loved seeing their Cruella de Vil get dressed down.Try saying any of those phrases three times fast. But it doesn't end there. The going is just getting good.
Everything is breaking Barry’s way, as Mitt and Newt rip into each other in vicious ads and debates like alligators going after house pets.
Romney was tutored in Florida by Brett O’Donnell, a new debate coach. Too bad he can’t find a conviction coach.The alliterative lilt is perhaps the most underestimated of Dowd's rhetorical reaches, but when she strikes her stride, nobody can hold a candle to her cadence.
O’Donnell manned up Mittens and taught him how to pummel Newt in “moments of strength,” as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls them.
Bye Bye, Mubarak
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 1, 2011
Which of these three tongue twisters from today's column would be hardest to say three times fast?
The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies...or
...stanch the uncontrolled surge...or
...the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers.
Cleopatra’s Egypt was modern in ancient times and Mubarak’s was ancient in modern times.Maureen, you maniacal maven, we missed you.
Hold the Fries
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 16, 2009
When Maureen Dowd is feeling particularly playful she deploys her debatably daring Alliteration Alerts™. Count the ones in this paragraph.
It was easy to imagine a scenario where the president and his body man, Reggie Love, would have their own early-morning TV show called “Downward Facing Dawn,” coaxing a reluctant nation into a regimen of yoga and yogurt.And if the yoga pose pun weren't bad enough she spreads another delicate-tessan dollop.
He boosted the business of Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va., after he took Joe Biden there in a monster motorcade for lunch and ordered a cheeseburger with Dijon mustard (a spicy detail that amused Republicans).The "mustard/amused" pair is particularly well played. However, it's not just Barack that brings the milkshake to the yard.
Michelle sometimes takes her staff on impromptu lunch trips to Five Guys or other burger and barbeque spots.But it's not over yet. There is more consonance to come.
Yet maybe when Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer come next week to broadcast a special on health care from inside the White House, the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas.Oh, snap! Oh, please! Or should I say oh, peas!
The Long, Lame Goodbye
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 17, 2009
The most lethal weapon in Maureen Dowd’s arsenal is the Dowdversion™ where two parallel phrases are used to create an ironic comparison often using a pun or play on words. Because they are so powerful she rarely uses more than one or two in a column. For her final column with Dubya still in office, she has pulled out all the stops starting with the very first two paragraphs.
As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.That’s actually a very long example. Most Dowdversions are only a single sentence, like this one:
As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.
W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence.Another compare/contrast example is here:
The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.And just so the difference between the two isn’t missed she shows it again:
W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.That last one ends with another Dowd trademark, what we here at Dowd Central call the Alliteration Alert® and the column is chock full of them as well. She then even quotes Bush in his own Dowdversion.
“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”And here she strings two alliterations together:
When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.Then, like a Bach fugue, she plays off the “cocky” and calls back the twist of a Dowdversion:
That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton.
One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.And Maureen even uses a Dowdversion to deploy one of her other famous tactics, the silly Rude Name®, although in this case, her new sobriquet for Obama is much more respectful than the retired Obambi.
Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener.And the following is perhaps one of the most complicated Dowdversions ever spotted. Follow it carefully. It is a large Dowdversion with a smaller one nested within it that includes two intertwined alliterations. This is the quadruple axel of Dowdversions.
If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.It’s just breathtaking to see a master linguist at work. Her cunning wordplay just cuts to the quick.
We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.And that is the beauty of a well-played Dowdversion. It doesn’t have to make any sound sense, it just has to sound sensitive.
Boxers, Briefs or Silks?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 11, 2008
Sarah Palin is the best thing to happen to Maureen Dowd’s sense of sarcasm since Monica Lewinsky snapped her thong in front of Big Dog Bill Clinton who deigned to answer the original version of the titular question. The sartorial scandal caused by Palin purloining GOP party dresses is garment gold. Just listen to the Alliteration Alert™ alarm as she executes a rare intertwined fusillade of funny phonics.
The snippy McCain snipers once loved Palin’s sassy ability to burn Barack Obama and Joe Biden with snide little remarks.Palin is sending Dowd to new heights of invective. Maureen has made the My Fair Lady analogy three times in as many months, but she has now given it an extra sting by spinning it into a Rude Name®.
Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told The Associated Press over the weekend that his daughter was “frantically” trying to sort out the clothes she got as Eliza Knowlittle so she could send them back.And the mention of unmentionables just drives Dowd delirious.
“You know,” Heath said, “the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.”
The campaign was charged for silk boxers, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry the designer duds, Shear reported, adding that one source said, “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance” in October. Silk boxers and custom-designed underpinnings? Sounds like Sarah and Todd were treating the vice presidential run as a second honeymoon.
And keeping with the undergarments theme, she concludes with a giggle about girdles.Palin should follow her own reformer precedent and put the borrowed underpinnings on eBay. The windfall would undergird her new presidential bid.Talk about establishing a firm foundation. Someone needs to tell Palin not to get her panties in knot if she expects to have a run at the presidency rather than just get one in her stockings.
A Makeover With an Ugly Gloss
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 26, 2008
Anyone thinking Maureen Dowd wouldn’t go off on the reports of Sarah Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree was sadly mistaken.
Politico broke the news that the Republican National Committee spent over $150,000 on a “Pretty Woman”-style shopping spree for Palin, including about $75,000 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and St. Louis.But the Julia Roberts "hooker with a heart of gold and credit card of platinum" movie isn’t the only Movies With Maureen® we get. She also returns to the My Fair Lady motif she mined back in the “My Fair Veep” column.
Instead, with the economy cratering and the McCain campaign running on an “average Joe” theme, dunderheaded aides, led by the former Bushies Nicolle Wallace and Tracey Schmitt, costumed their Eliza Doolittle for a ball when she should have been dressing for a bailout.And it seems the Cockney flower girl make-over metaphor went as far as actually hiring Sarah a diction coach to make sure "the snow in Juneau falls mainly on the moose."
In The New York Times Magazine today, Robert Draper reveals that the campaign also hired a former New York stage and screen actress, Priscilla Shanks, to be her voice coach for the convention. The expense was listed in finance reports as Operating Expenditures and Get-Out-The-Vote consulting. Apparently getting out the vote includes teaching a potential vice president the correct way to pronounce “nuclear.”And just to drum in the Palin-as-plaything point, Maureen extends the Barbie metaphor to breaking.
McCain advisers have been scathing about the “sexism” of critics who dismiss Sarah Palin as Caribou Barbie.Dowd also deploys a pretty clever Dowdversion™ stealing VH1's "Best Week Ever" upgrade/downgrade bit.
How odd then, to learn that McCain advisers have been treating their own vice presidential candidate like Valentino Barbie, dressing her up in fancy clothes and endlessly playing with her hair.
The sartorial upgrade was bound to turn into a strategy downgrade, as Palin pressed her case as a homespun gal who was ever so much more American than the elite, foreignish Obama, while she was gussied up in Italian couture.And some nice Alliteration Alerts® are buried in this line:
The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers:To drive home the “let them eat cake” hypocrisy of the candidates, Dowd enumerates the convention night couture on parade.
The McCains own 13 cars, eight homes and access to a corporate jet, and Cindy had her Marie Antoinette moment at the convention.
Vanity Fair calculated that her outfit cost $300,000, with three-carat diamond earrings worth $280,000, an Oscar de la Renta dress valued at $3,000, a Chanel white ceramic watch clocking in at $4,500 and a four-strand pearl necklace worth between $11,000 and $25,000. While presenting herself as an I’m-just-like-you hockey mom frugal enough to put the Alaska state plane up for sale on eBay, Palin made her big speech at the convention wearing a $2,500 cream silk Valentino jacket that the McCain staff had gotten her at Saks.Maureen also pays Palin two rather left-handed compliments:
She is so naturally good-looking, there is no need to gild the Last Frontier lily.At the end of the column, Maureen makes a suspicious presidential succession assumption.
{snip}
As a former beauty pageant contestant and sports anchor on TV, Palin already seemed on top of her grooming before the McCain campaign made her traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi, the highest-paid individual on the campaign for the first two weeks of October.
The conservative big shots who have not deserted Palin and still think she can be Reagan in a Valentino skirt are furious at those who have mishandled the governor and dimmed her star power. They mourn that she may have to wait now until 2016 to get rid of the phony stench of designer populism.This scenario seems to assume that if the McCain/Palin ticket would win that McCain wouldn’t survive two full terms. Hoping for that sort of tragic upgrade is too much for even a Cinderella-in-go-go-boots to hope for.
Makeovers are every woman’s dream. But this makeover has simply pushed back Palin’s dream of being president.
Hey, in some parts of the universe, maybe not in contempo-casual, but in some parts, it's considered cool to know what's going on in the world.Sarah’s Pompom Palaver-Clueless
I had hoped I was finally done with acting as an interpreter for politicians whose relationship with the English language was tumultuous.And then Maureen builds up a head of steam with a rich rash of Alliteration Alerts®.
There’s W.’s gummy grammar, of course, like the classic, “Is our children learning?”That last one alluding to that bridge that leads the same place. And she winds down with a triple Lindy.
Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch.
Sarah’s running against the Democrat’s highfalutin eloquence by speakin’ in homespun haikus.
Did Joe Biden have to rhetorically rush over to Home Depot before Sarah could once more brandish “a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there brought to Washington, D.C.?”
With her pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism, Palin can bridge contradictory ideas that lead nowhere…
Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.”But Dowd also attacks Palin’s speaking style or lack therof.
She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”Palin also has a strange habit of insisting that “impact” is a noun, and a plural one at that.
Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loathe to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”Dowd calls these folksy-isms for the faux frontierism that they are:
As Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.”And behind Palin’s aural abuses are, like totally, VapidVille as Dowd invokes the Movies With Maureen® pick with the title that sums up Palin’s grasp of the big issues.
Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last Frontier.
At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)This all-out assault on Sarah is severe and sustained. Most of all, Dowd hits on the central mis-aligned metaphor of the self-styled mavericks.
Palin, by contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True mavericks don’t brand themselves.If you have to call yourself a maverick, you aren’t one. Plus, mavericks aren’t known for being team players.
My Fair Veep
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 9, 2008
The Sarah Palin nomination has opened new horizons for Maureen Dowd and her weekly Movies With Maureen® column. Last week the Alaskan Gov was Miss Congeniality (and isn’t that movie just Pygmalion with Benjamin Bratt and beauty pageants?); this week it’s the Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn classic My Fair Lady.
I hope John McCain doesn’t throw his slippers at Sarah Palin’s head or get as acerbic as Henry Higgins did with Eliza Doolittle when she did not learn quickly enough. McCain’s Pygmalion has to be careful, because his Galatea might be armed with more than a sharp tongue.And just to be a little highbrow and show off her way around Bullfinch’s, she throws out the Greek mythological inspirations. I’m not sure why Geraldine Ferraro doesn’t count (not as inexperienced or young perhaps), but Dowd sees this nomination and the subsequent crash candidacy class as historic.
For the first time in American history, we have a “My Fair Lady” moment, as teams of experts bustle around the most famous woman in politics, intensely coaching her for her big moment at the ball — her first unscripted interview here this week with ABC News’s Charlie Gibson.Then Dowd delightfully mixes up a barnyard metaphor.
She’s already shown that she can shoot the pig, put lipstick on it, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.This one sentence works on three levels. Palin compared herself to a hunting hockey mom that's a pit bull with lipstick. The popular phrase “put some lipstick on that pig” means to try to hide something ugly with a little window dressing. And finally, the "bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan" is from the proto-feminist anthem (and Enjoli commercial) “I’m A Woman.” Maureen managed to use every part of that metaphor except the squeal.
McCain vetters, who are belatedly doing their job checking to see if Palin is a qualified White House contender and doing their best to shut down Troopergate and assembling a “truth squad” posse of Palinistas to rebut any criticism and push back any prying reporters; and journalists — from Sydney to Washington — who are here to draw back the curtain on the shiny reformer image that the McCain camp has conjured for their political ingénue and see what’s behind it.And just in case My Fair Lady isn’t enough, she throws in a Wizard of Oz call out.
Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants and a ban on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian?While the abortion and Harry Potter bit combines her extreme pro-life position and her clumsy attempt to censor the local library, I have no idea where the trans-fat call-out comes from. There must have been some obscure quote I missed, or it could just be a metaphor taken too far. And the book burning is a good piece of witchy Alliteration Alert®.
Does she talk in tongues or just eat caribou tongues?But back to the Eliza Doolittle metaphor, the tale of an older cynical man taking a young lady under his wing always backfires because once the woman is on her own, she eclipses her mentor in the public eye. Or, to look at it another way, in the film version, Audrey Hepburns singing was dubbed in by another actress. Who is pulling the strings on this made for the media manufactured maverick? Let the show begin.
Two Against The One
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 19, 2008
We haven’t had a good fictional conservation from Maureen since the end of May when Barrack was vetting Bill. Today, Dowd’s tortured paranoid imagination takes us to a secret Senate causcusing closet where McCain and Hillary are prematurely celebrating the defeat of Obama.
They grin at each other as they lift their celebratory shots of brutally cold Stolichnaya.Vodka being a long-standing Dowd shorthand for the chumminess between the two senators. Here at Dowd Report we dissected the Dowd obsession with drinking here, but the original appearance of the Estonain shot contest was back in October of 2006.
“Oh, John, you know I love you and I’m happy to help,” Hillary says. “The themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity, when we’re rich celebrities, too. Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card — that one always cracks me up. And accusing the media, especially NBC, of playing favorites. It’s easy to get the stupid press to navel-gaze; they’re so insecure.”The article in The Atlantic that detailed strategies the Clinton campaign considered but rejected as being against the pale might as well have been placed on the RNC doorstep wrapped in a bow. It’s no coincidence that these came out in a way that made Hillary look high-minded for not using them while at the same time placing the attacks in the public sphere.
“I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.”And just in fairness, a brief reference to McCain’s shoewear is meant to show that he is not genuine populist, but a rich guy with better taste in pumps than Maureen.
“…My gals know when I say ‘We may have started on two separate paths but we’re on one journey now’ that Skinny’s journey is to the nearest exit.”
“…While he’s up on his high-minded pedestal, you’ll scoot past him in your Ferragamos.”Maureen also goes back to themes that she has mined. Compare the following part of this week’s column with a column from 2007:
Looking pleased, Hillary expertly downs another shot. “His secret fear is being seen as a dumb blonde,” she says. “He wants to take a short cut to the top and pose on glossy magazine covers, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a glib pretty boy.”Here was Obama being discussed over a year ago:
For some of us, it’s hard to fathom being upset at getting accused of looking great in a bathing suit. But his friends say it played into this Harvard grad’s fear of being seen as “a dumb blond.” He has been known to privately mock “pretty boys” (read John Edwards, the Breck Girl of 2004).It seems FictionalClinton reads OldDowd.
McCain lifts his glass to her admiringly. “If I do say so myself, while the rookie was surfing in Hawaii, I ate his pupus for lunch. Pictures of him pushing around a golf ball while I’m pushing around Putin. Priceless.”Let’s look at that in slow motion. Depending on how you count “pupus”, there are seven p-words in there, a rarely achieved level of alliteration. Then you have the “pushing golf balls/pushing Putin” parallelism. And finally “Priceless” evokes tired Mastercard commercial memories. Dowd is clearly going for the Gold in purple prose. But like any good diver, Dowd also adds one final twist to wow the judges:
There’s a knock on the door. Jesse Jackson sticks his head into the meeting.The non-too-subtle message here is that both erstwhile presidential candidates, the senator from New York and Jesse Jackson, are not to be considered allies of Obama. This column is the most explicit example yet of Dowd advancing what is the Subtle Sabotage Strategy™: Hillary Clinton is running her own 2012 campaign independent of and in opposition to Obama.
Yes, She Can
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 12, 2008
Nothing gets Maureen Dowd’s dander up more than an attempt by the Clintons to remain in the spotlight as long as possible. It got her excited enough to fit not one, but two, Rude Names® into a single paragraph.
You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.And she gets bonus points for sneaking in a reference to Barack’s weight or lack thereof.
Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.And the Royalty Theme® is also alluded to in this quasi-quote:
Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.
She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”All of this is Cassandra Dowd raising the cry (as the column title implies) that Hillary is engaging the Subliminal Sabotage Strategy to submarine the Obama candidacy to clear the way for a future run.
Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.In support of this, Dowd references a YouTube video (found via the Sweetness and Light blog) where Hillary is disingenuously pandering to her PUMA (Party Unity, My Ass) patrons.
In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.Dowd is on such a roll that she even outsources her Alliteration Alerts™. The first comes from the Hillary -hijacked portions of the party platform:
Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.”And the second comes from The Atlantic dissecting the mismanagement skills of Senator Clinton:
Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”But as Maureen keeps warning us, Hillary will be back. Whether we want her or not.
The Last Debate
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 21, 2008
The day off has refreshed and energized Maureen Dowd and she has reverted to one of her favorite formats: the faux debate where she gets to put words in the mouth of both candidates. The most recent of these tour de forces was the epic drug-lingo round-up.
Today she imagines a mock debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a verbal shoot-out at the OK Corral. She starts right off with a topical reference to Sweetie-gate, Barack’s off-handed and sexist dismal of a female reporter:
“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”The second line is faux-Hillary’s rebuttal which is the first of several references to Barack’s skinniness and/or his eating habits and lack thereof:
“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”
Forget it, Bones.Dowd columns for a couple of months now have had an odd subtext that Obama’s slender frame and dainty eating style have made him too skinny to be a serious candidate. Not too black, liberal, or inexperienced (although the faux-Clinton sock puppet touches on all of these as well), but too thin. Amateur psychoanalysts may discuss this amongst yourselves.
While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.
Back at ya, Skeletor.
I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.Say “party pedestal powder” three times fast. I dare you. But her greatest assonance achievement is this particular phrase:
“Bill and I don’t need your Netroots arugula moolah. We don’t need your stinking $20 donors. We’ve got Burkle, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and Kazakh uranium loot on tap.”Just by itself, "netroots arugula moolah" would be a classic since in three words it touches on both Obama's internet ultra-liberal support base and his upper-class effete lack of he common touch. But the very next line changes targets and serves not only as poetry, but as a precise and concise summary of Clinton fund-raising scandals to come.
“Wow, you’re so-o-o generous. Can I also write the plank on switchgrass?”Switched to what? Does this have something to do with the preternatural thinness?
“I switched from grass a long time ago.”
And if you think your Secretary of Hairdressing, John Edwards, is going to help, you’re more delusional than I am.And the racial allusions are thick and heavy as well. We get a great new phrase aimed at redneck voters who say to exit pollers that race IS a factor as well as Hillary's not always subliminal appeals to them:
So cool it with the White Fright.
And we have a great Dowdversion® that invokes the “Barack is a crypto-Muslim” rumors:You can bet your white turban that I’m not raising the white flag.The entire column is a laundry list of obscure scandals and campaign kerfuffles that make a Dennis Miller monologue look straight forward. Here is a Kentucky Primary/Derby reference that flows right into a dead race horse metaphor for the Clinton campaign:
I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.But that is followed with a line for FauxBama that could be as sincere a statement as Maureen will ever say to Hillary directly or indirectly:
“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”It’s the sign of a master satirist that she can hide the greatest truths in plain sight.
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.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:
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.
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.”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:
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.”
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:
He tried to shine a light on that clannish place where grudges and grievances flourish. After racing from race for a year, he plowed in and took a stab at showing blacks what white resentment felt like and whites what black resentment felt like.While she doesn’t single out a quote, she is probably referring to this passage of the speech:
(He was spot-on about my tribe of working-class Irish, the ones who have helped break his winning streak in New Hampshire and Ohio, and may do so in Pennsylvania.)
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.Basically, she is saying that some of her closest relatives are racist, but….
A little disenchantment with Obama could turn out to be a good thing. Too much idealism can blind a leader to reality as surely as too much ideology can.And the lady from the Gray Lady is painting a picture of the next president through some pretty thick beer goggles.
Gray is a welcome relief from black and white.
Carry on my wayward son,
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Now don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, it surely
means that I don't know
The arithmetic of procuring a prostitute who is both experienced and inspirational is even more complicated than the arithmetic of procuring a president who is both experienced and inspirational.And that doesn’t even count as a Dowdversion®, because the structure is completely parallel. This shell game is much punnier:
…do you really need to shell out $4,300, plus minibar expenses, to a shell company for an hour with a shady lady? Aren’t there cheaper hooker hook-ups on Craigslist? It makes you wonder how sharp Eliot Spitzer’s pencil was on the state’s fiscal disclipline.As a bonus, we get the pretty lame shell-shady ho-ho double alliteration complete with internal rhyme and the just a little too subtle phallic pencil innuendo. But it goes juicier:
And how does it add up that Steamroller No. 1 suddenly morphs into Client No. 9, a nom d’amour with the ring of an overpriced Gucci cologne for men, giving untold thousands for untold years to a prostitution ring that has hourly rates based on rating its girls on a diamond scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being $3,100, and above 7 in a special club for $5,500 and up?This is good because Steamroller No. 1 is a callback to this profane quote from Spitzer’s first days in office (as retold on Boston.com):
"I am a fucking steamroller and I'll roll over you or anybody else," the Democratic governor told Republican Assemblyman James Tedisco in a private conversation last week, the New York Post reported on Wednesday."Fucking" was the absolutely right adjective there. Freudian slip much Eliot? This story is so hot we get, not one, but three unnamed imaginary “friends” of Maureen to chime in. The first knows her way around an escort service. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they, Mo?
(A friend of mine who knows the ways of the wayward, explained that the flesh-peddlers no doubt had a shell game as well as a shell company: “They say, ‘You can have Jane. She’s $1,000 an hour. Or, you can have Tiffany for $5,000 an hour.’ The client doesn’t know that Jane and Tiffany are the same girl...)The second is a straw(wo)man letting Dowd drag this out to the gutter and back onto the Clinton campaign.
“I would think the story about our esteemed governor is all the proof we need that we should have a woman as president,” a woman I know said in an e-mail message.And finally, we get back on the Hillary Hating Highway after our detour to Spitzers truckstop trollop.
Another woman e-mailed the reverse to a friend: “I hope this makes people think back to Monica Lewinsky. Can sex scandals be well timed?”Gee, what sex scandal does this remind Dowd of? Hmmm…
Hillary could not have been pleased to be in all the TV stand-by-your-man features, or to hear David Letterman’s Spitzer Top Ten list which included, “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”Since sex is covered, Maureen can fan the flames of racial disrespect while getting in a jab at spectacular Democratic crash and burns of the past:
Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984, was clearly stung at what she considered Obama’s easy rise to celebrity and electoral success. Last Friday, Ms. Ferraro, who is on Hillary’s national finance committee, told The Daily Breeze, a small newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”Sorry, I got to take the side of the Obamaniacs in this one. Gerry was one the bringing up race. And it was an attack. Guilty as charged.
[Ferraro] told The Times on Tuesday night that she was “livid,” adding: “Anytime you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.”
If blood will have blood, as Shakespeare said in “Macbeth,” power will have sex.But the feature attraction is a costume drama about a powerful woman that has trouble keeping the men in her life in line. Rather than go to any of the recent Cate Blanchett portrayals, Dowd reaches way back to the Errol Flynn classic The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. “Private lives”, “Essex”, get it?
Some people took the saga of Eliot Ness in the boudoir, the old yarn of holier-than-thou caught in flagrante delicto, as a sign that a woman should be president.
But in the past, women got tangled up with sex and power. When Bette Davis played Elizabeth I, she was always sending her lovers off to the Tower of London when they made eyes at her pretty ladies-in-waiting. Catherine the Great was hardly known for her restraint. And there were Agrippa and Cleopatra, of course.And to that pantheon, Dowd adds a future ruler tough enough to stand with the men:
Hillary would never have to pretend to be a man to get aides to respect her, proving that she has moved past gender in a way Ferraro never did.Not only that, you have no fear of sex scandal on Hillary’s watch because:
In modern times, you rarely see any men having to ashenly stand by their women.We know that Hillary has already stood by her man and now Tammy Wynette gets to be the opening act.
Captive to History’s Caprice
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 17, 2008
We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art - Henry JamesMaureen Dowd waxes unexpectedly philosophical this week as she wonders what we know about any candidate. And she does it with alliteration:
The passionate palaver about Hillary versus Barry rages on, with each side certain it is right about our fate if we end up with a President Obama or another President Clinton."Callow" is also bit of a pun on "cattle" as Dowd reminds us of Hillary's entanglement with Refco but not of Barack's buddy Rezko. It was through Refco that she made her hundred to one long shot.
But is she right, that he’d be a callow leader, too trusting of Republicans, dictators and terrorists? Is Bill right, that voters should not be swayed by eloquence and excitement? (Unless he’s running.)
Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.Because Maya Angelou, author of "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" has endorsed Hillary instead of the less experienced Obama.
Hillary could be ready on Day 1 — to make up her Enemies List and banish Overkill Bill to a cubbyhole in the Old Executive Office Building. But it’s Day 2 that I’m really worried about.But the biggest pun is used on a hope-filled Kennedy legacy line that Barack has adopted:
Maybe we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Or maybe we are not.The full Hopi prayer also includes these lines:
Perhaps when Barack Obama uses that trippy line, he is just giving false Hopi, since the saying, which he picked up from Maria Shriver’s New Age-y L.A. endorsement speech, is credited to Hopi Indians.
Perhaps that is advice as good for us as it is for our next president, whoever it might be.The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.We are the ones we've been waiting for.
Darkness and Light
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 6, 2008
Not in the least; everybody allows that Lady Sneerwell can do more with a word or a look than many can with the most labored detail, even when they happen to have a little truth on their side to support it.The Dowd thesaurus had been taken out of mothballs and Heading 421 in particular is burning from the furious page flipping. We can’t get to them all, but let’s get a sampling:-School For Scandal, 1777
Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.Note the use of pitch(shill)/pitch(tar), as in "pitch black" and in "tar and feather", giving three levels of allusion. The pathological/{dark} path pair is also well played. We even get an art lesson:
But her pitch is the color of pitch
Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.
Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro.From Wikipedia:
Chiaroscuro (Italian for clear-dark) is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.And according to Dowd, never has the contrast been clearer. And we get a nice Alliteration Alert® AND a new Rude Name® with Diffident Debutante. A nice opposite to Debate Dominatrix.
Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.We also get the boxing metaphor we last saw in November back in action:
For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic?And on “laconic/iconic/bionic” the rhyming dictionary bursts into flames. Flames from a fire-breathing dragon{lady}:
But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.Obama is clearly Dowd's white knight.
There Will Be Blood
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 3, 2008
I have a competition in me.It time for another night of Movies With Maureen®. While movie allusions are a common feature of Maureen Dowd columns, sometimes the combination of too much late night MSNBC and Starz causes her movie mania to go into overdrive. The last time was as part of her Dubya of Arabia coverage. This time her film focus is on the Democratic nomination race.
I want no one else to succeed.There Will Be Blood (2007)
And so it is with Barack and Hillary. Thursday night was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Just a beautiful, dare we say, fairy tale.The fairy tale of course being Bill Clinton’s take on Barry’s Iraq policy. Dowd also echoes her invocation of Seven Days in May back in December by saying that with Bill in the East Wing, the Oval Office will be off-limits to any Veep usurpation.
There won’t be any Dick Cheney-style coup in Hillary’s White House.But if Bill is the Big Dog, Hillary is the ultimate toothy terror, Bruce The Shark from Jaws, devouring anything in her path to the presidency. Obama will need more than a few rides on Teddy’s sailboat to sink her ambitions.
Team Obama refers to the Clinton campaign as “Jaws” because “just when things are quiet, they keep trying to come back and capsize the boat.”The movie Mean Girls (which is a MoDo metaphor explored fuller earlier this week) was based on a parental advice book called Queen Bees and Wannabes which posits that in any social pecking order there is only room for one Alpha Hillary and she will lie, gossip, and scheme as much as necessary to keep her standing as Queen of the Cafeteria.
Hillary sent word to Obama that she wanted to talk to him. Obama’s aides figured that she wanted to make a pro forma apology for the comments of Billy Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, who had told The Washington Post that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use in his late teens. Shaheen would step down the next day, but Camp Obama did not think the slam was a mere slip of the tongue.Mean Girls use proxies and lackeys to do their dirty work and the Clintons are no exception.
In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.”
He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.The rest of the story involves physical contact that almost starts a cat-fight complete with name-calling and hair-pulling. But the Mean Girls/Queen Bee call-out also segues into the Clinton Royalty Metaphor® of the week with jostle/joust just close enough together to trigger an Alliteration Alert®:
As Queen Bee of the Clinton hive, Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission, so something that wasn’t even a jostle was perceived as a joust.This recap of the animosity between former colleagues is meant to show that any show of congeniality on the part of the candidates is just Oscar-worthy acting.
But on Thursday, when he leaned down to whisper and put his hand on her shoulder, she looked up at him with a glowing smile. They really should have taken home gold statuettes.And for Dowd, Super Tuesday will have all the glamour and drama of the Academy Awards.
