What To Do In Denver When You Are Bitter

High Anxiety in the Mile High City
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 26, 2008

Sensing that she doesn’t have much longer to bash the Clintons, Maureen Dowd unleashes all the stops. Projecting more than she usually does, she finds bitterness and hatred everywhere.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks.

And Maureen continues to Cassandra the Subtle Sabotage Strategy my noting that Hillary is trying to keep her base energized.

At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.

“Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.

And Hillary gives her fellow senator, Joe Biden, a compliment even more ambiguous than “clean and articulate”.

Hillary also said she was happy about the choice of Joe Biden because he added “intensity” to the ticket. Ouch.

And when Dowd gets her dander up, the Movies With Maureen® allusions fly. In addition to the Hitchcockian title (and the “high” in “High Anxiety” must refer to the altitude and not any recreational pharmaceuticals), Maureen latches onto the chick-flickie call out by Hillary.

She thanked her “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,” and slyly noted that Obama would enact her health care plan rather than his.

But the really big movie moment compares the Clintons to the Corleones.

Obama’s pacification of Bill made his supporters depressed and anxious that he was going to be a weaker candidate than they had hoped and fearful that, as in Obama’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” every time Democrats try to get away, the Clintons pull them back in.

But the best line from the column is gone. Missing from the current online version is this demonic aside that appeared in the dead trees edition (omitted text in [brackets]):

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult with Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

[Ah, yes, now I recognize that sulfurous aroma.]

Also gone was a line comparing Bill Clinton to a murderous mythical beast:

[Bill Clinton is brooding in his hotel suite at Brown Palace Hotel, like the outcast Grendel lurking on the outskirts of the town where young Beowulf lived.]

That parenthetical aside had inspired this less than inspired photoshoppery on my part. Now it has been retconned out of existence.

Having witnessed some editorially reining in of Maureen’s more incendiary invective, perhaps one day we will learn how she really feels.

Obamawulf versus Clinton Grendel

The following passage from Maureen Dowd's High Anxiety In Denver column was deleted sometime during the night. The original can still be found here.

Bill Clinton is brooding in his hotel suite at Brown Palace Hotel, like the outcast Grendel lurking on the outskirts of the town where young Beowulf lived.

Inspired by this now purged description I propose this movie poster:

And if Bill is Grendel, then Obama is Beowulf, the warrior hero that slays the monster:

Coming to a voting booth near you.

Cry-Baby McCain

Woe to the land that's governed by a child.

Richard III. 2. 3

McCain’s Green-Eyed Monster
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 5, 2008

If you came to Maureen Dowd today expecting more petty nit-picking of Barack Obama, you are bound to be disappointed. Instead, she has pointed her laser wit at his Republican rival and found him lacking. Part of it she sees as an age versus youth case of envy which she casts into Shakespearean terms with references to Othello, Richard III and Richard Nixon (okay, the last one isn’t a Shakespearean tragedy, but it should be)

Not since Iago and Othello obsessed on the comely Cassio, not since Richard of Gloucester killed his two nephews, not since Nixon and Johnson glowered at the glittering J.F.K., has there been such an unseemly outpouring of boy envy.

And just to dig at McCain’s grumpy old man persona a little bit more, she compares him to Fred Mertz from the I Love Lucy show in her own version of Spy magazine’s Separated at Birth™

“Now somebody else is the celebrity,” the colleague continued, while John looks in the mirror and sees his face marred by skin cancer and looks at the TV and sees his dashing self-image replaced by visions of William Frawley, with Letterman jokes about his membership in the ham radio club and adventures with wagon trains.

Green is the color of envy and Maureen’s favorite shade is pea-green. Hillary turned this hue back in February when Obama’s star was rising. Now it’s McCain’s turn to drink the Hulk juice.

Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.

Her thesis is that McCain, supposedly the straight talking-elder statesman is the one acting like a petulant child.

The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough.

At Sulzberger High, where Maureen Dowd is the Prom Queen, Obama is the valedictorian and McCain is the leather (flight) jacketed greaser making a jerk of himself.

For McCain, being cool meant being a rogue, not a policy wonk; but Obama manages to be a cool College Bowl type, which must irk McCain, who liked to play up his bad-boy cool. Now the guy in the back of the class is shooting spitballs at the class pet and is coming off as more juvenile than daring.

Maureen blames this change of character on a Rove minion that has taken over the campaign. Steve Schmidt even comes with his own Rude Name® that predates his appearance in a Dowd column.

McCain upbraids Obama for being a poppet, while he’s becoming a puppet. His mouth is moving but the words coming out belong to his new hard-boiled strategist, Steve Schmidt, a Rove protégé, nicknamed “The Bullet” for his bald pate.

The poppet/puppet play is a particularly effective Alliteration Alert® and to close the dressing down she gives Maverick, she goes the Dowdversion® route.

Schmidt has turned Mr. Straight Talk into Mr. Desperate Straits. It’s not a good trade.

But since nothing political can’t be backtracked to a Clinton, she brings out the b-words show that even the Big Dog is a little bitter.

Unlike his wife, Bill Clinton — the master of fake sincerity — still continues to openly begrudge his party’s betrothed.

I hope this latest column silences the DowdHaters that claim she only attacks Democratic candidates. Today she has really cut McCain down to size without once effeminizing Obama. She must be serious. And that's no kidding.

Labor Pains

Ich Bin Ein Jet-Setter
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 20, 2008

Every now and then Maureen Dowd has to remind us that she too has a high school diploma by making some allusion to a circa 1965 staple of scholastic knowledge. This week she must have stumbled upon an old copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Or she just may have fallen asleep during a Movies With Maureen® Steve Reeves Marathon (and I’m thinking Reeves since I doubt she knows who Kevin Sorbo is), because she is dreaming of Obama as a well-oiled heavily-muscled hero. After all, he does work out a lot:

…back home in Chicago, he worked out three times on Wednesday. An Associated Press report jokingly compared his fitness regime to that of Mr. Universe and marveled at “a distinct lack of visible sweat on the Illinois senator.”

And all this is reminding Maureen of that hunky hero of yore.

Because Obama started from scratch a year and a half ago in his amazing presidential odyssey, he has to swiftly and convincingly perform the political equivalent of the Labors of Hercules.

Cleaning the Augean stables in a single day seems like a cinch compared with navigating the complexities of Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Jordan in a few short days.

And while Dowd is well known for her alliteration and movie references, her most distinctive rhetorical device is the Dowdversion®, two parallel clauses with either a twist or a pun connecting the two. We have several classic examples today.

Even if Obama is treated as a superstar by W.-weary Europeans, some Obama-wary Americans may wonder what he’s doing there…

See the alliterative weary/wary change-up. But not all rise to this level of pithy. Some are a little lazier and more obvious:

Since he’s already fighting the perception that he’s an exotic outsider, he can’t be seen as too insidery with the Euro-crats.

The outsider/insidery link is just a little forced. But when she is on top of her game, a Dowdversion® can work on several levels:

Instead of obtaining the girdle of the Amazon warrior queen Hippolyte, Obama has to overcome the hurdle of the Amazon warrior queen Hillary.

This one is a two-fer because we get the rhyming girdle/hurdle pair with the even more alliterative Hippolyte/Hillary comparison which completes the current events tie-in. And it masculinizes Senator Clinton as an Amazon warrior in a completely defensible literary allusional way. Take that Clark Hoyt.

The next Dowdversion® is more explicitly tied to Herculean labors motif:

Instead of slaying the nine-headed Hydra, he must bedazzle three European countries without causing Middle America to begrudge his popularity with a bunch of foreigners.

This one is a particulary significant call-back because begrudge and bedazzle are two of Dowd’s favorite words. In April she admired Hillary for…

…the gusto with which she bedazzled her résumé and then bedazzled some more when she got caught bedazzling.

In February she wrote a column about Obama titled “Begrudging His Bedazzling” (DowdReported here) where she declared:

Bedazzling beats begrudging.

But the use of 'bedazzling' predates the current campaign. Back in 2000, she wrote a column about how boring and soporific Al Gore that was titled “Belaboring, Not Bedazzling”. And 'belaboring' brings us right back (in more than one way) to Hercules.

She only explicitly mentions five of the twelve labors. In addition to cleaning the Augean Stables, slaying the Hydra, and de-girdling Hippolyte ones mentioned above, she also compares speech making to stealing the Apples of the Hesperides. But the labor she uses to invoke Bill Clinton is the most puzzling:

Obama must capture his own equivalent of the Erymanthian Boar, deciding how much to grovel to get Bill Clinton in his corner, and he has to calculate whether the Big Dog will be help or hindrance, or both, as he was with his wife, and how to use him, if at all.

While many might think comparing Bill to a boar (or even a bore) is an apt analogy, in the Dowdverse, Clinton is the Big Dog, which would make the three-headed hell-hound Cerebus the better choice. But explicating that metaphor would cause problems with a family newspaper and would make Maureen struggle to think of what exactly Bill Clinton’s third head would be.

And on that note, we have to sign off by noting that the Kennedy allusion in the title really has nothing to do with the swords and sandals motif of the rest of the column except that since Barack is going to Berlin as part of his travels, it ties Obama in some way to the JFK mystique. By the Washington dateline, we know Dowd isn't risking foreign intestinal distress by being on the press plane. That means Maureen has to stay home and fantasize about Barack coming to our rescue, whip in hand.

MoDo Theater Presents: Barack Vets Bill

Inspired by Grace Nearing of the always relevant Scriptoids, we have formed the MoDo Players to re-enact the various fictional dramas that go on in Maureen Dowd's columns. In the most recent column (frisked here), Barack Obama vets Bill Clinton to be his vice-presidential nominee in full defiance of the 22nd Amendment.

To see Dowd's column cleaned up into script form check out the blog The Aristocrats. Our cast for this little drama is:



Alan Ruck as Congressman Rahm Emanuel




Jeremy Irons as Harold Ickes



Tom Arnold as Ron Burkle



Olympia Dukakis as Governor Kathleen Sebelius

And starring:



Will Smith as Barack Obama

And:




Jim Belushi as Bill "Big Dog" Clinton

And hey, if you don't think these celebrities don't look enough like the real politicians, remember that HBO got Laura Dern to look like Kitty Harris.



Look for more productions from Dowd Theater in the future.

Bubba In The Backroom

Can He Take a Frisk?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 28, 2008

In counter-point to The Last Debate, Maureen Dowd’s fevered imagination brings us the hypothetical backroom interview where Barack Obama offers the vice presidency to Clinton. Bill Clinton, that is. This hypothetical junta involves several major and minor players for both campaigns, so let’s look at the program:

After “Rahmbo” Emanuel, the Illinois congressman dubbed “the hostage negotiator” by the Obama forces, fails to talk Hillary down, Barack Obama knows that he is left with one final roll of the dice. He sets up a secret meeting with Bill Clinton in neutral territory at Rahm’s hideaway office in the Capitol.

A part of the Chicago political machine, Rham Emanuel aka "Rhambo" is Obama’s enforcer. He makes the offers that others don’t refuse. He raises the money and decides who gets it. This congressman has the rather large ear of Obama when it comes to picking running mates.

“Hey, Bill, please, stop wagging your finger at me. Call off Harold Ickes and the Hillaryland Huns. You’re right. I can’t win without her. The two of us can clean McCain’s grandfather clock.”

Ickes, part of a Democratic dynasty, is the last advisor standing in Hillary’s campaign. His close relationship (hint, hint) to labor unions has given her a power base in New York. And of course, Hillaryland Huns makes for a nice Alliteration Alert®.

“Thank goodness you’ve got Jim Johnson frisking me. He’s the guy who missed all the baggage weighing down Geraldine Ferraro’s husband.”

Jim Johnson is the former Fannie Mae head who is running Obama’s vice-presidential vetting operation. He performed the same job for Walter Mondale and John Kerry and we know how well those campaigns went. While he left Fannie Mae before the sub-prime meltdown, he did manage to cook the books good enough to a nearly two-million dollar bonus on his way out the door.

“We need to know where that $11 million came from that you guys loaned your campaign. And the $15 million from Ron Burkle at Yucaipa and the $3 million from Vinod Gupta.”

There’ll be no more Ron Air, no Burkling and Binging.

Billionaire Boys Club buddy Ron Burkle makes an encore appearance from The Vice Squad column. Both Burkle and Gupta have the habit of having jets waiting when the Clintons need a vacation in Mexico. With large donation pools at the end of the runway. Steve Bing is also a binge buddy of Bubba.

“I’ve got to level with you, man. Hillary’s a lot of work. And that Kathleen Sebelius is terrific and has those twinkly eyes.”

Kansas governor Sebelius is considered a front-runner for the real vice-presidential nomination. And being attacked by Robert Novak doesn’t hurt her bona fides any. And on a dream ticket, she adds the eye candy to balance out Barack’s appeal.

Faux-Bill gets the last word on the odds of Hillary making the Dream Team:

“The idea of Hillary as your No. 2 was always a fairy tale.”

Fairy tale being the words that Bill used to describe Obama’s free ride just a while ago. And it looks like Bill will be riding Bing Air instead of Air Force Two in the next four years.

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.

The Perfect Column

Wilting Over Waffles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 23, 2008

Every now and then an archetypal example of something comes along. Today’s Maureen Dowd column is like the every column she's ever written all wrapped into one. Lets’ go through the catalog:

Alliteration Alert®: It starts in Wilting Waffles of the title and then goes on to “Caucasian Card” and “embarrassing explosion”.

Movies With Maureen®: It’s just not a Dowd column without at least one trip to the video store. This time Hillary Clinton is a enormous red-headed harpy enraged with jealousy. Project much, Maureen?

The Democrats are growing ever more desperate about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Emasculating Obama®: This time she puts the words into Hillary’s mouth:

Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

But she also delves into her long running obsessive theme of Obama as a food-picking anorexic:

He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

Silly Phrases From Freshman French®: Why something like “whiny wail” wouldn’t have done here is only John Kerry’s guess:

That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

Middlebrow Literary Allusions®: We have two to chose from here. it's good to know that a childless woman of a certain age is familiar with childhood classics:

Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”)

And then, with a Brobdingnagian finger-wagging on the screen, he denied it to an NBC News reporter.

Blatant Bill Bashing®: That second quote above is part of a larger random swipe at the Big Dog because not a column goes by without an updated on Bill Clinton's latest step into dog poo:

They also cringe as Bill continues his honey-crusted-nut-bar meltdown.

If there’s one person who knows about crass diversions, it’s Bill. But even for him, it was an embarrassing explosion, capped with some blue language to an aide that was caught on air.

And for those of you that want to know what Bill said that brought out the prude, according to ABC News, he dropped the S-bomb:

Then, after the interview had concluded but the microphone had not yet been turned off, he said, "I don't think I should take any s[hit] from anybody on that, do you?"

The Left-Handed Hillary Compliment®: If nothing else, and truly nothing else, Dowd admires Senator Clinton’s tenacity.

The very fact that he can’t shake her off has become her best argument against him.

Awkward Sports Metaphor®: I can’t tell if Dowd thinks the candidates are playing volleyball or tennis or basketball or darts here.

Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce. He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you’ve got to score points.

He knew he tanked in the Philadelphia debate, but he was so irritated by the moderators — and by having to stand next to Hillary again — that he couldn’t summon a single merry dart.

All we are missing to make this the perfect Dowd column is a tortured Dowdversion® and a new inventive Rude Name®. Instead we will have to make due with a line that DowdHaters will latch onto out of context and twist back to Maureen:

“You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!”

Which is also Dowd's way of unsubtly telling Hillary not to go away mad, just go away.

Dance Dance Innuendo

Standing by His Woman
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 13, 2008

Last week Maureen Dowd suggested we pick our next president based on who can hold their liquor the best. Since that might favor the vodka-favoring Hillary, this week she has decided that we need to have a dance-off.

See the video of Hillary dancing at a seniors’ aerobics class at a Philly Y.M.C.A. Awk.

Compare that to the slick moves of Senator Smooth Jazz.



The Clinton video has been viewed less than 300 times while Obama has over 700,000 views. I think the voters have spoken. Krugman will probably argue that a bowling tournament would be a fairer test of skill.

The rest of the column is the weekly Dowd update on how the wheels are coming off the bus while at the same time she keeps throwing advisors under the bus. What is masterful about this column is the economy with which Dowd embeds subliminal references to other previous scandals and incidents.

Bill is also crazed about the ineluctable fact that he isn’t Obama.

Maureen explained this in more detail back on in the March 26 column when she said this:

And even Clinton supporters know that Bill does not want to be replaced as the first black president, especially by a black president with enough magic to possibly eclipse him in the history books.

According to Dowd, this rear guard assualt on Obama is personal. The Big Dog wants to stay the darling of Harlem, but his running of the mouth doesn't always help his cause. When Bill Clinton mentions bank robbing sarcastically, that is enough of an opening to dredge up some metaphorical mugging.

“And, oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari, you know? Just making up all this stuff,” he said, adding: “And you would’ve thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this.”

Given her 3 a.m. ads — (that has got to be her hedge fund manager on the phone) — it was not very flattering for Bill to rant on and suggest that her 60-year-old brain was fuzzy.

This lets Dowd recall Hillary's financial windfall from fraudulent futures trading.

And while accusing Hillary of pimping Chelsea is beyond the pale, there is no compunction about calling Bill a call girl, even if he is a seven diamond hooker.

But the dubious deals of her husband, a seven-diamond influence peddler, do provide an unsavory contrast with some of the candidate’s positions.

Seven diamonds was the top price level of Hillary's super-delegate Spitzer's favorite escort agency. And Bill is nothing if not high priced even if his taste in trailer trash is low rent.

While this column is ostensibly about Bill reopening the wound of Hillary's Bosnian dissembling, it is really about things being business as usual for the Clintons. Funny business, money business, and monkey business. It is these little innuendos that Dowd slips in so that every column does double duty. And that innuendo is that the Clintons are unfit for an encore dance.

Vice Squad

The Vodka Chronicles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 6, 2008

Maureen Dowd gets down to analyzing all the remaining presidential candidates and the criteria she uses is who has the most repugnant personal vice. She knocks McCain for not drinking enough, given his hard driving naval aviator reputation.

In his book and last week’s bio-tour, McCain painted himself as a cool bad boy. He was a girl-loving, authority-defying, plane-crashing Top Gun.

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).

She had mentioned the bipartisan Temple of Doom style shot drinking contest on her last Meet The Press appearance back in January. She is worried that the candidate is being whitewashed because it would cut into the use of Rude Names®:

If his campaign is bowdlerizing, let’s hope it stops before he’s a bland McNice.

If McCain seems like the stealth temperance candidate, Hillary, according to Dowd, seems to be seeping under the rug her desire to earn the Absolut endorsement. The second feature of today’s Movies With Maureen® double feature is Election.

Oddly, Hillary, a Tracy Flick Goodie Two Shoes growing up, is the only one who seems to be enjoying her vices… Her campaign doesn’t deny that she likes to kick back, at the end of a long day, with a vodka on her plane.

But it’s Obama that earns her scorn for pretending to down a drink but watering the plants instead.

Everyone may imagine that Obama and his press corps spend all their time quaffing Champagne and celebrating the astonishment of his very being. But the candidate is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

But Obama is not entirely vice free. While his pot and coke days may be behind him, he keeps backsliding on his cancer stick habit. Worse than his addiction to the devil’s weed, he is one of those annoying inconsiderate smokers that throws his butts on your windshield.

Ever since Chicago reporters followed the up-and-coming Obama and saw him flicking his ashes and butts out the windows of moving vehicles, the senator has had a testy relationship with the press about his addictions to cigarettes and littering. (Obama, wrote one reporter on his blog, was “one of those reprehensible nicotine addicts who seems to believe that the world is his ashtray.”)

Dowd’s uncited source is David Mendell as quoted by Eric Zorn. If Hillary is serious about using every weapon against Obama, she needs to appeal to those of us that find highway butt flickers repulsive.

But when discussing vices, a special corner is saved for possible future First Lad Bill Clinton. His White House chubby chasing days may be behind him with hope for an encore dimming, but he seems to be having fun with his Billionaire’s Boys Club. She sees the Big Dog being kept on too short a leash:

Bill Clinton is a cautionary tale about what happens if you surrender too many cherished vices. Curtailed from Burkling, international jet-setting, cholesterol-chowing and race-baiting, Bill has gotten raspy and lost his legendary charm.

“Burkling” is a term coined by Dowd to describe Bill’s habit of hanging around rich guys of flexible matrimonial status like gossip column staple Ron Burkle. In July of 2007, Dowd had an imaginary Hillary warn the equally imaginary Bill:

“Speaking of roving, don’t even think about going on your Hollywood rat pack’s planes after I’m elected,” she snaps. “Strictly Air Force for you, mister, with extra federal marshals. You promised me two terms after your two terms, and I’m not going to get that if you’re caught Burkling or Binging.”

In real news (as opposed to a Dowd column), the Clintons finances are intimately entwined with Burke’s business ventures which are highly dependent on favorable legislation.

In the mean time, Dowd heaves an alliterative sigh of despair about the loss of real bad boys.

Let the Big Dog off his leash. There can be virtue in a little vice.

Since Dowd won her Pulitzer tut-tutting over Bill’s vices, perhaps she has an ulterior motive in hoping for a candidate with a few bad habits to pick on.

The Big Truth

He’s got to hide the truth.
She'll stop at nothing to find it.
But tonight, Everything's off the record.

-The Big Easy tagline

You can’t handle the truth!

-A Few Good Men

But Big Jule cannot win if he plays with honest dice!

-Guys and Dolls

Hillary or Nobody?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 26, 2008

Sometimes Maureen Dowd just throws subtlety to the wind and lets us know how she really feels. Let’s go down the list:

She likes watching old movies:

It’s one of my favorite movie formulas, driving the dynamics in such classics as “A Few Good Men,” “The Big Easy” and “Guys and Dolls”: Charming, glib guy spars and quarrels with no-nonsense, driven girl, until they team up in the last reel. He spices up her life, and she stiffens his spine.

This is a very telling episode of Movies With Maureen®. What do these movies have in common? Bad boys that with a secret to hide. Tough talking lugs like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Quaid, and Marlon Brando. It’s a bonus if they treat women wrong.

Hillary Clinton won’t settle for second banana. Again.

It’s hard to imagine that after spending her whole life playing second-fiddle to a superstar pol, Hillary wants to do it again. She’s been vice president.

Maureen has already explore the theory that Barack would be and unfit veep for Hillary. Now she says that there is no way Hillary would settle for a position she de facto already had.

The Clintons only think of themselves.

After all, the Clintons think of themselves as The Democratic Party. When Bill and Dick Morris triangulated during the first term, it was what was best for Bill, not the party. In 1996, when Bill turned the White House into Motel 1600 for fund-raisers, it was more about his re-election than the re-elections of his fellow Democrats in Congress; in 2000, the White House focused its energies more on Hillary’s Senate win than Al Gore’s presidential run.

The Billary Express has always been a duopoly and the focus has never been what is good for the party, but what is good for the Clintons.

If she can’t win the nomination, she will sabotage Obama to give herself a shot in 2012.

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat.

(Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC’s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for “the Tonya Harding option” — if she can’t get the gold, kneecap her rival.)

And we all know how it turned out for Tonya. Nancy Kerrigan became America’s sweetheart until she bad mouthed Mickey Mouse.

That whole wait-until-next-time strategy sounds pretty Machiavellian. It requires the hope that an electorate that rejected you this time around will flock to you four years down the road.

There you have. The Four Horsemen of Maureen Dowd for the past six months. Just mix and match as required until the election. Then she can go on to stopping the next Clinton run.

She'll Be Back

Haunting Obama’s Dreams
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 23, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still having nightmares about Hillary Clinton’s resurgent campaign even though most pundits don’t see any chance of the Senator from New York catching the Senator from Illinois in either the delegate count or the popular vote. Still Dowd claims that people are worried.

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

In her nightmare scenario, an undead Hillary arises like a killing machine to menace the hero:

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.

This monster movie analogy was used here on the Dowd Report as well as by Dowd’s fellow Obamamaniac Andrew Sullivan. Here is his take:

The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares [the Clintons] to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

Of course, comparing Hillary to a ruthless killing machine is not a new concept. This video is one of several on YouTube.

But Dowd saves some of her venom of the other half of the Clinton tag-team. In perhaps the cheapest shot ever leveled at Bill Clinton, Maureen has this to say about his latest campaign spinning:

On Friday in Charlotte, N.C., Bill Clinton, the man who once thanked an R.O.T.C. recruiter “for saving me from the draft” during Vietnam, sounded like Sean Hannity without the finesse.

Ouch.

Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary’s last hope is some sort of power play involving the super delegates that she has courted. This sort of logrolling is supposed to be the Clintons strong point, but Dowd throws a bucket of water on this wicked witch.

After the Hillary camp lost — and trashed — Bill Richardson and was outmaneuvered by the Obama forces on mulligans in Michigan and Florida, Hillary’s hopes dwindled down to the superdelegates.

If Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are the dealmakers, it won’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who had knives out for Hillary in this “Murder on the Orient Express.”

Movies With Maureen® Spoiler Alert: In the star-studded Agatha Christie classic, the murder victim was so hated that everyone on the train had a motive for killing him and they did.

Dowd then lists the beefs each of these party bigwigs has with the ham-handed Clintons and comes to this conclusion:

If Hillary’s fate falls into the hands of Jimmy, Al and Nancy, the Clinton chickens may come home to roost.

And that would be a movie as scary as The Birds.

BlogWatch: Cattle Prattle

Photo: Ben Sklar/Getty Images

Bob Somerby, noted DowdHater® and author of the Daily Howler accuses Maureen Dowd of mangling a quote Hillary made in El Paso, Texas, last week.

Let's be frank: The Times op-ed page is an intellectual sewer. Yesterday, Dowd was at it again. After some brain-dead Hopi humor, she lodged this hiss-spitting claim against her favorite target: "Hillary says Obama is 'all hat and no cattle.'" But The Dim One was playing her readers a tad. Here's what Clinton actually said, last Tuesday night, in Texas. We'll cite Beth Fouhy's AP report, since the Times didn't even report the comment:

FOUHY (2/13/08): She slipped into a "you all" and criticized Bush, the former Texas governor. "There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George W. Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle."

Huh! She had criticized Bush—but Obama worked better. So the Times let their crazy girl type it.

First off, the full speech is available on the New York Times website, so there goes that weird slam, but more importantly, is Dowd so crazy as to mix up W and Obambi like that? Let's read the paragraph following that cattle remark and figure out who Clinton is really talking about:

And we're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks, bringing our message about what we need in America, the kind of president that will be required on day one to be commander-in-chief to turn the economy around. I'm tested. I'm ready. Let's make it happen. (APPLAUSE) You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it -- "all hat and no cattle." Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle. Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hardworking Americans homes from foreclosure at the abusive practices of the mortgage companies.

The key phrase here is "the next three weeks." Hillary is not running, now or ever, against George Bush; she's running against Barack Obama who she is trying to portray as inexperienced and full of hot air, i.e. all hat and no cattle.

Is Muareen Dowd off-base is implying this spin to the comment. Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post was there and reported the event this way:

"You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it, 'All hat and no cattle,'" Clinton told a massive audience here. "Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat, and a lot more cattle." She continued, in an apparent swipe at both Bush and Sen. Barack Obama, the candidate gaining momenum in the Democratic race: "Texas needs a president who actually undersdtands what its going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care."

John Kelso of the Austin Statesman also saw a shot at Obama in those words:

At a campaign stop in El Paso, she took a shot at President Bush, and perhaps Obama, by using the expression "all hat and no cattle." Obama could respond by saying she's "no hat and all pants suit."

Newsweek reported the quote this way:

"There's a great saying in Texas. You've heard it: all hat and no cattle. After seven years of George Bush we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle," Clinton told the crowd, in a barely veiled swipe at her opponent. "Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hard-working Americans' homes from foreclosure."

And the well-respected Economist clearly saw the saying as an attack on Hillary's primary opponent:

Her quip on Tuesday night—that Mr Obama is "all hat and no cattle"—will provide the subtext of everything she says.

And the key word there is "subtext." A good candidate never explicitly calls out his or her opponent by name when a well crafted innuendo will do. So, no, Hillary's hat and cattle comment was not explicitly aimed at Obama but only the most blinded partisan would not realize who the jab was clearly aimed at.

Our Doubt Is Our Passion

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 James

Maureen 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.

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.)

"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.

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.

But as they say in the commodities market, past performance is no indicator of future results. Dowd goes down the list of poor presidential decisions from The Bay of Pigs to Monica's Thong (not that I'm making any comparison there). She even mentions her beloved Poppy throwing away his popularity with a lippy "Read my hips."

Maureen also comes up with a new Rude Name® for The Big Dog in the only outright movie allusion of the week, making him the Tarantino-esque Overkill Bill while at the same time throwing in a Nixonian Hillary prediction:

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.

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.

The full Hopi prayer also includes these lines:

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.

Perhaps that is advice as good for us as it is for our next preside