Cain Not Able By MAUREEN DOWD Published: November 1, 2011
Maureen Dowd is always at her best when there is a whiff of sexual scandal in the air. It's what won her her Pulitzer after all. So the Herman Cain scandal is right up her alley. And this affair has her pining for prim and proper alliterative Austen novels.
It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.
Which allows her to put her twist on one of the most famous opening lines in the English language (a gimmick she used on another politician back in 2008):
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.
And she elaborates the analogy further by placing the actors with the characters:
The Herminator was just a raffish passing fancy, like Mr. Wickham, a place for Republicans to store their affections while they try to overcome their aversion to Mitt Romney’s Mr. Darcy.
The eighteenth century landed gentry lived by a strict moral code and Dowd gives us an update useful in the 21st:
It is never right for any boss, especially the president of the United States, to mess with an intern, even if she’s the aggressor.
But she says that this particular tale is not a bodice-ripping potboiler, it is something far more pedestrian.
It is the most hackneyed story in Washington — another powerful man who crossed the line and then, when caught, tried to blame the women.
And our Maureen has too much sense and sensibility to let anyone get away with that.
Maureen Dowd invokes the name of a 1990's animated series featuring long dormant creatures who are awakened, but cannot be controlled, by an evil mastermind hell-bent on world domination.
Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes.
Let's hope Boehner can control these gargoyles better than Xanatos was ever able to.
Parsing the psychodrama of the Bush Dynasty is a long-lasting obsession of Maureen Dowd and a new memoir by Donald Rumsfeld adds new fuel to the fire. Maureen has a soft spot for George I with nothing but disdain for the his more hot-headed son.
As she sees it, Rumsfeld has the obverse opinion. Rummy is envious and disdainful of George H. W.:
Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein.{snip}No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for.
Meanwhile, W. hero-worships the rough-hewn Rumsfeld, giving him a Rude Name® and all:
The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest.{snip}W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness.
And this is where Rumsfeld forms a hinge in Dowd's working thesis that the W.'s actions are all predicated on resolving his deep-seated daddy issues.
Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.
Rumsfeld shares one other attribute with the president who saw an invasion of Iraq as a way to right perceived weaknesses.
The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt.
If only he and the last president he served had been more right rather than so certain.
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.
And just to prove that we have the real deal back after a month long absence from the pundit page of the Gray Lady, Maureen throws in a patented Dowdversion®:
Cleopatra’s Egypt was modern in ancient times and Mubarak’s was ancient in modern times.
We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.
These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama.
In reading Maureen Dowd's dispatch today from Saudi Arabia, I had the strongest sense of deja vu as the image of a NYT columnist discussing peace initiatives sent my mind reeling back to 2002 when the Mustache of Understanding was making the circuit of oil shieks.
I took the opportunity of a dinner with Saudi Arabia's crown prince, and de facto ruler, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, to try out the idea of this Arab League proposal.
“[Obama] said all the right words in his speech,” said Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister. “But the implementation took traditional roads.”
So I asked, What if Mr. Sharon and the Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire before the Arab summit?
"Let me say to you that the speech is written, and it is still in my drawer," the crown prince said.
Actually, the president didn’t say all the right words in his speech. He created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs.
As for the "axis of evil" and reports of a possible U.S. military strike against Iraq, the Saudi leader said: "Any attack on Iraq or Iran should not be contemplated at all because it would not serve the interests of America, the region or the world, as there is no clear evidence of a present danger. Iraq is contemplating the return of the inspectors, and the U.S. should pursue this because inspectors can determine if Iraq is complying with the U.N. resolutions."
If anyone deserves to be paranoid, of course, it’s Israel. But Israel can’t be paranoid because paranoia is the mistaken perception that people are out to get you.
Asked about the possibility that Israel could attack Iran with its new drones, Prince Saud said dryly: “Talk about changing lifestyle. I think this would change lifestyles at once, forcibly.”
Next week: Maureen Dowd shares the wisdom obtained on her taxi ride back to the airport.
Maureen Dowd picks up the pitchfork and goes after greedy bankers once again.
“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.
“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”
Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”
And she goes goes and takes the CEO of Goldman Sachs (or Goldmine Sachs as she calls it later) to task on ethical and spiritual grounds.
Whether [Lloyd Blankfein] knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.
Which also gives us the Crossword Clue Of The Week®. According to Wikipedia,concupiscence is
selfish human desire for an object, person, or experience.
This is strong theological concept she uses perhaps to rebut the many Catholic critics of her recent column about the Church's treatment of nuns.
And just to prove she paid her dues in CCD, she makes one last allusion to a Bible story.
And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
She thinks that maybe it is time to make some changes among the moneychangers.
It's been a long time since we had a really good Movies With Maureen® night at the cinema. But today, Ms Dowd has made up for lost time.
Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.
One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.
But that is the first of many movie allusions yet to come. She warms up with veiled references to Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick, fitting in truly terrible pun in the process.
There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting.
She invokes Martin Scorsese, the source of her titular reference, to bolster her high opinion of The Red Shoes.
Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation.
Maureen then moves onto a colorfully named flick featuring a fellow ginger.
In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange.
And since she got an interview with Scorsese for this column, she carries the color motif into his movies.
It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t).
So if your Netflix queue needs refreshing, you could do worse than to take a few tips from the cinephile of the Op/Ed page. Just make sure the hue on your television can capture all that red.
Oval Man Cave By MAUREEN DOWD Published: October 27, 2009
Since Maureen doesn't golf, she has this challenge:
Since the president is finally willing to let women in on the games, I offered up my own challenge: Scrabble. I’m curious about what X and Z words the smarty-pants Y chief executive can come up with.
There might even be $10 in it for you, Mr. President.
Never has an invitation for a board game looked sexier. I'm in.
There is no love lost between lifetime Catholic Maureen Dowd and the current Vicar of Christ in Rome.
In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”
Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.
Her particular beef is with the treatment of nuns who dare question the increasingly reactionary orthodoxy of The Church.
The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.
She contrasts this Inquisition (and nobody ever expects the Spanish variety) with the rather light wrist-slapping sexually straying male clergy endure.
The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)
She accurately assesses the recent overtures to ultra-conservative breakaway Anglicans as appeals to anti-feminism and homophobia.
As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.
In the age-old doctrinal debates over the celibacy of the priesthood and the ordination of women, Dowd clearly sees what the current Church position is.
Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.
In her column today, Maureen Dowd defends workplace hanky panky:
Office romances abound in life and art (“The Office” has its interoffice wedding this week), and sometimes young staffers are attracted to the boss, and vice versa.
Former Speaker of the House Tom Delay in order to supplement his meager government pension has joined cheesy reality series Dancing With The Stars on the confident assurance that he won't have to do more than three or four episodes. The Huffington Post has the full non-embeddable video here.
And where politics intersects pop culture, you are sure to find Maureen Dowd who is not without some moves of her own. Her signature verbal flourish is the Dowdversion® where the same phrase is repeated in the same sentence with just a little twist. Take this spectacular example:
Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he’s trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have “a strategy to whip the vote” on “Dancing.”
That my friends, is a Double Dowdversion.
Perhaps next season we can get Maureen on the dance floor with Mario Lopez and see if she is as good on the boards as she is at the keyboard.
Maureen Dowd has made many movie allusions about Barack Obama before. Everything from Obambi to Spock. Now she returns to the Sylvester Stallone oeuvre to portray his as a punch-drunk loser.
She has used the action hero before, but with Obama's pit bull chief of staff.
If Obama didn’t have a knife-thrower like Rahmbo in the Oval, Democrats would be totally convinced that the president would fold in a heartbeat.
So her advice to Obama is to start running up those steps with the Bill Conti music in the background.
The president told students on Tuesday that “being successful is hard” and “you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.”
He should take his own words to heart. He can live long and prosper by being less Spocky and more Rocky.
Maureen Dowd has this revelation today about here secret fantasy life:
If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.
As tempting as that lifestyle would be, what prompted that thought was the Battle of The Blonde Bimbo Bloggers.
It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”
Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.
But, according to Dowd, the bigger issue here is the nature of online anonymity.
Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.
And this point I start squirming uncomfortably. Dowd makes a brief half-hearted defense of Pseudonym-Americans as Jon Swift (the anonymous blogger one, not the Irish babies one) calls them us.
Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. {snip}
As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”
But, and there is always a but, Maureen comes down hard on us poor anonymous snarkers.
But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.
Ouch, that hurts. I snark because I love. So Maureen, if you want to know who I really am, don't call the legal department. Just send me an e-mail to dowdreport AT gmail.com. We'll talk.
When Maureen Dowd goes Hollywood, she goes all the way. After seeing a documentary on Vogue editor for life Anna Wintour, she fills a megaplex full of movie allusions. Even the column title is a movie pun. Naturally she starts this Movies With Maureen® marathon with the roman a clef featuring Meryl Streep as Wintour impersonator.
Just like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Wintour can be seen in the new film clutching a Starbucks cup in her office and the back of her chauffeur-driven car.
But Maureen gets to the bottom of how badly Anna treats her help. And it is only a little coincidence that former boyfriend Michael Douglas starred in the movie of the same name.
At the screening Wednesday, towering with gorgeous girls in bondage gladiator heels and threaded with famous designers, one designer not favored by Anna muttered that she was a sartorial Star Chamber who smothered creativity.
But it's not all oldies at the Dowd-plex. For example, she knows about the hot word-of-mouth Iraq war flick.
Indeed, the Vogue priestesses choosing glamour spreads in “The September Issue” seem just as intense as the soldiers in Iraq defusing bombs in “The Hurt Locker.”
But Vogue is an institution and Wintour seems to be something not quite real.
So the question invariably arises: Behind those bangs and dark glasses, is Anna human? Or did she tie Hermès scarves together and make a daring escape from District 9 in a getaway car driven by Oscar de la Renta?
But the magazine is floundering Wintour's helm. Can she keep it from sinking?And if you need a metaphor for a disaster, go big.
The Vogue team and moviemakers didn’t know they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic.
And Maureen Dowd is loving watching the Fashionista-In-Chief go down with the ship.
It's been weeks since Maureen Dowd has thrown out a really interesting pop-cultural reference, but when she returns to form, she does so in a big way with this week's Movies With Maureen® moment. Eschewing her typical chick flick and AMC genres, she goes straight for the high geek euthanasia touchstone.
She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.
It's good to know that Farrah Fawcett's biggest big screen triumph will live on in our memories forever.
Then Dowd doubles down with an even more obscure Separated At Birth call-out.
Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.
You have to really know your Swiss surrealist sculptors to pull that one out of your butt. And just to prove this is no fluke she also throws in a bonus Movie Moment that doubles as an Alliteration Alert™.
So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion.
Today's column is done in faux-Palin speak, a time honored Dowd gimmick guaranteed to keep wingnuts revved up about how Maureen Dowd is jealous and snobby and elitist. Therefore, it's helpful to review the source material to show that if anything Maureen with her innate need for complete sentences and coherent thoughts is actually undershooting the parody potential.
And there a few other pop cultural references to be illustrated.
I posed for a cheesecake shot in Runner’s World with short-shorts and a crumpled American flag that’s destined to be on the bedroom wall of every conservative 12-year-old boy. It’s the metaphor, stupid! Heck yeah, I’m running! As I learned when I was a beauty contestant — flags and gams show you it’s about country.
And before you say anything though about the glam shots of me stretching and preening on the waterfront in my cute running outfits, don’t bother. That would be a sexist double standard.
It’s just like when Obama, the One Who Must Be Obeyed, said his family was off-limits so everyone left them alone. But they never left mine alone. Thank goodness for that though because we hate being out of the limelight! It was a blast to see Bristol with my grandbaby Tripp on the cover of People as the ambassadress of abstinence!
But Maureen, through Fake Palin, knows what is really driving Sarah. Caribou Barbie has eyes fixed on an bigger race.
It’s about me running the country.
It’s about me running.
It’s about me.
The game Dowd is playing is that by posing phony Palin as a presidential hopeful it might force Sarah into some sort of non-denial that can be used against her latter. But then Maureen falls into wishful thinking.
The media doesn’t get Sarah Palin. I hear planes buzzing. Oh, no!! Have they all left??
Maureen Dowd likes to go on little riffs where she puts in as many puns on a theme as she can. Today she has two different trends going based on Sarah Palin's surprise resignation.
Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.
As is clear from the example above, in this column she is combining references to mental illness with examples from the animal kingdom. She is clearly trying to pack in as many of each as possible, so let's keep score. With the addition of 'caribou' that gives the critters a 2-1 lead.
Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).
'Battiness' could go either way, so we will give each side a point there. And while 'gnawing' is often done by mad dogs, it doesn't rise to the level of a full reference.
The White House can drive its inhabitants loopy.
That's a slam-dunk for the crazy category. but then we have another tough call.
As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.
Since 'salmon' isn't used as a metaphor, we are going to disqualify that, but we do give full credit for 'meltdown.'
On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness to a small group in her Wasilla yard. Gobsmacked Alaska politicians, Republican big shots, the national press, her brother, the D.C. lawyer who helped create her political action committee and yes, even Fox News, played catch-up.
Here we give the fauna a 'fowl' shot with 'incoherent' scoring on the rebound. No points for 'Cub' since that is an aviation reference and not an avian one. We would love to give 'Fox News' a point, but without an accompanying 'crazy as' it falls short.
She can hunt wolves from the air and field-dress a moose, but she fears being a lame duck? Some brickbats over her ethics and diva turns as John McCain’s running mate, and that dewy skin turns awfully thin.
Then the wildife goes on a hat trick tear with a bonus point coming from 'brickbat'. The crazy side gets a mercy score with 'diva.'
Maybe there’s another red Naughty Monkey high heel to drop — there’s often a hidden twist in Sarah’s country-music melodramas. Or is this a reckless high-speed escape from small-pond Alaska, where her popularity is dropping, to the big time Below?
The primate-named footwear call-out scores as does the 'reckless' remark, but 'small-pond' goes in the basket as well.
Even some conservative analysts admitted that the governor’s move seemed ga-ga before venturing the spin that Palin might be “crazy like a fox,” as Sarah’s original cheerleader, Bill Kristol, put it.
We finally get our 'crazy as a fox' call-out as a quote from the equally unhinged Kristol Meth. Under normal circumstances the use of 'cheerleader' would be worth mentioning as the second sports metaphor of the column, but the other trends are having a barnburner of match.
Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”
'Crazy Town' is also a Betty Boop short with this IMDB description:
Betty Boop and Bimbo take a wild streetcar ride to Crazy Town, where birds swim, fish fly, and everthing else reverses normal behavior.
The birds and fishes reference is too oblique to count so this one scores only on 'Crazy'. While that is stretch for a Movies With Maureen moment, the next paragraph is a clear Crossword Clue. That also doubles as an Alliteration Alert.
Palin’s speech is classic casuistry.
.The NYT handy pop-up dictionary defines it as "Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead" so we will give it to the unhinged side of the column.
Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town.
In another instant replay situation, 'milk' doesn't cut the mustard and 'fish' only scores once.
Sometimes, she explained, if you’re the star, you have to “call an audible and pass the ball” and leave at halftime, “so the team can win” somehow without you.
To round out the column, we get another misplaced sports metaphor, but then Maureen finishes strong.
The musher must jump out of the dogsled when warmer climes call. As Palin’s spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, says, “The world is literally her oyster.”
And the final score is: Nutty: 10 Puppy: 14
But the real winners are the voters of Alaska who no longer have to deal with this batshit crazy squirrelly nutjob. Now if only the rest of the country could say the same.
With Mark Sanford's serial weepy confession still playing out, Maureen Dowd is offering up advice to the overlooked victim in these scandals, the political wife. Here is an illustrated guide to some of the more salient points.
Stay away from the press conference.
Stoicism at the skunk’s side is overrated and, as Larry Craig’s wife learned, sunglasses don’t help.
The press is not your friend.
If you can’t maintain a dignified Silda Spitzer silence; ... go to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or even Deepak Chopra before crying to The A.P. A news wire is not a spiritual adviser.
Keep the kids at home.
Don’t bring the children into it. They suffer enough being the kids of politicians. Don’t trot out the family on “Oprah,” as Elizabeth Edwards did.
Really, keep the kids out of it.
Even if you’re a clever, competent woman, you risk sounding like a stereotypical harridan if you use the kids as a bludgeon and tell the press, as Jenny did: “You would think that a father who didn’t have contact with his children, if he wanted those children, he would toe the line a little bit.”
Stay above the fray.
Don’t trash a mistress, as Hillary and Elizabeth did, as a wacky stalker. No one — except the wife — blames the girlfriend as much as they blame the husband.
Bonus advice to the Other Woman: Keep the cameras in the drawer.
And just when you thought John Edwards could not sink any lower, there is news of a sex tape, in which Rielle Hunter shows off her skills not only in videography but pornography.
(See this post for some of her more tasteful filmic efforts.)
And finally: Make lemonade out of lemons.
Cut your losses and keep going. Don’t let yourself get dragged into his drama or your reputation may follow his down the well. Hillary refused to let that happen. She salvaged her long investment in Bill Clinton and turned a profit when she became a senator.
There you have them, Maureen Dowd's advice to the wronged. Because two wrongs don't make a right, but do make a delightfully catty op-ed column.
In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.
Her use of 'amante' for 'lover' also foreshadows her comparisons to come.
She also wastes no time getting right to her Movies With Maureen® Moment, a romcom from 2006, proving that Dowd has been to the theater since Audrey Hepburn died. (She does manage to namecheck Roman Holiday before the end of the column.)
He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie “The Holiday,” presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives.
And Maureen is often called emasculating but it rarely gets as obvious as this:
He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.
That rhetorical flourish is her patented Dowdversion® where she directly compares and contrasts two things using similar phrasing. The entire rest of the column is one long Dowdversion as she contrasts Sanford's parsimonious public political image with his Latin lover (or at least Latin-loving) alter ego who she dubs Marco.
penny-pinching millionaire Mark, who used to sleep on a futon in his Congressional office and once treated two congressmen to movie refreshments by bringing back a Coke and three straws.
Marco, international man of mystery and suave god of sex and tango.
Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment
Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires
Mark is a conservative railing against sinners;
Marco sins liberally.
Mark opposes gay marriage as a threat to traditional marriage.
Marco thinks nothing of risking his own traditional marriage, and celebrates transgressive relationships.
Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes and index cards...
Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress.
Mark is so selfish he tried to enhance his presidential chances by resisting South Carolina’s share of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, callously giving the back of his hand to the suffering state’s most vulnerable — the jobless and poor and black students.
Marco is generous, promising to send a memento of affection that Maria wants to keep by her bed.
Mark hates lying. As he said of Bill’s dalliance with Monica, “If you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.”
Marco lies with brio, misleading his family, his lieutenant governor, his staff and his state about his whereabouts, even packing camping equipment to throw off the scent from South America.
Mark, who disdains rascals, agreed that he wouldn’t [skip off to the other woman].
Marco, who is a rascal, skipped off.
Dowd sums up with the reason that Republican sex scandals are so juicy (even though she got her Pulitzer for Clinton's and has covered Edwards' with brio.)
Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.
The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.
Until then pundits will continue to play the Marco Polo game of catching hypocrites trying to weave and dodge when their transgressions are unmasked.
The End of This Road
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When I left on hiatus a few weeks ago, I had every intention of coming back
after an extended break. I thought there might be a possibility the break
would...
July Forecast: Storm Clouds Over Cleveland
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A pair of articles are worth considering side by side today. The first
comes via Politico and deals with the likelyhood that the GOP nomination
race wil...
Fun With Monogamy, Vol. MMCDLXXXI
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TELEVISION Blitherer: The baby's name will be George Alexander Louis. My
Poor Wife: Damn! I was hoping for “Dakota”!
Tripping on Twizzlers
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*I was a liberal Democrat when I was young. I used to wear a green Army
jacket with political buttons on it — for Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, John
F. K...
Sometimes There Are No Words
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One of my favorite bloggers and frequent commenters has suffered a terrible
loss.
Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.
