You Go, Gallfriend!

Updated 11/6/07

Gift of Gall
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 4, 2007

Gall [gawl]–noun
1. impudence; effrontery.
2. bile, esp. that of an animal.
3. something bitter or severe.
4. bitterness of spirit; rancor.
Synonyms 1. nerve, audacity, brass, cheek.
-Dictionary.com

Speaking of nerve, Maureen has been watching too much of The View and has picking up the patois of that estrogen fest. Take for example:

Girlfriend had a rough week.

And

I must rush to a sister’s defense.

Which of course she doesn’t. If the feminists were outraged over Dowd’s previous treatment of Hillary Clinton, she pours gasoline on the fire this week. She begins with a baseball metaphor more tortured than a Gitmo ghost detainee.

First Hillary got brushed back by the boys in the debate. Then some women bemoaned Hillaryland’s “Don’t hit me, I’m a girl” strategy.

Then we go to the Dylan allusion:

But she can break, just like a little girl, when male chauvinists are rude enough to catch her red-handed being slippery and opportunistic.

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Ev'rybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.
-Bob Dylan, "Just Like A Woman"

Much better is her reversal of the famous Harry Truman saying “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Sometimes when Hillary takes heat, she gets paranoid and controlling. But this time she took the heat by getting into the kitchen.

Dowd then goes to examples of Hillary and her campaign milking the victimhood while trying to toughen up her image.

Meanwhile, she let her aides below the fray stir up fem-outrage by putting a video on the campaign Web site called “The Politics of Pile On,” edited to highlight men ganging up on her to the tune of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.”

And remember the time Hillville used a Washington Post story about a sighting of the senator’s cleavage in the Senate to spearhead a fund-raising drive with women? Dollars for décolletage. Genius!

No, Mo, your penchant for alliteration is genius! And "Politics of Pile-On" (video here) is coming awfully close to working your side of the street with the alliterative title, mid-brow opera soundtrack, and mild sports metaphor. Just remember that sincerity is the most flattering imitation.

It was Pulitzer Prize rival Robin Givhan that made the mountains out of those particular molehills. Keeping with the fashion beat approach, Dowd takes another incident of the week and inverts that metaphor as well.

That may be why she recently blew off a Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz at the last minute, according to Liz Smith: to show solidarity with supporters who can’t afford Vogue frocks.

She was always kind enough to let Bill hide behind her skirts when he got in trouble with women. Now she deserves to hide behind her own pantsuits when men cause her trouble.

And Dowd projects just a little when calling for the clucking commentariat to back-off on the “disgrace to feminism” tirades.

When pundettes tut-tut that playing the victim is not what a feminist should do, they forget that Hillary is not a feminist. If she were merely some clichéd version of a women’s rights advocate, she never could have so effortlessly blown off Marian Wright Edelman and Lani Guinier when Bill first got in, or played the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign.

Marian Wright Edelman was a close friend and mentor of Hillary until they became estranged over various slights during Bill’s half of the Clinton Interregnum. Similarly, Lani Guinier was a close ally dropped like a hotcake when her views were too liberal for confirmation.

The Cupcake Fury takes us back to the kitchen, but whether Dowd is talking about Gennifer Flowers or Hillary's recent Letterman Cupcake Promise is lost within the recursive mind of Maureen. But she can’t get any clearer on her much repeated assertion that Hillary has one goal: Get elected.

There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.
That’s the beauty of Hillary.

And you don’t need a fashion editor to know that kind of beauty is more than skin deep. It goes all the way to the gall and bile.


Update (11/6/07): Thanks to Jessica McBride for highlighting a particularly relevant John Irving reference:

Mark Penn presided over a conference call on Wednesday to rally supporters to the idea of a fem-backlash, during which one devoted Ellen Jamesian suggested that Tim Russert “should be shot.” The woman quickly repented, not the sentiment, but the fact that she shouldn’t have said it on a conference call. (NBC security remained on high alert.)

In The World According To Garp, the Ellen James Society was a group of radical feminists that cut off their tongues in symbolic sympathy with an eleven-year-old rape victim named Ellen James. As always, Dowd is able to reach into the recesses of 1970s pop literature and pull out the absolutely perfect metaphor.

Blog Watch: French Feminist Felines

Nothing brings out the DowdHaters like a good attack on a Democrat. When MoDo launched her left-handed Left Bank compliment to Hillary on Wednesday, it was bound to grab some attention. Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire thought it was a disgrace to feminism:

It's hardly news that Maureen Dowd is a shallow, bitchy Mean Girl more interested in fashion and surfaces than policy. Her place on the NYTimes opinion page reveals the lie that feminism has accomplished all it needed to and we're done with it: she's taking a place which rightly belongs to Digby or Echidne or Katha Pollitt and filling it with gossipy crap, confirming with every word she writes snotty misogynist ideas about what women are interested in and what they're "really" like.

Zachary Drake would prefer the Times replace Dowd with Digby. As a dude, he can’t get as worked up about the feminism angle so he rants about why being French is some sort of veiled insult:

Maureen Dowd's gossipy style has always bothered me. It seems to reduce politics to some sort of middle school playground ritual about who is cool and who is not. And Dowd seems to often use silly comparisons and inversions that don't really illuminate anything.

And what was "French" about reforming American health care? Every industrialized nation has some kind of national health care, not just the French. She could have called it European, or Canadian, or British. And even if these characterizations were accurate, what do the alleged American-ness of Sarkozy and Frenchness of Clinton tell us about anything? What underlying dynamic is illuminated? What mystery is made clear? What policy implications does it have? It's not even very juicy gossip.

Speaking of Echidne, she pretty much nails the beef Dowd has with Hillary standing by her man.

You see, it's important to point out that Hillary is not a real feminist, because she elected to stay in a marriage after her husband's infidelity was revealed to all and sundry. Real feminists bugger off the minute such an insult is revealed, and real feminists are all about emotions.

It's less exciting to note that their ideas of feminism seem to include the demand that a woman is responsible for fixing the consequences of her husband's peccadillos, that all "less sophisticated" women need Hillary Clinton to defend them, and that for someone to be a girlfriend she must dish out all the dirt on her husband's infidelities and especially her own guilt in not somehow keeping him off those other women. But I do admit that I'd love to hear Rudy Giuliani dish out all the dirt on his own infidelities, girlfriend to girlfriend. Then we could braid each other's hair before we'd go out to vote together.

With friends like Maureen Dowd do Democrats even need any enemies?

At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin explains the whole Socks incident (and sneaks in a namedrop):

Dominatrix-detesting Dowd barged onto my breakfast table with the arresting report that Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic was "particularly bothered by Hillary’s callousness in dumping Socks, the beloved White House cat and best-selling author, on Bill’s former secretary Betty Currie."

On which momentous matter, Sidney Blumenthal writes me as follows: "Socks was Chelsea's cat. Bill got Buddy the dog. Buddy and Socks didn't get along. Chelsea went to college. Betty liked Socks and took him home. So, this is about Hillary's character?"

There you have it. Four bloggers from the left ready to throw MoDo off the island the minute she goes off message. And they call Maureen catty. Meooow.