Meaty Metaphors

Tim Geithner! Why Are Rich People So Cheap?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 13, 2009

It's one of those psychological effects that when you are deprived of something, your thoughts tend to fixate on that item. Let's do a textual analysis of today's Maureen Dowd column and see if we can find any clues to her New Year's resolutions.

With Chelsea sitting protectively behind in a plum dress and glam ’40s hairdo — Bill was watching on TV with his mother-in-law — Hillary showed the reasons she could be a star at state and queen of Obama’s hot nerds.

Getting warm? Let's try this passage:

She was on top of all the issues, no matter how obscure. She batted around our “stale” arctic policy — who knew? — with Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who doesn’t seem to realize we’re sick of Alaska.

She was up to date on the inevitable Law of the Sea Treaty.

What was a suspicion becomes a tortured metaphor:

She ladled up the broth of flattery expected in the Senate with a chef’s finesse. Even after Senator Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the panel that was questioning her, tut-tutted that her links to Bill Clinton’s foundation carry the “risk” of foreign governments “and entities” trying to curry favor with Madam Secretary by donating money to her husband, she deftly buttered up Lugar.

By now, even I am hungry. We even get some old-timey foodie references.

After enduring endless pompous lecturing from John Kerry on what she should read and think — a thinly veiled attempt to show the world that he would have made a better secretary of state, and indeed, thinks he was promised it by Obama — Hillary slathered on the oleo.

And after dinner, some digestive release is called for.

After his windy discourse on how scientists had “revised the levels of supportable greenhouse gas emissions from 550 parts per million to 450 to now 350,” Hillary replied: “You are eloquent in describing it, and you’ve been a leader in trying to sound the alarm on it for many years.”

We have waded deep into Mike Myers flatulence joke territory here. But it's not all food and fart jokes. Having exhausted the culinary attacks, she repurposes some old metaphors. It used to be The Nepotism Tango, but Hillary has switched partners and it's now Obama she is doing the forbidden dance with.

Obama and Hillary continue to be engaged in an intense tango.

And her image of Obama as Herculean hero is as sharp as ever.

Cleaning out the Augean stables was nothing compared to this task, with Obama trying to bend Hillary and Bill to his will, while they try to bend him to theirs.

And to get the obvious out of the way, the titular reference to Tim Geithner was a complete red herring. The point of the column was to dish up leftovers about Hillary. Because as long as there is a Clinton in the kitchen, Maureen will never go hungry for material.

By The Numbers

Two for the Price of Two
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 18, 2008

This column is just a continuation of Maureen Dowd’s piece from Sunday discussing the merits of Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State. As such, let’s run the numbers.

One Dowdversion®:

Just as Bill elevated his sprawling, chaotic personality into a management style, so Barry is elevating his spare, calm personality into a management style.

Two Alliteration Alerts™:

But then Obama surpised Bill and Hillary by offering her a chance at the secretary of state job. Maybe because the Clintonian perspective on anyone who opposes them tends to be paranoid, the couple wasn’t expecting such a magnanimous move and they were pleased to be drawn back in from the margins.

And in turn, Bill is doing all he can — he’s disclosing sketchy donors and business interests and figuring out how he could curb his global gallavanting to have fewer conflicts of interest — to help her get the job.

53 percent of the popular vote:

But 42 will probably always be somewhat steamed at 44. Not only because of the Obama camp calling him out on his racially coded poison darts in South Carolina. Bill is surely jealous that his Democratic successor got a majority of the popular vote with 53 percent;

500,000 dollars:

It says it all that, at the moment Washington became obsessed with news that Hillary was a contender for State, Bill was getting a half-million for an hour’s worth of chat sponsored by the National Bank of Kuwait, delivered from behind a podium with a camel and Arabic lettering on it.

One very left-handed compliment:

But why support Hillary for Madam Secretary if you don’t her for Madam President?

“I don’t think they’re the same job at all, do you?” [David Geffen] replied.

I told him I agreed. Completely.

Which I guess counts as the official Maureen Dowd endorsement.

With Frenemies Like This...

Frenemy: Someone who is both friend and enemy, a relationship that is both mutually beneficial or dependent while being competitive, fraught with risk and mistrust.

-Urban Dictionary

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

-Michael Corleone

Team of Frenemies
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 16, 2008

After two good months of having Sarah Palin to kick around, Maureen Dowd is forced to return to her raison d’être, bashing Clintons. Senator Hillary Clinton is being floated as trial balloon for Secretary of State and Maureen is there to insure as much lead gets loaded as needed. Her basic argument comes down to “Why, for God’s sake why?”

There are Obama aides and supporters who are upset that The One who won on change has ushered in déjà vu all over again. The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites.

For one thing, she points out that the prolonged primary fight created a lot of ill-will between the camps. And Bill Clinton is one to carry a grudge. In a gold-trimmed briefcase.

As Newsweek reported, last January Bill got so worked up in a phone call with Donna Brazile that he ranted, “If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service.” The magazine also revealed that “the former president had amassed an 81-page list of all the unfair and nasty things the Obama campaign had said, or was alleged to have said, about Hillary Clinton.”

And the Obama camp is being very thorough in vetting their potential nominees to avoid any Lani Guinier episodes right from the get-go. And it’s a list that the Clintons with their baggage probably wouldn’t pass if it weren’t for name recognition.

If Hillary wants to be Madame Secretary, Bill will have to put away the 81-page list and pick up the 63 questions in the Obama vetting questionnaire, an unprecedented deep probe of potential cabinet members and their spouses.

Heh, heh, she said "probe." But I digress.

Even if Bill scurries past the questions on sexual harassment claims, conflicts of interest, civil suits, real estate holdings, federal investigations, diaries, gifts worth more than $50 and Internet aliases, the Clintons will still have to grapple with No. 8: “Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.” (It would take books, and it has.)

Their disclosure form would be the first to include a bibliography. But Maureen takes delight in one question in particular.

Not to mention No. 62: “Do you know anyone or any organization ... that might take steps, overtly or covertly, fairly or unfairly, to criticize your nomination, including any news organization?”

Does the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” ring any bells? Not to mention that Dowd herself would require her own entry on this list.

Besides, there are other people on the Foggy Bottom short-list who might be miffed at being stepped-over by the carpetbagger from New York.

You can hear the gnashing of teeth from John Kerry — who thought the job was promised to him in return for his endorsement after New Hampshire — and Bill “Judas” Richardson, who met Friday with Obama in Chicago to discuss the job.

The “Judas” nickname is not Maureen’s doing. It was given to Richardson by Clinton spear-carrier James Carville as told by the news side of the Times when Richardson endorsed Obama instead of Clinton.

The reaction of some of Mr. Clinton’s allies suggests that might have been a wise decision. “An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

To telegraph the camps a little more clearly, Maureen goes on to quote Carville’s Corleone-esque advice in the next paragraph.

And Joe Biden would probably like a little less blond ambition at State so he could be the shadow secretary. But as James Carville has said, a campaign is the time to stab your enemies and a transition is the time to stab your friends.

And blond ambition is as close to a Movies With Maureen® as we are going to get, although I suspect she was playing off of the John Dean tell-all rather than the Jessica Simpson stinker.

Since this is essentially a by-the books anti-Clinton screed that Maureen keeps on hand for rainy days, let’s just hit the trademarked telltales:

The Alliteration Alert® (with bonus points for a glass ceiling crack):

And why should the woman who made 18 million cracks go back to being junior to Chuck Schumer, if she could be toasted from Dublin to Dubai?

A Dowdversion®:

On the down side, Hillary would be taking over a big and demoralized government bureaucracy, after proving with her campaign that she does not know how to run a big and demoralized group of people.

The Crossword Clue of the Week®:

How, one may ask, can he put Hillary — who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment — in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?

And finally while not a trademarked feature, no mention of Clintons can go without a few potshots at the Big Dog.

If you have a president who’s willing to open up his universe to other smart, strong people, if you have a big dog who shares his food dish, the Bill Clinton era is truly over.

Appointing a Clinton in the cabinet would be so un-Clintonian.

And if that were the case, how would Maureen know how to react?

Cat Fight Of The Century

Norm Gunderson: [rubbing Margie's pregnant stomach] Two more months.
Marge Gunderson: [smiling] Two more months.

-Fargo (last lines)

Clash of the Titans
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 6, 2008

Maureen Dowd misses Hillary Clinton. As much as she despised the pantsuited one, she wishes she was around to take Sarah Palin down a notch.

If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda.

In Dowd’s wrestling ring of Rude Names®, Ma Barker is the WSJ nickname that Dowd used back in March. Barracuda is the moniker Palin gained in her hoops days. Maureen sizes up the two hypothetical opponents.

The two women are both aggressive pols who take disagreement personally, accruing a body count of rivals, and who have been known to exaggerate their accomplishments. But in ideological terms, the gun-toting hockey mom and the shot-swilling Warrior Queen of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits are opposites.

To become governor, Palin defeated an incumbent Republican in the primary and then took on an ex-governor to take the governor’s mansion. Hillary’s enemies include, well, let’s not even get started. Ironically, it’s the now mythical Estonian vodka contest with McCain that gives Clinton her alcohol imbibing vibe. And we mix a Royalty Metaphor® with Hillary’s sartorial salute to her PUMAs.

Since Hillary is not on the ticket, Dowd has fantasized a scenario where McCain wins the 2008 election, Palin forces him to step aside and she takes on Hillary in the 2012 race. This is all to set up a trademarked DowdDebate™ where she gets to put all her catty cut-downs in the mouths of her characters. This faux-bate is full of all sorts of trivia and asides so hang on tight because we are going to go fast.

PALIN: Before we start, Hillary, I want to honor your achievement in 2008. You nicked the glass ceiling. But in the end, as my friend Cheryl Metiva from Wasilla Bible Church said, I was more of a woman and more of a man than you, so I was the one who actually busted up the old boys’ club. Sorry I called you a whiner about sexism. That was before I realized how handy the victim card can be against the press wolves. In Alaska, we just gun down wolves from the air.

Pretty head-spinning when the head of the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce is a national figure. Metiva did give Palin that gender-bending compliment, but Maureen adds the boys club crack. And Dowd connects the real practice of aerial wolf hunting with the metaphorical sexists in the press.

We get a brief reprise of the Subtle Sabotage Strategy®, but the caged bird metaphor is all Dowd:

CLINTON: I do give you and John credit, Sarah, for following my blueprint to reveal Obama as all cage, no bird. {snip}

PALIN: {snip} While you got to go to your snooty Wellesley, I had to switch colleges six times in six years. While you got to go to Yale Law, I had to enter beauty contests and turn my back to judges in a bathing suit to get scholarship money.

And this is a double cheap shot by Dowd, dredging up Palin’s presumably pallid academic career and her 1984 second runner-up placing in Miss Alaska. As if journalism majors and beauty queens can’t become president.

In another two-fer, Maureen points out that Palin supports creationism and sports pricy glasses worthy of being seen with McCain’s Ferragamos.

CLINTON: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Annie Oakley. Dinosaurs disappeared a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. I admit you’ve had a profound influence on America, and I’m not just talking about all the women wearing up-dos and rimless titanium $375 Kazuo Kawasaki designer frames.

And then Dowd’s Sock Puppet Hillary really lays into Palin. In this hypothetical future, McCain has edged us towards a dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale proportions.

CLINTON: You said you wanted to help women, but you’ve only hurt them with your silly mantra that women can have it all if they just work harder and pray harder. You put Medicare on eBay. You cut funding for special-needs children. The Dobson Supreme Court has outlawed abortion, evolution and gun control. With sex education banned, baby bumps in high schools are rampant. And the head of your Abstinence Outreach Program, Levi Johnston, has failed to force any other teenage fathers to marry their prom dates.

Dowd is pointing out that this election will have a major impact on major wedge issues such as the Supreme Court and reproductive rights. And while doing so, she slips in a side reference to the discredited tale of selling the state jet on eBay and a snide reference to Palin’s future son-in-law. Not stopping at the social issues, Maureen also points out that oil interests will be well represented in a McCain/Palin administration. But she saves the last shot for Fake Future Hillary:

CLINTON: Adios, Sister Sarah. You’re tough, but I’ve been tougher longer. Slide out of town on that oil slick you made on the Mall. And take that Grizzly throw with you.

There really is a genuine bearskin in the Alaska Oval Office. By giving Clinton the last word, Dowd is declaring war. Maureen Dowd has a new target and she is going to spend the next two months shooting Barracuda in a barrel.

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.

Subtle Sabotage Strategy Conspircacy Revealed

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.

Dowd then notes that McCain’s current campaign echoes the themes that were field tested against Obama in the primaries:

“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.

While hammering at Hillary is the main focus of the column, Dowd does slip in two Too Thin To Win™ swipes:

“I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.”

“…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.”

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.

“…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.

It’s in these fantasy columns that Maureen really lets the wretched rhetoric fly. Perhaps inspired by the Olympic diving competition, she goes for an unheard of degree of difficulty by combining an Alliteration Alert®, a Dowdversion™ and a stale Pop Cultural Reference all into one paragraph.

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.

Whether Dowd is proved out to a cranky Cassandra or a prescient predictor remains to be seen, but it is clear who Maureen sees as the real enemy of The One. Hint: Her husband helped Maureen win a Pulitzer.

Un-Convention-al Wisdom

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.

We also get two Shakespeare allusions, both involving mad royalty that have had their thrones stolen from them.

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.

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.

And the Royalty Theme® is also alluded to in this quasi-quote:

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.

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.

Hilarity In Unity

“It’s Over, Lady!”
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 29, 2008

Let's get all the hilarity out of the way and count every nitty gritty "ity" word used in today's Maureen Dowd column:

Unity(1) was spared the banality(2) of unanimity(3).

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity(4), duality(5) and ferocity(6) in Unity.

Hillary beat Maureen to the Alliteration Alert®, so Dowd goes and quotes it:

Just as Hillary was testing out the unfamiliar familiarity(7) “Barack and me” Friday and talking about “his grace and his grit,” Carmella began loudly booing and waving her sign.

This amenity(8) did not stop the disunity(9).

And the Movies With Maureen®; goes back to West Side Story:

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity(10) on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity(11) in the Unity humidity(12).

And it's not a campaign column without a swipe at the Big Dog.

But the former president can’t stand being a loser, so he’s taking it out on the winner. When it comes to Bill, there’s a lot of vanity(13) but very little humility(14) in Unity.

And in this week's inexplicably tin-eared call-out, is there perhaps a less appropriate Tom Wolfe allusion to the grandson of a Lau tribesman than flack catching with the mau-maus?

It’s hard to fathom why Obama should be mau-maued into paying off the debt that Hillary and Bill accrued attacking and undermining him...

And with that we can go back to questioning Maureen's sanity(∞).

Et Tu, MoDo?

Watch Out, Meryl Streep!
She’s a Master Thespian.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 8, 2008

Maureen Dowd comes not to praise the Clinton campaign, but to bury it.

…through humiliation and pain, she has shown herself to be a skilled survivor. She said she embraces the old saying, “Fake it till you make it.”

With Hillary singing her swan song, the Movies With Maureen® is no longer Elizabeth and Essex like it was back in March, but Norma Rae:

…as a presidential candidate, she morphed from Queen Elizabeth I to Norma Rae, as Newsweek put it.

Let’s put the Newsweek quote into context.

While Clinton veered between playing Queen Elizabeth I and Norma Rae, Obama and his team chugged along with a superior 50-state campaign strategy, racking up the delegates.

There is a bigger metaphor here. Queen Elizabeth was reluctant monarch who went on to rule her country during one of its greatest eras. Norma Rae was a hardscrabble working woman who organized her coworkers in a seemingly hopeless struggle. Hillary in the course of the campaign had gone from the heir apparent to the the scrappy underdog only without the strings-swelling happy ending.

To belabor the Royalty Metaphor®, Hillary is about to be marginalized as the leader of a constituency that the Democratic Party needs rather than becoming its standard bearer.

She will help Obama be king, if he lets her be queen of the women.

…she started her presidential campaign wearing an off-putting ermine robe of entitlement and presumption.

And the "ermine robe of entitlement" leads us to this week's Alliteration Alerts®:

After the roiling rollout of the Clinton administration, a sad and unnerved Hillary sought answers from self-help gurus like Jean Houston.

She still doesn’t believe Obama can win, but she knows she can move ahead only as a beguiler, not a begrudger.

Or maybe Hillary’s grit and gall allowed them to easily envision her cuffing generals and dictators.

But Maureen keeps her eye on the big picture and surmises:

I don’t believe Hillary’s campaign will cause a backlash. As long as her Denver Liberation Army doesn’t cause Obama to lose, it may well be good for women.

And while the DLA RudeName® conjures images of strident, comfortable shoe-wearing Clintonistas marching on the convention, Dowd manages a few more wisps of faint praise:

Hillary thrillingly proved herself the best debater and the toughest candidate while being shorter and having the higher voice.

She didn’t lose because she was a woman. She didn’t lose because America isn’t ready for a woman as president. She lost because of her own — and her husband’s and Mark Penn’s — fatal missteps.

And with that less than elegant oratory, the last nail is hammered into the coffin of the courageous but outfought Clinton campaign. Now it's Hillary's turn to see if she can win awards in the supporting roles because her supporters really like her.

No Happy Ending

She’s Still Here!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 4, 2008

Part of the drama of the primary season has been watching Maureen Dowd scramble every Tuesday night to stick some news peg into her Wednesday column. Her sportswriter training taught her a valuable tip about writing on deadline: Have all the post-game analysis written before the players take the field. That way all you have to do is stick the scores in the right place and file the article before last call.

The “winner” of the final primary has been a foregone conclusion for a while and pundits have been waiting for the Kabuki theater to play out. The only suspense has been what will Hillary say. And if you were expecting a gracious concession, you’d be disappointed. Here is Dowd’s sigh of exasperation with one final none-too-subtly disguised Obambi:

He thought a little thing like winning would stop her?

Oh, Bambi.

Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.

If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

And the acceptance line is first of several Dowdversions®. The much better one is:

But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever.

As befits a valedictory farewell, several common Dowd themes are recalled, dusted off, and buffed up. If Bill Clinton is The Big Dog, then Hillary is a yappie Jack Russell Terrier that refuses to admit to being outmatched:

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency.

And potency is just one of a few emasculating asides. Seriously, can anyone else get away with calling Barrack a sistah?

Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

And Maureen will use that Iranian rhyming slang until her last dying day.

Another common theme is Obama as Magical Negro, although perhaps with a devilish twist:
As he was reaching the magic number of delegates, she was devilishly stealing the spotlight.
We get yet another random Movies With Maureen® reference to Gone With The Wind :

She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes.

In order to inject some actual analysis, she posits two theories about Hillary’s against all hope last ditch strategy:

Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

Rather than dwell on the RFK analogy, I prefer to call this the We Are Marshall Strategy. Accidents happen and it is best to be prepared. Either theory relies on Obama listening to the demands that Hillary has earned a place on the ticket. And Maureen has a response:

“It would be,” said one influential Democrat, “like finding out there’s no tooth fairy.”

And Hillary knows all about fairy tales. She just can’t quite catch that happy-ever-after ending. In the meantime she is just sitting in the theater watching the credits roll wondering what happened to her script.

Meet The Press: It's Poppycock

Rather than have boring guests full of talking points, this week's Meet The Press had a double-stacked panel. Maureen Dowd was one of the six guests along with David Brody, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ruth Marcus, Jon Meacham & Gwen Ifill. Gwen seems to be filling in the black woman chair for Michele Norris who was a pre-announced guest but didn't appear.

A lot of television punditry is a little canned and if you follow a columnist you are very likely to hear lines from current or future columns. George Will is notoriously famous for recycling his on air bon mots. Maureen Dowd is no different. Here is her take on Hillary's RFK gaffe which liberally paraphrases the best paragraph form her latest column:

Well, I think her timing was excruciatingly bad. I mean, right after the anniversary of King's death, right before the anniversary of Bobby's death, right when we learn the tragic news about Teddy Kennedy, and right when she and Bill seem engaged in kind of a hostile takeover of Obama's vice presidential mansion. So, beyond that, I think it gave delegates and a lot of Democrats the creeps, because basically the only reason she is still is in the race is that something bad will happen. Of course she doesn't wish him bodily harm, but she does want--she does wish him ill in the sense that they want a big horrible story that would debilitate him to break

Russert later asks Dowd about the Clintons blaming 'misogyny' and 'gender bias' as the reason for Hillary's campaign hitting the rocks. Her "it's poppycock" line is already gaining attention in the blogosphere.

I think it's poppycock, really. I mean, Hillary Clinton has allowed women to visualize a woman as president for the first time, in the way Colin Powell allowed people to visualize an African-American. And she dominated the debates, she, she proved that a woman can have as much tenacity and gall as any man on earth. We, we can visualize her facing down Ahmadinejad. But the thing is, Hillary hurts feminism when she uses it as opportunism. And she has a history of covering up her own mistakes behind sexism. She did it with health care right after health care didn't pass. She didn't admit that she was abrasive or mismanaged it or blew off good advice or was too secretive. She said that she was a Rorschach test for gender and that many men thought of a female boss they didn't like when they looked at her. And now she's doing the same thing, and it's very--you know, in a way it's the moral equivalent of Sharptonism. It's this victimhood and angry and turning women against men and saying that the men are trying to take it away from us, in the same way she's turning Florida and Michigan and riling up and comparing them to suffragettes and slaves. And it's very damaging to feminism.

She returns to that same topic just a little bit later:

It's inexplicable, because Harold Ickes, who works for Hillary, helped write these rules, right, about the caucuses. So I, you know, the--there's--Michelle Cottle has a piece in The New Republic quoting different people anonymously inside the Clinton campaign about saying what went wrong, and one of them said that the mismanagement of money borders on fraud, because this was someone who had raised a quarter of a billion dollars and still now has had to give 20 million of her own money because of mismanagement and still didn't have a campaign in half the states she needed.

On the other side of the spectrum, John McCain had to distance himself from Reverend Hagee who saw Hitler's persecution of the Jews as a mixed blessing.

I think it's always better not to riff on Hitler. And here's a guy who thinks we're in a nice little cult called the Catholic Church, and McCain stuck with him after that. But then when he got in trouble with the Jews, that was one too many, you know, ethnic groups that McCain couldn't offend, so he dropped him. But it makes you miss the McCain who, you know, stood up against the agents of tolerance rather than pander to them.

McCain also tried to make some jokes about the rather thin resume of Barack Obama, only it didn't come off as that funny. At least not to Maureen:

I think we learn something very interesting from this exchange. For one thing, McCain really doesn't like Obama. And, you know, he thinks he's the punk who hasn't bled, as McCain people like to say, and doesn't deserve to be in this arena. And we also learn that Obama is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton. He is much freer when he goes on the attack, much more confident. And McCain has another problem. He doesn't sound as fun and genial as he does when he's--as Reagan did when he said those lines. And also he tends to take any policy criticism as an attack on his integrity, and then attack back on the other person's integrity, and it sounds nasty.

And finally, the illness of Teddy Kennedy is starting the first round of eulogizing. And for Irish-Catholic Dowd, it's the first step towards beatification.

I think, in families like ours, working-class Irish families, we had the Kennedys' pictures mixed in with our family pictures. We grew up feeling that they were almost part of our family. And my brothers were Capitol Hill pages for JFK, Prescott Bush and Richard Nixon. And Teddy Kennedy would ask my brother Martin to play touch football with him, and he was always scared because he thought it would be like that scene in the "Wedding Crashers," part touch football, part pro-wrestling. But, I mean, they just seem like part of our family. And as Bob Schieffer said, it's like--he's like a Washington monument, you can't imagine the town without him.

The full episode can be seen below:


It's worth watching not just for Maureen Dowd, but for Ruth Marcus as well. I also noted that Jon Meacham also invoked the Kinsley Gaffe Definition. This is Dowd's second television appearance this month. Perhaps we will be seeing more of the normally reclusive redhead.

Eve Of Destruction

Funny business, a woman's career, the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman.

-All About Eve

All About Eve
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 25, 2008

Maureen Dowd's synopsis of the latest campaign gaffe (using the Michael Kinsley definition of a gaffe as being a politician accidentally telling the truth) goes as follows:

In an interview with The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, Hillary disagreed that she’s hurting party unity: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

She was talking about the timeline for June, not wishing physical harm upon her rival. But many Democrats were upset. Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina called her words “beyond the pale.”

Maureen's reasonably rational explanation is that like any dedicated athlete, Hillary knows that a contest isn't over until fat lady sings. A true competitor never quits while there is still hope, even if the only hope is the opponent self-destructing.

Maybe a tired, stressed Hillary was giving an unfiltered version of a blunt conversation that she’s had with her husband and advisers about staying in the race, using R.F.K. as an anything-can-happen example, in the same way she fantasizes about Sean Hannity breaking a story that would demolish Obama.

I'm not quite sure what Mount Rushmore and Deadwood have to do with it, but the mention of this week's Movie With Maureen® (and column title), All About Eve implies that perhaps Hillary wouldn't mind giving this hypothetical Obama immolation a little push.

Maybe it was the proximity of Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but something caused Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington to leap out in South Dakota.

And while many of Dowd's rhetorical flourishes lately have been a little over-the-top and too clever by half, she hits just the right note with this paragraph:

But coming right after the anniversary of the King assassination, right before the anniversary of the Bobby Kennedy assassination, right in the midst of the wrenching news about Teddy Kennedy’s brain tumor, and right in the middle of Billary’s hostile takeover attempt on the vice president’s mansion, the image was jarring.

The confluence with the Kennedys brings back a Dowd's magical metaphor:

Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.

But Hillary is waiting in the wings, the understudy that feels she should have the starring role. In those cases, Dowd suggests that it is best not letting those types of ambitious actors backstage in the first place.

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

By now it's nearly reflexive, but there is just a little tinge of the Royalty Metaphor® coupled with an emasculating aside in the final paragraph where Maureen compares Barack with defrocked beauty queen Vanessa Williams.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.

And while an actual nude picture of Obama may do even more for his support among women than his famous Venus-from-the-sea bathing suit shot, you have to wonder what are the skeletons in the skinny guy's closest that still give Hillary hope.

Too Thin To Win

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?”

“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I 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:

Forget it, Bones.

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.

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.

When Dowd pulls out the rhetorical stops, the Alliteration Alerts® just pile up everywhere. This paragraph has three sets just by itself:

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.

There are just so many tossed-off gems here, they are tough to catalog. We get the drug reference throwback:

“Wow, you’re so-o-o generous. Can I also write the plank on switchgrass?”

“I switched from grass a long time ago.”

Switched to what? Does this have something to do with the preternatural thinness?

Then there’s the memory of the Breck Girl who gets a new RudeName®:

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.

Hillary The Killer Rabbit

That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent
you ever set eyes on!

-Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 11, 2008

As the entire world, including lagging indicator the Time magazine, declares Barack Obama the de facto Democratic candidate, Maureen Dowd moves on to the next phase: picking a running mate. One possibility would be Hillary Clinton. The thought of that makes Maureen rabid.

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

Dowd wonders if Hillary wants to be thrown in that briarpatch.

But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting? (Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn’t she be, in Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?

The flaw in the Trojan Rabbit plan was that the Knights of the Roundtable forgot to hide in the rabbit.

BEDEVERE: Well, now, uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I, uh, wait until nightfall, and then leap out of the rabbit, taking the French, uh, by surprise. Not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!

Monty Python also features the killer rabbit that is a cute little bunny with a ferocious temper.

Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

Barack is still the Golden One, which is a promotion from Golden Child. Earlier in the column, Dowd had made a veiled Basic Instinct call-out:

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Proving once again that there is no political situation that can’t be compared to an old movie, today’s feature Movies With Maureen® is Pat and Mike.

It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in “Pat and Mike.”

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, “You are the wrong jockey for this chick.”

“You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,” he says, later adding, “When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?”

Dowd is saying that Hillary would knock Obama off his game.

The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He’s no good around her, see?

The best advice for Obama would be to meet any overtures from the Clinton campaign with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Then, count to three. No more. No less.

The Scorpion's Nature

"But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable! It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty."

"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."

-Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

Butterflies Aren’t Free
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 7, 2008

I’d been worried about Maureen Dowd. The stress of the campaign seems to have interrupted her Movies With Maureen® marathon, but returning to form, we have Vivien Leigh night. Maureen compares Hillary to Vivien Leigh with her tenacity to do anything to get a role.

In his memoir, the legendary Elia Kazan wrote about directing Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” While he did not think that Leigh was a great natural actress, he was impressed that she would crawl through glass to get the role right.

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right.

But Blanche DuBois from A Steetcar Named Desire just doesn’t seem Clintonesque enough to Dowd, so she goes back to the Vivien Leigh costume drama she has used on more than one occasion, Gone With The Wind:

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. “Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,” Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver.

And just to prove that she can, Maureen comes up with yet another baffling metaphor. While the column title evokes the Goldie Hawn romantic comedy, Butterflies Are Free, the real source for the column title is this inane comparison:

The Democratic race has been a scorpion and a butterfly in a bottle. Hillary tore Barry’s wings off, and so psyched him out with her silly goading — “Enough about the speeches and the big rallies!” she cried — that he gave up his magical trump cards.

The more famous tale of a scorpion is about the frog and a scorpion crossing a river (as told here by Luis Aguilar Leon):

A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs.

``Don't be scared,'' the scorpion says. ``If something happens to you, I'll drown.''

Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river.

Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, ``How could you -- you know that you'll drown?''

``It's my nature,'' gasps the sinking scorpion.

In this better example, Clinton is the scorpion that will sting Obama and force them both to drown just because that is what she does.

The more familiar Dowd themes get touched on just to keep them current. We have a reference to Obama refusing food:

Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter.

Which also included the Crossword Clue Or The Week® for 'diaphanous' which is evocative of butterflies and gauzy flightiness. While not completely efeminizing Barack, it will do.

Maureen Dowd is no darling of Media Matters, the left wing Truth Squad and enforcer of political correctness. They have been on her for daring to call Clinton a vampire (here’s my take on that column and a typically rabid Media Matters over-reaction). She seems to be daring them to come after her for quoting an Indiana voter that thinks Barack is Muslim.

In a restaurant in Greenwood on Tuesday, Obama approached an older white guy who waved him off, muttering afterwards to a reporter: “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Dowd does nothing to dispel the obvious misimpression this voter has. And really that sort of mistake is beyond correction. It is a Big Lie spread among rabid right-wingers that has taken hold in the zeitgeist. I’m just waiting for the accusations that Dowd is a foot soldier and dupe for the McCain campaign for observing that the meme is out there. Hand-wringing liberal outrage in four, three, two, wait for it…

Knocking Dowd for pointing out the weaknesses of Democratic candidates is a fool's game. It's her nature to do so, no matter who ends up drowning. Just like the scorpion.