Maureen And The Bard

When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools
-King Lear IV:vi

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
-King Lear V:iii

Stage of Fools
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 3, 2009

Maureen Dowd sees John McCain, now retired from the campaign trail and re-ensconced in the Senate as the angry geezer yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Or as a dottering mad King Lear with flowers in his hair.

If only Shakespeare had known how to Twitter.

There was a bit of King Lear in the scene on the Senate floor, a stormy, solitary John McCain on “this great stage of fools,” as the Bard wrote, railing against both parties and the president in fiery speeches and rapid-fire tweets.

“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath,” the Fool told Lear.

The truly snarky would remark that when it comes to whore's oaths, Dowd should know, but we'll take the high road here, so continuing:

And he’s truly mad that trusts in the promise of a presidential candidate to quell earmarks.

She also ridicules his new-found familiarity with a new form of technological ranting.

The 72-year-old senator who seemed hopelessly 20th century when he confessed during the campaign that he didn’t know how to use a computer or send an e-mail has now mastered the latest technology fad, twittering up a twizzard to tweak his former rival.

I do like "twizzard" as an imaginary word in her four-fold Alliteration Alert™.

Maureen then pads half her column with the full list of McCain's top ten pork projects including things such as astronomy promotion, but he seems particularly incensed by anything having to do with agriculture, livestock or wildlife, singling out things that have to do with grapes, honey bees, pigs, crickets, catfish, and beavers (insert Beavis and Butthead snickering here). The top ten list seems to be a recurring feature of his and you can read his latest senile ramblings on the SenJohnMcCain Twitter page.

Maureen than goes on to catalog the earmarks of various Administration members' favorite items from when they sat on the Legislative end of Pennsylvania Avenue. That campaign warhorse, the Chicago planetarium, even gets trotted out again. McCain sure hates science.

And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.

Which returns Dowd to her Shakespearean fury.

Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in “Lear”: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

But we could also go with a different quote just a few lines before the line about the titular stage of fools:

Get thee glass eyes;
And like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou dost not.
-IV:vi

And as for McCain, all I can say is:

I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
-IV:vii

The Skinny On Obama

Who’s the Question Mark?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 1, 2008

Today’s column is Maureen Dowd’s last before the votes get cast and she rightly exposes how the straight-talking McCain has become a chameleon hiding behind talking points so much so that voters cannot truly recognize the man he used to be.

Why did a politician who once knew how to play the game so well, who was once so beloved by people of very different political stripes, allow his campaign to get whiny, angry, vengeful and bitter?

In it, Dowd puts the blame on campaign strategist Steve Schmidt whom she gives a trademarked Rude Name:

But ever since Sergeant Schmidt put Captain McCain into a sterile brig on the trail, the candidate has become a question mark.

The Captain McCain reference makes me think of the instant classic Drew Friedman cartoon portraying McCain as the hotheaded Captain Kirk and Obama as the cool alien Mr. Spock.

And while most of the column asks rhetorical questions on how McCain lost control of his campaign, there is only short paragraph about Obama, but it bears further analysis. Within one sentence is an entire campaign season of innuendos and allusions.

And it is Obama, who sashayed onto the trail two years ago as an aloof and exotic mystery man with a slim record and a strange name, now coming across as the steadier brand.

Let’s break down the pieces.

Sashay: Dowd got her wrist-slapped for excessive effeminization of Barack and the verb sashay evokes a mincing that backslides into this bit. The last use of this word was a year ago and referred to Hillary that time.

Maybe it’s fitting that a woman who first sashayed into the national consciousness with an equation — “two for the price of one” — may have her fate determined by the arithmetic of dynasty.

Aloof: As opposed to the previously gregarious McCain, Obama has often been portrayed as being more reserved. Dowd has described Barack as aloof at least twice. In June, Karl Rove was trying to promote Obama as a sneering elitist.

Obama can be aloof and dismissive at times, and he’s certainly self-regarding, carrying the aura of the Ivy faculty club.

But Rove was only empahasizing an opinion that was already out there. Back in April, he was not only aloof, he was abstemious.

But the candidate is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof.

Exotic: This adjective is usually seen as an off-putting quality. It has been used at least three times. Back in August, Dowd said voters were still having a hard time connecting to Barack.

And the prejudice is visceral: many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate’s exotic shooting star, and he is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises.

But also in April.

At the very moment when his fate hangs in the balance, when he is trying to persuade white working-class voters that he is not an exotic stranger with radical ties, the vainglorious Rev. Wright kicks him in the stomach.

Even when he is following the conventional wisdom, he is attacked for his foreigness. Dowd presents the paradox back in July.

He must simultaneously defend himself for being too exotic and, because of recent moves, too conventional.

But exotic can also mean erudite and effete. During his grand world tour, Dowd connected it with more European mores.

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. He doesn’t want a picture of him nibbling on a baguette to overtake the effete image of the Europhile John Kerry windsurfing.

Slim: Normally here at Dowd Central, we would take umbrage at anyone taking slim out of context here, but Maureen has a history of using slimness as a defining feature of Barack. A fictional Hillary had this to say:

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.”

But Dowd sees it as a positive trait.

It does not occur to Parisians that Americans will choose the old, white-haired one if they can have the cool, skinny one with the Ray-Bans, John le Carré novels, chic wife and secret cigarettes.

She quotes Obama as defending his weight class:

“I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I’m tough,” he told a crowd of more than 15,000 in Hartford the other night, with the Kennedys looking on. “I’m from Chicago.”

But being that thin seems too off-putting to some voters. Dowd stretches the metaphor to food.

As Carol Marin wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Lanky One is like an Alice Waters organic chicken — “sleek, elegant, beautifully prepared. Too cool” — when what many working-class women are craving is mac and cheese.

Strange name: In March Dowd connected his slimness to his exoticness through his strange name.

And whether we can take a flier on this skinny guy with the strange name and braided ancestry to help us get it back.

So we will let others find the "erratica/dramatica" wordplay or the "tech tyro" alliteration. After Tuesday we need to get used to the themes of an aloof, exotic, skinny guy with a strange name running the country. In other words, prepare for Mr. Spock.

Let The Tumbrels Rumble

After W., Le Deluge
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 18, 2008

Maureen Dowd, the Queen Bee of the Forth Estate has decreed that the current economic disaster be compared to the French Revolution. Let’s go through the references.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

Since most people’s knowledge of the French Revolution starts and ends with A Tale of Two Cities, that is where Maureen starts, fittingly with the first line from Charles Dickens's high school reading list classic. She then moves on to the book’s famous plotting knitter.

I’m feeling as vengeful and bloodthirsty as Madame Defarge sharpening her knitting needles at the guillotine.

But it doesn’t end there. She makes a decent pun on Reign of Terror by recasting it as Dubya’s more mistake prone epoch.

The best of times because W.’s long Reign of Error is about to end.

She also makes reference to Marie Antoinette:

In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.”

And finally, the Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week is also guillotine related. A tumbrel is “a crude cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their place of execution, as during the French Revolution.”

I can’t wait to see the tumbrels rumble up and down Wall Street picking up the heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism.

Dowd also raises the bonus degree of difficulty of sneaking in two internal rhymes into that one sentence.

Most of the article is outrage directed at the outrageous behavior of AIG executives who are beyond the ability to be shamed publicly. Dowd suggests public mockery.

The New York Times should follow up the excellent Portraits of Grief it did after 9/11 with Portraits of Greed.

But beyond the storming the Bastille rhetoric, she saves some asides for McCain’s latest living metaphor.

The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor — not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset — and spent $17,500 for food and rooms.

Poor Joe is also the victim of another aside:

John McCain wasted his last-chance debate Wednesday by trying to stir up faux class rage against Barack Obama with Joe the Unvetted Plumber instead of tapping into the real class rage the country feels over bailing out ungrateful financiers who gambled away the life savings of working people.

And when it comes to expressing class rage, nobody outclasses Maureen.

Heads must roll.

And when Maureen says "Off with their head!" Somebody gets a really really close shave.

Lost In Translation

Are We Rome? Tu Betchus!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 11, 2008

Running out of gimmicks, Maureen Dowd has stumbled onto a new one. Riffing on comparisons between the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire, she decides to translate her standard generic column into Lipstick-On-A-Pig-Latin. Continuing her proud tradition of out-sourcing her work whenever possible, she enlisted a real history professor, who is clearly unconcerned with his tenure hopes, to do the heavy lifting.

I enlisted Gary D. Farney, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, to translate (loosely and creatively) from English to Latin “The Battle of Gall,” my take below on why the hyperventilating Republicans are not veni, vidi, vici-ing.

Dr. Farney teaches Ancient Greek and Roman History and according to Rate-My-Professor he is hard but fair with a strong resemblance to Radar O'Reilly.

Let's see if we can identify the distinguishing features of Dowd column even when quasi-translated to a dead language.

Punny Titles

Bellum Gallium

Her column within a column translates to "The Gallic Wars" which is the title of Julius Caesar's famous book or "The Battle of Gall" which puns on the meaning of gall as "bitterness of feeling; rancor." The column is about the bitter tactics that the Republicans are resorting to in the homestretch of the campaign. "Gall" is one of Dowd's favorite words, having called a column last year "Gift of Gall."

Alliteration Alerts™

Manes Julii Caesaris paucis diebus aderant — “O, most bloody sight!” — cum Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis, qui sneerare amant Baracum Obamam causa oratorii, pillorant ut demagogi veri, Africanum-Americanum senatorem Terrae Lincolni, ad Republicanas rallias.

Sentences with silly internal rhyme:

Vix quisque audivit nomen “Palinae” ante lunibus paucis. Surgivit ex suo tanning bed ad silvas in Terram Eskimorum, rogans quis sit traitorosus, ominosus, scurrilosus, periculosus amator LXs terroris criminalisque Chicagoani? Tu betchus.

Lindsay Lohan movie reference:

Vilmingtoni, in Ohionem, McCain’s Mean Girl (Ferox Puella) defendit se gladiatricem politicam esse: “Pauci dicant, O Jupiter, te negativam esse. Non, negativa non sum, sed verissima.”

Vicious personal nick-names:

Maverici, ut capiunt auxilium de friga-domina, hench-femina, Cynthia McCaina Birrabaronessa...

I'm pretty sure Maureen is calling Cindy McCain an "ice-queen henchwoman Beer Baroness." For a far better translation of the entire column, check out the Ablative Absolute blog.

Next week: Dowd expands on the Shakespearean tragedy aspect of McCain's descent into madness and gets the NYU Elizabethian Literature professor to rewrite her column in iambic pentameter.

The Two Willies

Mud Pies for ‘That One’
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 7, 2008

In the latest turns in the election, Maureen Dowd is seeing echoes of a previous campaign.

Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.

But Dowd sees McCain as being partly to blame.

But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.

While the Alliteration Alert® level is down to yellow, she does slip a few in, especially when discussing reptilian Republicans.

[McCain] been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock).

Maureen uses a Dowdversion® based on "common" to show the inherent hypocrisy of Atwater-style attacks.

Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man.

Then she draws the bigger parallel.

Willie Horton In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges: The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.

William Ayers Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He’s now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base. He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side.

Sound familiar?

And while Dowd does not use the "R-word", the racial undertones of the Wille Ayers/Rev. Wright association does not go unnoticed.

Atwater gleefully tried to paint Willie Horton as Dukakis’s running mate. With a black man running, it’s even easier for Atwater’s disciple running McCain’s campaign to warn that white Americans should not open the door to the dangerous Other, or “That One,” as McCain referred to Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. (A cross between “The One” and “That Woman.”)

Maureen may be stretching by trying create "That One" as a portmanteau between The Messiah and Monica Lewinsky, but there is a ring of truth there.

And by using Palin as the pitbull, McCain is making her do the dirty work.

The woman is sounding more Cheney than Cheney.
{snip}
Maybe that’s why McCain didn’t bring up Ayers or Wright during the debate, instead leaving it to Sarah Barracuda.

Our only Movies With Maureen® moment comes from a brief queen bee aside with it's own alliterative aspects.

Asked if she thought Senator Obama was dishonest, McCain’s Mean Girl meandered:

“I’m not saying he’s dishonest, but in terms of judgment, in terms of being able to answer a question forthrightly, it has two different parts to this. The judgment and the truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, is there still — has there been an association continued since ’02 or ’05, I know I’ve read a couple different stories. I think it’s relevant.”

Of course she does.

And by that, Maureen means that it is both irrelevant and that Palin only says it is because that is what the slithering consultants handing the candidates mud pies told her to believe. And to aim some smears at That One.

McCain Plane Flak

As detailed earlier this week, the McCain camp revoked Maureen Dowd's campaign plane privileges. They basically dumped her on the side of the road in Pittsburgh and left her for dead. Tim McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes it thusly:

It all started when Maureen covered an Aug. 30 McCain-Palin rally in Washington, Pa., then wasn't let on the McCain plane afterward, Maureen Dowd/Vanity Fairforcing her to overnight at a Pittsburgh airport hotel while the traveling press went on without her.

Being on the press plane is not just a perk, it is the only realistic way a journalist can keep up with a fast moving campaign. And news organiztions pay premium for the privilege. Again McNulty:

The McCain campaign has barred her from flying in the McCain and Palin press planes, even though major media outlets routinely pay thousands to the campaigns every day for travel and expenses (and also begs the question, why didn't her media colleagues Man Up and get her aboard anyway?)

He quotes an e-mail from Dowd:

"I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn't like. So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for 'the foreseeable future.' Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicole Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane," Dowd wrote in an email.

"It was disappointing because I didn't think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney."

Comparing McCain to Cheney is fighting words, but some see the shabby treatment of Dowd as just a skirmish in a bigger battle with the Times. Back on September 22, Sam Stein at the Huffington Post reported this:

Today, the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign went to war with the Grey Lady. Asked to respond to an article that brought to light the fact that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had earned nearly $2 million in lobbying fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (based, almost primarily, on his access to McCain) at the same time that he was attacking Barack Obama for his own ties to those very institutions, aides to McCain went off.

"We are first amendment absolutists on this campaign and the press and everyone who wishes to cover this race from a blogosphere and media perspective is constitutionally protected to write whatever they want," said Steve Schmidt, the campaign's chief strategist. "But whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Gov. Palin and excuses Sen. Obama..."

Dowd of course hadn't been making friends since her August 24 column called him out on his POW Get Of Jail Free card tactics. And then there were the five columns in a row holding Sarah Palin up to ridicule.

But Maureen doesn't seem to be gathering a whole lot of sympathy. At the County Fair blog on the Media Matters website (which is decidedly liberal and frequently anti-Dowd), Eric Boehlert said:

Of course we don't like the idea of any campaign "banning" a journalist because the candidate doesn't like what was written or said about them. That's petty and wrong and disrespectful toward journalism.

But in reference to the Cheney crack, he added:

We're torn because we can't think of a single elite columnist who we'd rather not have invoking the solemn rights of the Constitution in a press fight, simply because we don't think Dowd is a serious journalist. So we're not comfortable with her representing any sort of professional journalism community.

Harsh. If a columnist for the New York Times isn't a professional journalist, who is? The Pushback blog takes a mixed stand on the issue:

John McCain’s war on the media has resulted in yet another casualty: Maureen Dowd’s access to McCain’s press plane. Let’s all remove our hats and share a moment of silence.

Now that a single manly tear has been shed by all of us, I have to confess something: I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, the McCain campaign’s open aggression against the press is both absurd and frightening. Whether or not you think that The New York Times is a good news source, it’s flat-out ridiculous to say that it’s “not … a journalistic organization.” And kicking Times staffers off the press plane for doing their job sets a pretty scary precedent.

But that’s not to say that keeping Maureen Dowd very far away from news is a bad thing. The Times is certainly a journalistic organization, but there’s no serious definition under which Dowd is a legitimate journalist...

Uh, they don't give out Pulitzer Prizes to just anybody.

FishbowlNY kind of comes to her defense:

It's not like we don't have our own numerous issues with Maureen Dowd, but kicking her off the press plane? That's just not okay.

It isn't okay, and the rest of the pres should be taking greater umbrage. Hoops And Pop Culture probably says it best:

Nothing says, "Straight Talk" like trying to intimidate and silence your critics in the press.

Bullies pick on the weak and hope to cow others. Dowd has few friends among the right-wing, but the fact that liberal guardians of free-speech are not outraged, is in itself an outrage. If this is how McCain manages his issues with the press during the campaign, how will he act if he is president? What we see so far does not bode well.

McCain Bans Dowd

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in a post-debate spin wrap-up lets slip that a certain red-tressed NYT columnist is persona non grata on Straight Talk One.

Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC's Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane. And the Obama camp seemed to show its media leanings when it texted followers to watch the debate -- on CNN.)

So much for an open and honest campaign. Hat-tip to the Washington Independent that notes that snubbing Maureen is a Republican rite of passage. Here at Dowd Central, we're more interested in getting a pic of that Elvis shirt.

A Few Good Movies With Maureen

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline.

-A Few Good Men, screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

Sound, but No Fury
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 27, 2008

Making up for a few columns with poor or non-existent Movies With Maureen® segments, Maureen Dowd makes up for it with an extended take on the Aaron Sorkin military courtroom drama. (I wonder what reminded her of that flick. Hmmm….)

The first debate seemed like the perfect moment for Barack Obama to re-enact the Code Red courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men,” to slide under John McCain’s skin and irritate until he goaded McCain into doing exactly what he really wanted to do: tell off the whippersnapper who’d never bled for his country.

Tom Cruise’s trick in that movie was to make Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, lose his cool and blow up. But the usually hot-headed McCain refused to play his role.

It would have been easy for smarty-pants Obama to get in the face of the temperamental older guy, just as Tom Cruise did with Jack Nicholson, to push him into erupting into some version of that climactic speech, like, “Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at your fancy faculty club, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

Dowd says that McCain kept his cool despite the incoherent ramblings of his running mate. Sarah Palin has been kept under such tight wraps that Dowd compares her to another famous recluse.

Once Garbo began to speak, and people realized that Palin had a few key lacunae in her understanding of the globe and even of her running mate’s record, the myth of the Alaska superwoman continued to unravel.

And Maureen is repeating her Crossword Clues Of The Week®. “Lacunae” was used back in July when it was Obama that wanted to cover up any gaps in his judgment. The runner-up Crossword Clue for this week is “bête noire” (meaning nemesis from the French for “black beast”), which shows up in this slam at Dubya:

The president, who is so insecure that he could only choose a vice president he knew would never hold his title, and so insecure that he needs proof of presidency emblazoned everywhere, even riding a Trek bike with the presidential seal affixed, was suddenly faced with his bête noire: sitting at a table in the White House with the two men who want his job, either of whom would do a better job, given that nearly everyone in the country thinks things are going horribly.

Mountain Bike One was described in a Washington Post article thusly:

The Trek has "United States of America" painted in white letters across the blue top tube, and a 2-inch presidential seal affixed to both sides of the head tube.

Maureen sees Bush’s preoccupation with biking as a metaphor for his inattention to the business of state, by citing four examples where Dubya had been warned, but did nothing.

The Republicans had a lot to answer for. The Bush administration had been warned about Osama bin Laden attacking and did nothing. It had been warned that there would be a civil war and insurgency if it attacked Iraq. It had been warned that Katrina was coming. It had been warned that the country’s financial casinos were courting disaster.

W. biked through all those eves of destruction.

She also mentioned him biking off a cliff in her previous column as well which mentioned the End of Days, tying into the "eve of destruction" apocalyptic image as well (not to mention a nasty Barry McGuire tune cootie). That earlier column also took some swipes at Nobel Prize winning bomber Henry Kissinger. McCain’s mention of Dr. K in the debate allows Dowd to take one more shot.

And who cares what Henry Kissinger thinks? He was wrong 35 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

Maureen calls the debate a draw on points since Obama failed to bait the bear sufficiently.

Obama did a poor job of getting under McCain’s skin. Or maybe McCain did an exceptional job of not letting Obama get under his skin. McCain nattered about earmarks and Obama ran out of gas.

But while McCain-Obama should have been the main event, she holds out for a better fight in the undercard match.

We’re left waiting for a knockout debate. On to Palin-Biden.

We need a catchy name for this matchup. Perhaps The Beauty Queen versus the Plagiarizing Pugilist. We’ll be watching.

Reality Check

Too Much Life?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 2, 2008

Subtlety is not one of Maureen Dowd’s strong suits, but she seems to be trying to break it to the Republicans as gently as she can.

For many years, reality was out of vogue with Republicans. {snip} Now reality, in all its messy, crazy, funky glory, has flooded the party, in the comely, crackling form of Sarah Palin.

One good thing about the storm that raged through the blogosphere over the long weekend is that it did a lot of the heavy lifting for Dowd as far as coming up with silly names for things.

Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

And here is where the subtle part comes in. She is going to compare the Palin selection to the two worst vice-presidential nominee fiascos in recent history. First up is another pretty boy picked for his inexperience and youthful demeanor.

It seems like a long time since Vice President Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock, saying that this “poverty of values” contributed to poverty in the inner city, and perhaps even to the Los Angeles riots. It also seems like a long time — and another McCain ago — that Republicans supporting W. smeared the old John McCain by spreading rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

She is setting up the Republicans in a glass house. Some will try to make lemonade out of the lemons they have been dealt.

As more and more titillating details spill out about the Palins, Republicans riposte by simply arguing that things like Todd’s old D.U.I. arrest or Sarah’s messy family vengeance story will just let them relate better to average Americans — unlike the lofty Obamas.

“If this doesn’t resonate with every woman in America, I’ll eat my hat,” Bill Noll, an Alaska delegate whose daughter got pregnant at a young age and kept the baby, told The Times’s Ashley Parker.

But all this post-announcement hand-wringing reminds Maureen of another pioneering woman plucked out of obscurity.

When you make a gimmicky pick of an unknown for vice president, without proper vetting, there’s bound to be a sticky press conference sooner or later. I watched it happen with Ferraro and then with Quayle, and I watched Mondale and Poppy Bush curdle with embarrassment but plow through.

Dowd splits the blame for these fiascos between the starry-eyed nominees and the incompetent nominators.

The political unknowns, of course, want that tantalizing brass ring, so they’re not always completely forthcoming about their skeletons, if they’re lucky enough to be ineptly vetted. This is ironic, since the nominee who gets blindsided with these crises — Did McCain really know that this Palin reality show was about to pop and swallow his convention — is presenting them to voters as the most trustworthy people to inherit the nuclear codes.

Dowd asserts that Ferraro set women seeking the highest office back a couple of decades.

Because Ferraro grabbed at the chance, without revealing to Mondale’s incompetent vetting team how damaging some of her husband’s financial imbroglios could be, she went from being a female icon to part of the reason it’s taken a quarter-century for another party to take a chance on a woman.

Finally, she compares the McCain camp to another electoral loser.

Hillary cried sexism to cover up her incompetent management of her campaign, and now Republicans have picked up that trick. But when you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any legitimate question, you only hurt women. And that’s just another splash of reality.

And that reality is not pretty. By Dowd standards, Maureen was taking it pretty easy on Governor Palin, but let’s review the adjectives used at the vetters: gimmicky, sticky, ineptly, incompetent (twice). These are not the words associated with campaigns that wins the ultimate reality show.

Miss Congeniality

Vice in Go-Go Boots?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 31, 2008

Maureen Dowd loves to watch old movies, particularly chick flicks. Who knew?

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate delights her because it reminds her of a Sandra Bullock classic.

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin.

It makes her so giddy that she needs to change only two words in the two parts of her Dowdversion®.

It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.

In addition to the Movie With Maureen®, Palin's Lifetime story also reminds Dowd of a quixotic television show set in Alaska which lets Maureen coin a nickname for Sarah's supporters (personally, I prefer Palindrones).

Palinistas, as they are called, love Sarah’s spunky, relentlessly quirky “Northern Exposure” story from being a Miss Alaska runner-up, and winning Miss Congeniality, to being mayor and hockey mom in Wasilla, a rural Alaskan town of 6,715, to being governor for two years to being the first woman ever to run on a national Republican ticket. (Why do men only pick women as running mates when they need a Hail Mary pass? It’s a little insulting.)

Oh, and the "Hail Mary pass" sports metaphor: Already claimed by Senator Charles Schumer, Ed Rollins, Jonathan Capehart, Marc Ginsberg, William Greider of The Nation, and about every blogger known, including Dowd Report contributor yellojkt. And for future reference I'd stay away from "game-changing" as well. It's been done.

The rest of the column is just lame fantasizing about how this chick flick will end. It only ensures that Maureen isn't going to get any script polishing gigs anytime soon. Besides, with a story this great, real life, as opposed to reel life, is going to be dramatic and hilarious enough.

The Ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free Card

The "Get Out of Jail Free" card is held until used and then returned to the bottom of the deck. If the player who draws it does not wish to use it, then they may sell it, at any time, to another player at a price agreeable to both.
-Official Monopoly® Game Rules

Too Much of a Bad Thing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 24, 2008

According to Maureen Dowd, John McCain’s years of being tortured as a POW in Vietnam has given him the ultimate hall pass as she states in the following Dowdversion® (the only trademarked Dowd Rhetorical Device used in this very solemn column):

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

Maureen then compiles a list of the things that having been held and abused for five years gets you a free pass on.

Divorcing your wife to marry an heiress.

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.
{snip}
“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Pimping your wife in front of thousands of bikers.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

Being late to a debate.

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

Liking bad pop music.

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

Maybe if Dubya and Cheney had known what a great all-purpose excuse being a POW was, they wouldn’t have been so eager to avoid military service.

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.

Cry-Baby McCain

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

Richard III. 2. 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manchurian Reruns

The Wrong Stuff
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 2, 2008

With the campaign season past the primary boost phase, we might expect some new metaphors for the new/old left/right campaign we have, but instead we get Movies With Maureen® reruns. First up is The Manchurian Candidate:

In the warped imagination of some on the left and right, this is a race between two Manchurian candidates, the Vietnam Manchurian candidate and the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

We last saw a reference to this Frank Sinatra/Angela Lansbury classic back in February:

Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe.

The twist for this column is that both McCain and Obama are refighting the Vietnam War, only this time it's all interservice friendly fire. Obama has lined up a regiment of veterans to fight by proxy the war hero image of McCain.

Wes Clark joined the growing ranks of troublesome Obama associates when he meowed that just “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” is not a qualification to be president. He made McCain sound like a drone aircraft.

And the mere mention of aviation, gets Maureen misty for the good ole days of Pappy Boyington Bush.

This is not even about Obama. It’s the old business of grunts resenting flyboys. Bob Dole made a crack long ago about patrician Poppy Bush flying over the infantry.

But we also get a bonus Movies feature, but again, it's a rerun.

But as Obama offers himself as an avatar of modernity, the horizon fills with Swift boats against the current, and he is, Gatsby-like, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby is probably just behind Gone With The Wind as Maureen's favorite overworked metaphor. Hillary Clinton was Daisy Buchanan and now Barack Obama is in the Robert Redford role. Let's see if that metaphor plays out as well.

I'm just disappointed that with the Tom Wolfe movie allusion in the title of the column that Maureen didn't dredge up Obama's old reverend and go for a Wright Stuff pun as well. But it's a long campaign. We still have time.

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.

Vice Squad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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