Mitt's Favorite Things

Mitt’s Big Love
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 14, 2012

Recently an internet mash-up featured clips of Mitt Romney cut into Jule Andrews singing "A Few Of My Favorite Things" from A Sound Of Music:

Well, it seems there is a reason for doing so. As Maureen Dowd reports:

Romney recoiled from ’60s counterculture and was “proudly square” as he went from seeing “The Sound of Music” with [future wife] Ann to avoiding the Grateful Dead at college, Kranish and Helman report.

And while he isn't on the stump telling tales of his youthful varmint hunting, it's clear the one thing he loves more than firing guns is firing people.

Don't It Make Her Brown Eyes Blue

No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
-The Who "Behind Blue Eyes"

Blue-Eyed Greed?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 28, 2009

Maureen Dowd goes on a classic rock bender this week. The impetus is a third world dictator making some crypto-reverse-racist statements substituting eye color for skin tone.

At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain — who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots — [Brazilian president] Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.

The first classic rock allusion is just a hint at the Procul Harum signature tune.

As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.

She interrupts the flow to use her new favorite Crossword Clue® to again slap at the morals-free actions of AIG and their ilk.

And it is true, of course, that the upper-crust, underwhelming Anglo-Saxon leaders who allowed America’s financial markets to morph into louche casinos, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, were very, very white men with blue eyes.

And the blue eyes finally push her into typing out the tune cootie in her head.

As the Who sang: “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man behind blue eyes. No one knows what it’s like to be hated, to be fated to telling only lies.”

And being a little more free-associative than usual she rambles past Jesus and Barbie to land on her favorite interview and Hollywood crush.

The cerulean-eyed Paul Newman once wryly predicted his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

And it's been a while since Maureen's mother made a guest appearance with her words of wisdom. This time she comes up with a great maternal ugly duckling-beautiful swan aphorism.

I obsessed on it so much, cutting out a picture of a beautiful brown-eyed model and keeping it in my scrapbook, that my mother finally reassured me:
“You look at blue eyes. You look into brown eyes.”

And the memory of her Irish mom sends her right back to the classic rock apple crate for that Celtic crooner of the 70s.

Later, of course, there would be the thrill of Van Morrison serenading a “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Maureen ends the column with a wistful Alliteration Alert™ that is all peace, love and understanding.

With Michelle urging students to aim for A’s and the president promising to make school “cool,” brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners.

But she could just as well have used a different Who song:

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again

Cowboy Diplomacy

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

-Kris Kristofferson

W. Regrets Almost Nothing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 15, 2008

George Bush went to France and Maureen Dowd got to tag along. I hope it goes better for her than their trip to Saudi Arabia did. Today’s column has a Paris dateline so she must be there. W is making a greatest hits tour of Europe, but it’s not exactly selling out to packed houses.

A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV.

President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty.

Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.)

The Dowdversion on the song made famous by Janis Joplin also recalls its cowboy poet author, Kris Kristofferson. And speaking of cowboys, for this piece Maureen breaks out all sorts of cowboy metaphors.

He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.

We are going to ignore the Movies With Maureen® potential of “blazing hostility” and go on to the faux French which loosely translates as “idiot cowboy administration.” Maureen dips into her nun-taught French one more time to use a phrase which means “No regrets.”

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Alluding to the Edith Piaf classic "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is triply ironic because the song has its roots in French Foreign Legion lore as France tried vainly to hang onto its empire. From Wikipedia:

Piaf dedicated her recording of the song to the French Foreign Legion. At the time of the recording, France was engaged in a military conflict, the Algerian War (1956–1962), and the 1er R E P (Premier Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes, First Regiment Foreign Paratroopers) — who had backed a temporary putsch by the French military against the civilian leadership of Algeria—adopted the song when their resistance was broken in April 1961.

Dowd claims that Dubya is trying to play on France’s sympathies as one failed imperial power to another:

He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.

The parallels between France and the US in Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere would seem to be a cautionary tale that Dubya is deaf to, but Maureen sees a deeper drama happening.

In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem. The actions were the problem. W. was really anxious for war. He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.

Because his dad failed to march to Baghdad, Bush the Younger is determined to stick by his own course of action.

A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered. “I will never do that to them,” 43 said.

Sounds like Oedipal déjà vu all over again.

And Greek tragedies, even when translated into French and set in the Old West, never end well.

BlogWatch: Barry's Raspberry Beret

This original photoshop was inspired by Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire who seemed to be the only other person in the blogosphere that got Maureen Dowd's call-out to a certain sexually ambiguous popstar:

As regulars know, I've been cataloguing Maureen Dowd's descent into madness in recent weeks, watching her flail wildly from Hillary as Blanche DuBois to Hillary as Mildred Pierce, and the parallel narrative of Barack Obama as a feminized, effete Democratic male.

But it took me a day or so to spot this in her most recent headline: "Raspberry for Barry."

So now he's the most effete black man of all.

And hidden even deeper in the Raspberry Barry column is this variation on the ever-popular royalty metaphor that Dowd is so fond of:

The lady-in-waiting would be surrounded by Obama disciples who disdained her for fighting dirty. And she would be miserable holding up the train of the young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill to trade places.

And who better to represent Barack than Prince, since purple IS the color of royalty.

Rap Star Obama-Z

If you feelin like a pimp nigga,
go and brush your shoulders off
Ladies is pimps too,
go and brush your shoulders off
Niggaz is crazy baby,
don't forget that boy told you
Get, that, dirt off your shoulder

-Jay-Z "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"

Brush It Off
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 20, 2008

Like Barbara Billingsley in Airplane, Maureen Dowd can speak Jive, old school style.

Barack Obama, who says he listens to Jay-Z along with his “old school guy” favorites like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Temptations, alluded to the rapper’s 2003 hit “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” on Thursday to sweep away concerns about his pugnacity.

After conceding that the Philly debate was tough, he brushed the imaginary lint of Hillary, George and Charlie from his shoulders, in a wordless reference to Jay-Z’s lyrics in his anthem about not letting anyone crimp your ride as you cruise from the bottom to the top: “Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me.”

First off, changing "pimp your ride" to "crimp" is old lady lame. And Maureen catching onto the not-so-subliminal Jay-Z reference wasn't all that earth shattering. The hidden message of the shoulder brushing was immediately apparent to most of the blogosphere where it battled an alleged bird flip as the most debated hand gesture of his speech. It didn't take long for the YouTube stars to mash up the song and the speech so that there was no mistaking the diss (audio NSFW - it's Jay-Z, duh):



Having been on the campaign plane with Barack, Maureen starts fantasizing about how cool an Obama presidency is going to look.

There’s no doubt the cat is cool. It’s easy to imagine the wild reception many parts of the world would give a President Obama as he loped down the stairs of Air Force One in his aviator glasses, the chic and chiseled Michelle on his arm.

The hot/cool metaphor is just too painful to diagram. It's tedious even by Dowd standards. Obama last loped in the column where he snuck up on her on the campaign plane while eating barbecue. And unless you've covered as many Obama rallies as Maureen you may not be aware that Obama uses a certain Stevie Wonder chestnut as his campaign stop closer:

But before it’s signed, sealed and delivered, as his campaign song goes, Obama will have to balance his cool with some heat, as J.F.K. did. He seems too imperious about the power of hot-button values issues that have proved so potent for most of his lifetime.

But according to Dowd, he has switched to something more patriotic as he focuses attention on defusing the fervor behind McCain.

Even though his supporters raised Cain about ABC, Obama is smart enough to know he will need a better game against a canny war hero. Campaigning in Pennsylvania on Friday, he seemed eager to show he was not highfalutin. He said he and Michelle weren’t born with silver spoons; he shared how “burned up” he was when his sick mother could not get health insurance; he hugged a disabled veteran who thanked him for getting into the race, and he left a rally with a lusty “God Bless America.”

Dowd slips in the phrase "better game" (maybe Mystery can become a campaign consultant) to show that she's hip to the lingo, but also proves that she speaks fluent Fogey by slipping in "highfalutin" as the closest word to "uppity" she dares attempt.

If she really wanted to prove how down with the hip-hopper she was, she'd be using "99 Problems" as Obama's reaction to the increasingly irrelevant Clinton Campaign:

99 problems but the bitch ain't one
If you're havin' girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me

But instead Maureen tries to talk like she's ever seen a copy of XXL.

He’s trying, as Jay-Z says, to get flow.

With that kind of clunky phrasing, we don't have to worry about Dowd getting crunky any time soon.