All About Douthat

Maureen Dowd took the day off, but that doesn't mean there wasn't news coming from the Gray Lady's Op/Ed page. In a stunning and daring upheaval of the existing paradigm, the Times has replaced a conservative Harvard grad with, wait for it, a conservative Harvard grad. While hardly anyone will argue that anybody brighter than J. Fred Muggs would be an improvement over the lazy and tired scribblings of Kristol Meth, some vetting of Douthat needs to be done. Lets see how he matches up.

Bill Kristol	Ross Douthat
Harvard '73	Harvard '02
The Weekly Standard	The Atlantic
The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (with Lawrence F. Kaplan)	Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
"[Obama's] selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff suggests that Obama’s not going to be mindlessly leftist."	"Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue."

All I can say is that Bill Kristol had a rock-solid reputation about never getting anything right. And for the new blogger on the right, those are tough shoes to fill. Someone as young as Douthat is a blank slate still. At just barely over half of Maureen Dowd's age, this baby-faced newcomer could be around for a long time.

Kristol Klear

Here at Dowd Central we tend to ignore the other lesser New York Times columnists like the ones that win mere Nobel Prizes. However, we are sad to bid adieu to William Kristol, the beneficiary of the Gray Lady's year-long conservative columnist internship program. Alas, his lackluster style and casual approach to fact-checking doomed his tenure.

For a neocon with an unblemished record for never being right about anything, he went out the same way he came in, passing on blatant falsehoods as divine truths. Anyone who can read, let alone write, these sentences without gagging is well beyond delusional:

Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day {snip} Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

This is about his fifth post-election column where he waxes nostalgic and praises the conservative movement on its many accomplishments proving that he is well-ensconced in the Denial Stage of Grief. It's unlikely he will ever move to Bargaining, let alone Guilt.

Hallmarks of his style included bland over-generalizations, contrived anecdotes (his tendancy to find classic works of literature in airport newsstands made Friedman's propensity for citing cabdrivers seem charming), and cliched quotations. His farewell column included a full paragraph of fairly familiar Thomas Paine. Bartlett deserved cowriter credit on most of his columns.

Even fans of Kristol Meth's fevered fantasies noted that he saved his best stuff (such as it was) for The Weekly Standard treating his Times column much as Mick Jagger treated his solo albums. He even went so far as to bite the hand that fed him on the Jon Stewart show.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Bill Kristol

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Rumor has it that Bill will be taking his schtick to the Washington Post on a monthly basis because Charles Krauthammer doesn't quite fill their quota for second-hand neo-con idiocy.

Us fans of Maureen appreciated Kristol for one huge favor he regularly did for Maureen: He served as a lightning rod for criticism over the Op/Ed page. He quickly replaced the Dowdster as the Times's most reviled columnist. Like Kristol's favored flypaper theory of fighting terrorism, the shear number of haters he drew far dwarfed the quantity of any native critics of Dowd. With Bill gone, Maureen will once again become the focus of unhinged hatred vaguely directed at the Times.

We have only one hope and plea to Andrew Rosenthal: Please, please, please hire Megan McArdle. For Dowd's sake.

Maureen Makes The List

Forbes has placed Maureen Dowd on their 25 Most Influential Liberals List, proving that their rather elastic definition of 'liberal' includes anybody to the left of David Brooks that can make a pun. As they describe her:

Known for her exclamatory columns, Dowd writes about politics with a biting, pop-culture-infused spin. She is much better at meowing at her own side, though, so the Obama administration could see her recover the cat-wit she appeared to have lost in her formulaic Bush years.

Just so you can calibrate their scale, Arianna Huffington came in at #2, Chris Matthews at #12, and Andrew Sullivan at #19. NYT stablemates making the list included Paul Krugman at the top and Thomas Friedman at #4. She's just going to have to work snarkier, not harder.

Could Maureen Dowd Live On Thirteen Bucks A Week?

A Penny for My Thoughts?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 29, 2008

Maureen Dowd pulls a Friedman this week and looks down the long barrel of outsourcing as it moves into the dying and not even convincingly twitching world of newpapers.

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.

The Pasadena Now website can be found here, and it’s a bright colorful page with all the bells and whistles expected from a modern Flash driven portal, but it hardly qualifies as a hard news source. The lead story is "Queen Skittles to Reign Over 2009 Doo Dah Parade". It also covers a mall opening and a Christmas tree lighting. But it looks better and cleaner than the home page of some Gray Ladies I could name.

And if you are looking for a Dickensian villain, James Macpherson fits the bill. He pays his Bangalore stringers starvation wages.

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

That would make the gross pay for Maureen’s twice-weekly 850-word essays about thirteen dollars a week. And while you can find DowdHaters convinced that even that would be overpaying her, it’s definitely not going to pay the mortgage on a Georgetown townhome or even dent her shoe debt to Aaron Sorkin.

Palin Pundit Peace Prize

Those Hard-Boiled Eggheads
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2008

As noted here, fellow NYT columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics and Maureen Dowd is not happy.

I’m not sending Paul Krugman Champagne.

He won the Nobel prize in economics this week, and while I’m sure that’s delightful for him, it has raised the bar to an impossible height for his fellow columnists at The Times. We used to strive for Pulitzers, or simply regional awards, or even just try to top each other on the paper’s most e-mailed list.

Now we’re supposed to compete for Nobels?

Her idea to top that and regain cock of the walk status? A Nobel of her own! But which one?

A Nobel in economics is out. I didn’t take economics in college because all the classes started at 8 a.m. Physics, chemistry and medicine are out. Literature? They’ve given up giving it to Americans. So it’s going to have to be the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a plan she settles on trying to get disgruntled conservatives to rally around Palin. Here's how it goes:

	On Tuesday, Matthew Dowd (seen here in an exclusive photo kibbutzing with Maureen following a "This Week" appearance), the former Bush strategist who offered a famous apologia for helping get W. re-elected, offered a scorching assessment of Palin’s not being ready, saying that McCain “knows that in his gut. And when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with. ... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot, and he put the country at risk.”
	Christopher Hitchens endorsed Barack Obama on Slate on Monday, calling Palin’s conduct “a national disgrace” and writing: “Given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.”
	Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama on The Daily Beast, writing of McCain’s embrace of Palin: “What on earth can he have been thinking?” (The endorsement led to Buckley’s resigning from The National Review, founded by his father.)
	On “The Colbert Report” on Monday, the conservative columnist Kathleen Parker stuck by her assertion, which she said caused the base to treat her like a traitor, that Palin should have bowed out. She said she’d gotten some secret e-mails from Republicans in the White House agreeing with her.
	William Kristol, a Palin fan who thinks she has been horribly managed, wrote in The Times on Monday that McCain should fire his campaign for malpractice. {snip} I called Kristol and asked him if he thought Palin could grow into the next Reagan, reminding him that he was outnumbered by conservatives recoiling from her. “Conservative eggheads are my friends,” he said, “but politically they’re a contrarian indicator. If they’re down on Palin, things are looking up for her. With all due respect for my fellow eggheads, they are underestimating the importance of a natural political gift or star quality. It matters a lot.”
	David Brooks, speaking at an Atlantic Magazine event, called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party,” bemoaning the fact that she did not fit in with the late William Buckley’s desire to have a party that celebrated ideas and learning. {snip} I called Brooks, who conceded: “Her political delivery skills are incredible.” So you agree with Kristol that she might be a star in the party? Could Palin be the nominee in 2012? “The short answer is no,” Brooks said. “She has reinforced the worst of talk-radio culture. The party will need a leader to strike out in a new direction, a fiscally conservative president more like a high-tech Teddy Roosevelt. Someone with gravitas.”

Her hopes dashed, Maureen concedes defeat.

So much for brokering a peace accord. I’ll have to leave the eggheads boiling.

Perhaps she would have better luck brokering peace with the Palestinians than the Palinistas.

Nobel Envy

Maureen Dowd's fellow Op/Ed page stablemate Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. The NYT article seems unduly restrained:

Mr. Krugman, 55, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

And the prize comes with serious coin, as long as you have someplace to spend ten million kronor. Sure makes Maureen's mere Pultzer look a little shabby.

Blog Watch: Feeding Frenzy

Updated: 6/25/08 (correction in italics)

Nothing brings out the bloodlust better than an angry mob with torches and pitchforks. Time and time again, we have seen a certain pack mentality develop once there is some blood in the water. Once the feeding frenzy starts, the metaphors mix endlessly until the piranhas have nothing left to chew on but themselves.

As noted here, Media Matters recently brought up the issue of Maureen Dowd’s long-standing use of effeminizing words for male Democratic figures (particularly Barack Obama, and to a lesser degree, John Edwards) and masculine terms towards Hillary Clinton.

About the same time, the National Organization of Women named Dowd to their Election Media Hall of Shame and began a letter writing campaign to the New York Times. This led to a June 22nd column by Times Public Editor (read ombudsman) Clark Hoyt to investigate:

Peggy Aulisio of South Dartmouth, Mass., said, “A real review of your own stories and columns is warranted.” I think so too. And I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

The case against Maureen and her defense are summarized thusly:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Despite the defense of her putative boss Andrew Rosenthal, Hoyt finds Dowd worthy of a wrist slap:

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary.
{snip}
Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

Media Matters immediately went back on the offensive citing Dowd’s “nobody had objected” phrase and then copiously quoting notorious Dowd critics Bob Somerby, Taylor Marsh and Molly Ivors. In her defense, these are bloggers that might be below Dowd's radar. Media Matters didn't find any mainstream media sources that match those folks for sheer DowdHatred.

Piling on, bloggers have been cackling with glee at the sight of a bastion of the New York Times Op/Ed page getting her knuckles rapped with a ruler. Her is just a partial list of blogs that jumped in to take a kick at the prone body:

Ed Driscoll.com
JustOneMinute
Michael Calderone at Politico
Egregious Moderation
impolitical
broadsheet at Salon
Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo
digby's Hullabaloo
Jossip
Conde Nast Portfolio
Gawker

And those are the tip of the iceberg. I really wish I had time to go through and select the most vituperative missives, but that may have to wait for another day. If you have seen a particularly vicious Dowd Driveby inspired by Hoyt's public flogging, let me know in the comments or at the tip-line. The only blogger I've come across to come to her defense is ATLmalcontent. It seems to show some sort of lockstep at work.

I’m sure Maureen Dowd will survive this bushwhacking. For every critic, there is a silent observer that agrees with her often pithy punditry. And it would be a shame to see Dowd start to pull her punches. After all, she told Clark:

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

And that just isn’t going to happen.

Dowd-Free Digest

To save time and since there was no new Dowd column this weekend, here's a guide to the other NYT columnists from the past couple of days:

Digest David Brooks: Dubya has so screwed up Iraq and the economy, there is no way the Democrats can fix it, so you might as well just stay the course.

Digest Bob Herbert: Obama's got the momentum, but it's still a long, long battle.

Digest Roger Cohen: Obama is not Muslim. He just acts that way sometimes.

Digest Bill Kristol (from yesterday): Stop voting. Obama won.

Digest Paul Krugman (also from yesterday): Obama isn't playing nice and says mean things about Hillary.

Digest Frank Rich (from Sunday): If you think the Democratic primary race is ugly now, wait until Hillary starts playing the race card.

Digest Nicholas Kristof (from Sunday): Women make better leaders when we don't bother electing them.

Digest Gail Collins (from Saturday): We don't have Mitt Romney to kick around anymore.

Dowd's Dateline: Rosenthal's Rebuttal

The low key buzz over the Dowd Dateline Debate reached such a hum that Andy Rosenthal gave an interview to the New York Observer to clarify New York Times policy on datelines and assistants.

“It’s driving me out of my fucking mind,” Times editorial-page editor Andy Rosenthal told Media Mob this afternoon.

"[Dowd] reported the column in New Hamsphire. The fact of the matter is, paticularly when covering a campaign which is a very high-speed story, it’s incredibly unusual for the reporter to be in the same place as the dateline when the story is filed. What do you do, stay in Des Moines while a candidate travels to New Hampshire? Oh, don’t go to Ramallah with the President because you have a Jerusalem dateline on your story! I mean this is just ridiculous! This is a complete invention, this controversy."

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," he said. "It’s a little bit of an affectation."

As for the assistant, Mr. Rosenthal said it's common for assistants to collect quotes for columnists without a reporting credit.

"Has Greg Sargent ever heard of leg-work? If somebody wrote a blog post saying that all the reporters from the New York Times are Martians, would we have to respond to that too? This is no less ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous!"

This expletive-laden explanation did not assuage Sargent who stuck to his guns in a follow-up:

This is a straightforward representation issue. Because of the combo of the dateline and the uncredited reporting, readers of the Dowd column came away with the belief that she went to the victory party and talked to voters, when she didn't.

Rachel Sklar at Huffington Post gives datelines some mystical holy power:

What does the reader assume by seeing "DERRY N.H." in all caps and bold type at the top of the column? Well, obviously, that the story was written there, that the reporter had written his or her thoughts right at the scene. And why are datelines important? Well, for one they maximize information provided to the reader, but there's another: The dateline puts the reporter at the scene, which makes a statement about the publication's resources, level of reporting, and commitment to the story. Upshot: Datelines are selling points. So a misleading, not-quite-correct dateline is a bit like false advertising.

In Sklar’s mind, somehow news magically disappears if not written down immediately as it is witnessed. But in expressing umbrage, she manages to explain that the Derry dateline means that Dowd isn’t claiming she was at the victory party.

She mentions Hillary's victory party in Manchester (where apparently an assistant collected the quotes used), and herself watching Hillary's on-air tear-up on TV from the comfort of her office. She refers to an event in Salem, to Bill Clinton in Henniker. Otherwise, that's it. Derry is not mentioned.

The bigger point is that if Dowd wanted to lie about where she had been, why not name someplace more newsworthy? If anything Maureen was scrupulously honest about where she had been and where she hadn’t. And Adam Clymer, a former NYT political reporter tells the Observer that this sacred ground interpretation of a dateline is horsefeathers:

Oh, for crying out loud! The Times dateline rules are that you have had to have been in the place you use as a dateline, not that you have to be in it when you write. There is no evidence at all that the rules were not followed.

The real journalists, as opposed to the easily outraged bloggers, seem to be taking Dowd's side. Mike Peterson editor of the Franklin Journal in a comment at journalism oriented Poynter Online takes the side of Dowd by saying:

Maybe it's just the impact after a long week in the trenches, but this entire thing sounds like a lot of j-school theorizing and reminds me of that crack about an economist being like a guy who knows a hundred ways to make love, but doesn't have a girlfriend. As far as I can tell, Dowd spent some time in NH and, yes, she had a stringer pick up some quotes for her. That justifies the dateline but doesn't require sharing the byline and, as your fifth grade teacher would say, maybe if you spent less time worrying about what Maureen is doing and a little more time working on your own projects, you could have a nice trip to Jerusalem, too.

With all this huffing and puffing, a couple of points are agreed upon:

• The New York Times admits to everything Sargent’s sources claimed, but fails to see any violation of policy or reader trust.
• Everybody thinks datelines are kind of silly in an electronic world, but if you’re going to have them, make them mean something.
• Nothing in the column was factually incorrect or fabricated.
• A lot of people like to see Maureen Dowd and/or the New York Times taken down a notch no matter how petty the point.

I wish people would expend this much scrutiny on real scandals.

Rich's Reruns

There was no new Maureen Dowd column today but Frank Rich asks the question “Haven’t We Heard This Voice Before?” and the answer is “Yes, we have, Frank. Twice a week in Maureen Dowd’s column.” At Dowd Report contributor yellojkt's blog, Foma*, he did a Pundits on Parade post which noted that Charles Krauthammer has a tendancy to echo themes touched on by George Will earlier and better. Frank Rich is Maureen Dowd’s Chuckie K. Critics of the liberal slant of the New York Times like to conflate Dowd and Rich into one double headed hydra and columns like his today don’t help that image.

I’ve always had a theory about Rich’s lateral move to the Opinion page. When he was the nations premiere theater critic, his scathing sarcastic reviews could close a show faster than any other voice. Since the Times gets a large advertising income stream from the full color Broadway show ads in the Sunday arts and style section, his constant naysaying must have annoyed the powers that be. By putting him out to pasture on the columnists’ page, he could have an outlet for his negativity and not annoy Great White Way advertisers.

One of the problems with only writing weekly is that when the news happens on Tuesday like it did with the New Hampshire primary, the ground has been pretty well plowed by the weekend. But this would be forgivable he brought any new context or slant on the week’s events, but he doesn’t. It’s a hackneyed replay of the conventional wisdom that has been expressed already by every pundit on the planet.

Even his opening movie allusion is perhaps the lamest ever not found in a high school newspaper:

She had me at “Well, that hurts my feelings.”

While Maureen Dowd is name-checking classic movies by Hepburn and Kubrick, Rich is using Tom Cruise as his cultural touchstone. And so much else that he writes is a pale imitation. On Tuesday, Dowd succinctly invoked the Lazio Effect in one sentence:

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man.

Rich with twice and many words to fill feels he has to spell it out for his slower readers:

To use family-newspaper language, [Obama] behaved like a jerk — or, to be more precise, like Rick Lazio, the now-forgotten adversary who cleared Mrs. Clinton’s path to the Senate by boorishly waving a paper in her face during a 2000 debate.

And that is part of his problem. With one super-sized column a week (and you are free to make your own extra large Rich remark, it’s too low hanging of a softball lob for me to take a swing at), he often wanders around or shoehorns more than one topic in each column. At the end of this week’s column, he runs out of steam and starts to mine old Dowd columns.

Every politician employs pollsters, but Mrs. Clinton, tellingly, has one, Mark Penn, as her top campaign strategist.

Dowd had an entire column about Penn’s role in the campaign back in October. Rich then rambles on for several paragraphs about Penn with this portion in the middle:

Add to this habitual triangulation the ugly campaigning of the men around her — Mr. Penn’s sleazy invocation of “cocaine” on MSNBC, Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” rant falsifying Mr. Obama’s record on Iraq — and you don’t have change.

Maureen did a hilarious skewering of the use of “cocaine” as a talking point by the Clinton campaign a month ago. Rich ends with this admonition:

It would be good for both her campaign and the presidential race in general if Mrs. Clinton does find her own voice. We’ll know she has done so when it doesn’t sound so uncannily like Bill Clinton and Mark Penn.

And when Rich doesn’t sound so uncannily like a longer-winded Maureen Dowd, maybe he can justify 1500 words every Sunday. I’d rather read reruns of Dowd’s columns. Even the old ones are funnier and fresher than Rich’s rehashes.

Dowd Dateline Debate

Lots of blogs find fault with one phrase Maureen Dowd uses in a column and nitpick it. Mega-blog Talking Points Memo has taken issue with, of all things, the dateline. Yes, that little location the reporter claims they were when they reported the article. It seems Dowd had to leave the Clinton un-pity party early and allegedly an uncredited assistant did the actual quote collecting since Dowd had to wing her way to the Middle East with Dubya on deadline. The umbrage goes as follows (added emphasis mine):

The piece reads as if Dowd was on the scene at Hillary's victory party, interviewing voters reacting to her win. But it turns out Dowd couldn't have been at the party at all -- instead, she'd already jetted half way around the world to cover the President's Middle East trip, I'm told. An eyewitness tells TPM that on Tuesday night he spied Dowd typing away at the reporters' media filing center in Jerusalem's Dan Panorama hotel.

If Dowd was nearly 6,000 miles away from these people on Tuesday night, how did the quotes get into her column? A reporter I know tells me that Dowd's assistant was floating around at the Hillary victory party that night. So it seems almost certain that Dowd's assistant did the reporting for her. But there's no other byline on the piece.

The article has a lot of arcana about dateline ethics, the long and short being that the reporter at some point has to have actually set foot in the location used. This would be a tempest in a teapot, but journalists have been flogged for similar faults before.

The TPM article was passed along uncritically by several other blogs such as DragonFlyEye.Net, Portfolio and mediabistro mostly on the schadenfreudistic strength of vague accusations of wrongdoing by a prominent Times columnist.

Spencer Ackerman goes further and cites the case of Rick Bragg who resigned in disgrace and makes this bolder accusation (which the TPM article no longer links to):

My boy Greg Sargent catches Maureen Dowd in -- why mince words? -- a lie. Dowd datelined yesterday's column Derry, N.H. But at the time, it turns out, she was in Jerusalem, covering the president's trip. Apparently, she was following her paper's lead. Greg confirmed that the paper allows such dateline manipulation as long as someone contributed on-the-ground reporting to a piece. In this case, that someone is Dowd's assistant, who is uncredited in the column. The Times says that's OK.

But it isn't. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, resigned after it turned out he relied heavily on an uncredited stringer for a series with an Apalachicola, Florida dateline. That was the honorable thing to do when faced with such a misrepresentation. But Dowd's is worse. At least Bragg, in the words of the paper, "indeed visited Apalachicola briefly" for "his" piece. Dowd was half a world away from events she claimed to witness firsthand.

Ackerman cites Rick Bragg as the cautionary example, so it's worth examining. Rick Bragg was writing an article on the Gulf Coast and sent an unpaid informal stringer of his to Apalachicola, Florida for some reporting. Bragg eventually made it to Apalachicola but used the free lancer's reporting uncredited for most of the article. When this came to light it brought down a lot of scrutiny on other stories and Bragg resigned. Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote a comprehensive article which included these items:

David Firestone, a former Atlanta correspondent now based in Washington, said stringers were used mainly "when you couldn't be in multiple places..."

[S]ome Times staffers say Bragg is being unfairly singled out for working within a system in which interns and assistants -- what the newsroom calls "legs" -- are regularly assigned to do extensive firsthand reporting but almost never receive credit.

In a statement, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: "Like most newspapers, the Times has long relied on non-staff journalists to assist correspondents in their reporting, by conducting interviews, providing research assistance or helping to stake out the scenes of news events, especially when spot news is being gathered against a tight deadline." She said employees have been reminded that "such non-staffers should be used to supplement a correspondent's core reporting; they should not be used to substitute for that reporting."

A contemporaneous New York Times article added the following:

In an e-mail message to his colleagues on the national staff yesterday, Peter T. Kilborn, who is based in Washington, said: ''The interventions of editors and rare feeds from stringers notwithstanding, we dig stuff up ourselves and chase things down ourselves and put it together ourselves.''

Mr. Kilborn's comments were lauded, and amplified, in messages from other national reporters.

While the correspondents acknowledged that they relied periodically on researchers during breaking news, they said they had never gone as far as Mr. Bragg had: using a stringer to do almost all of the reporting on a feature article.

Let's analyze the kerfuffle to see if Sargeant and Ackerman are making a mountain out of a molehill or if we are facing the return of Jayson Blair.

• Sargent quotes an unnamed sources that allege Dowd was somewhere else. The source saw her working on something but had no direct conversation with her about what it was.
• Dowd met the test implied by the Times for using an assistant, she was on assignment elsewhere (and I think most readers of TPM would think tracking Dubya's misdeeds more important than attending a victory party). We have no idea who this assistant was and what his or her professional relationship to Dowd or the Times is.
• Dowd was writing on deadline about breaking news. The election results came late Tuesday night and Dowd's column had to be posted by midnight.
• The three people in the article were quoted by name. A real muckracker could easily track these folks down and determine when and by whom they were interviewed.
• The quotes used were anecdotal filler supporting Dowd's thesis that the emotional event energized her supporters. The story could stand without those three paragraphs. Here at Dowd Report Central we read a lot of commentary on her columns and nobody was citing these quotes as pivotal parts of the article.
• Dowd did plenty of leg work in New Hampshire over the rather abbreviated campaign cycle. As noted here, multiple sightings of the celebrity pundit were made at an earlier event by Obama.
• The only genuinely first person observation in the column was her observing fellow reporters commenting on Hillary's histrionics.

When you put this altogether we are looking at a rather mild case of a national reporter using resources available to her to fill out a piece that had to make deadline. It's not like Dowd was eating bon-bons on the beach while phoning in files.

We'll see if Dowd faces a feeding frenzy over what seems to be a heroic effort to get a column filed on time of if this is just a case of Dowd haters stirring the pot.

Quoting Kristol

Maureen Dowd’s latest compatriot on the New York Times commentary page is Bill Kristol, noted neo-con and omnipresent Fox television fixture. While Bill is new to the Times, he is no stranger to Dowd. The two have a professional relationship dating back to the Poppy Bush administration when he was vice-presidential chief of staff a/k/a “Quayle’s Brain”, something you would think you want to keep off your resume.

Here is how she described him back in 1989:

For his chief of staff, Quayle recruited a skeptical William Kristol, the 36-year-old son of Irving Kristol, by promising an ''energetic'' Vice Presidency. Lauded by the Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a 'formidable intellect,' Kristol is a New York native with a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science, where he subsequently taught politics. He has worked as chief of staff for William Bennett at the Education Department and has a reputation around Washington as a savvy conservative manager. 'The Vice President felt that there would be no inconsistency between being loyal and discreet and helping make policy,' says Kristol, 'and it's turned out that way.'

After the changing of the guard in 1992 with the election of Billary, Kristol became more frequently quoted by name rather than on background. He supplied a bon mot that became of the earliest digs at Al Gore’s infamous stiffness:

Another unfortunate omen for Gore came during Clinton's first press conference as President-elect, when he invited his Vice President to join him on stage, but made no opening for him to say anything. Gore stood silently, staring somewhat vacantly into the middle distance with his arms straight at his side. He looked, said William Kristol, Vice President Quayle's chief of staff, "like an environmentally correct wooden Native American outside a cigar store."

Kristol was peripherally involved in the Sununu columns that caused John to curse her, leading to the recent exorcism of her condo. She caught up with Bill at the opening of the Bush I library to learn some new gossip:

But I learned something even spookier: John Sununu is Dan Quayle's new brain.

Bill Kristol was Dan Quayle's old brain. In the White House, he was the chief of staff in charge of educating the frisky Vice President.

'I'll cheerfully acknowledge that John's I.Q. is considerably higher than mine -- he always told me it was,' Mr. Kristol said of his old nemesis. Mr. Sununu was President Bush's chief of staff until his inflamed ego, bellicose temper and personal trips on military planes and a Government limo jaunt to a stamp auction tripped him up.

While Bill was a staple of her columns in the early 90s, they must have had a falling out somewhere along the line. In recent years, he has appeared in her columns only through indirect quotes from his ubiquitous opining on the Fox Network. In 2003, she referred to him parenthetically as “über-hawk Bill Kristol.”

In her book, Are Men Necessary?, Dowd emphasizes the need to stay civil with all your acquaintances since you never know when a former lover or old colleague will show up in a professional setting. Let’s wait and see if any sparks fly between Dowd and her old source.

Out Of Fashion

What is amazing about Maureen Dowd is that she instills such strong passion even when she doesn’t have a current column. Lapata in Chapati Mystery takes on the entire New York Times stable of columnists, but singles out Maureen Dowd in particular.

I am willing to cede the point that numerous op-ed writers for that newspaper of record often appear to lack even the most basic skills needed in making a logical argument. In the case of Maureen Dowd, of course, logical argument is not, it is hoped, even a goal. In her column, the formula of pegging every political figure and situation to a corresponding character in a widely viewed prime-time hit television show does not require logical argument, but only a fit of insinuating pique.

What brought on his pique? It seems he is rather smitten with the prose of one Guy Trebay, the NYT fashion columnist.

Guy Trebay would never be invited to write an op-ed column in the Times, nor would his byline grace the columns of the first section of any newspaper. Guy Trebay would never call the world flat, or compare prime ministers of foreign nations fictional mafia dons or devote whole columns to baby names.

Lapata, of course, is calling out Flat Earth Friedman, and the baby names column by David Brooks is pretty silly, but of all the poisoned paragraphs by the Dowdster, what does he pick on? A five-month old item titled “A Tale of Two Tonys, Exiting Tormented”. Let’s have a look:

They’re both going out, not with a bang, but with a bing.

As they go dark, the two Tonys are bitter, paranoid and worn down by their enemies and scheming erstwhile allies. They both live in a bleak universe of half-truths, compromises and betrayals, a world changed utterly by the violence they set in motion. They were both brought low by high-stakes mistakes.

Tony Blair fears the feral beast. Tony Soprano is the feral beast.

The two Tonys found that their skin was never thick enough. And they stumbled into trouble with their Juniors, Junior Bush and Junior Soprano. Before he steps down in two weeks, Tony Blair decided to let loose with one of those self-pitying Tony Soprano-style rants that drove Dr. Melfi to terminate him. Call it No. 10 Downer Street.

It may not be Coward, or even Parker, but it’s fresh, clever, and topical (at least at the time). I would have never come up with the Blair in the Bada Bing Club allusion, but Dowd makes it work. As always, she stretches a metaphor a little further than it should go, like here:

I worry more about the press when it’s reverent rather than irreverent, when it’s a tame lapdog, as it was in the buildup to Iraq, than when it’s a feral beast. And I worry about politicians like W. and Blair being black and white rather than gray, as they were in building their hysterical, phony case against Saddam. We would have been well-served back then if Mr. Blair had explained to the jejune Junior that there’s some good, some bad, and some gray in the world, and that sometimes it’s smarter to squeeze tyrants, rather than Shock-and-Awe them.

It may not have the flowery flourishes of a Guy Trebay who can milk four paragraphs out of leering at supermodels at the tail end of a pout about hirsute hipsters, but I would rather spend an afternoon just staring at a Maureen Dowd column than read purple prose about underfed fashionistas.

FlashBack: Mean Girls

Maureen Dowd took Turkey Day off, so let’s look back at a classic column.

Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd
22 October 2005

One of the major reasons used for the invasion of Iraq was the Saddam Hussein's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Much of the evidence of WMDs was reported by Judith Miller who used now-discredited Iraqi expatriate Ahmad Chalabi as a source.

Any good schoolyard battle between two queen bees always starts with sarcastic declarations of devotion:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

Becky Sharp is one of the most famous amoral social climbers in literature. It implies a rise strewn with discarded relationships in a quest for power. An implication Dowd makes more explicit in the very next paragraph:

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of and hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

And it wouldn’t be a cat fight without an argument over cafeteria table assignments.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

Which of course includes an alliterative attack, one of several including “hard work and hauteur” above and these:

This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Other trademark Dowdisms are the silly nickname:

She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

And the lowbrow pop-culture reference:

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame."

Perhaps it would be too much credit to think Judith Miller was as familiar with The Fantastic Four as Dowd seems to be. But as always, Maureen saves the heaviest salvo for last:

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

When the paper of record is caught carrying water, even the op/ed page has to turn up its nose at the bias.

"Why Am I Single?"

Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?
MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 14, 2007

Maureen Dowd is single. This may come as a shock to you. After all, she is smart, beautiful and powerful. Who wouldn’t fall for this triple threat? Dowd asks herself that a lot. She turned the topic into a book, Are Men Necessary? In today’s column she comes up with a full set of answers. And then, through the power of her rolodex, Google and the Times archives, she finds an expert to rationalize each excuse.

I’m Too Smart
Expert: Ray Fisman, PhD – Columbia University, Dating Data: Economic Theory and the Search for a Mate

With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.

The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

Dr Fisman is also familiar with Episode 42 of that seminal scholarly work on inter-gender relationships, Sex and The City.

“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”

She then quotes an article in Slate about the study:

“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”

I’m Not Hot Enough
Experts: Steven Gaulin of the University of California at Santa Barbara and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh, members of Human Behavior and Evolution Society

Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.

I’m Too Old and Make Too Much Money
Expert: Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College as reported by Alex Williams of the New York Times

The new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”

Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.

I’m Too Powerful
Expert: Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst as quoted by Lisa Belkin, also of the Times

Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”

Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.
Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.

Something tells me it might be contract renegotiation time at the Gray Lady.

I’m Too Angry
Expert: Victoria Brescoll, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University

Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.

I Can’t Cook
Expert: Hillary Clinton, Presidential Candidate

That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.

There you have it, the master checklist of MoDo’s dating excuses. If only she would date younger, less affluent, married bloggers, she could solve her loneliness issues.

This Is Rich

On Sundays Maureen Dowd shares the Opinion Page of the New York Times with former theater critic Frank Rich. Frank is unabashedly liberal in that near stereotype of a mainstream media left-wing shill way. Sometimes he and Dowd are on the same page metaphorically as well.

Since Rich only writes one extra-windy column a week, sometimes there is a lag between current events and his column. It also helps if Maureen has done some of the footwork for him first. Let’s see what I mean:

Dowd 11/7/2007	Rich 11/11/2007
President Bush came to the steps of the Capitol yesterday for a Second Inaugural do-over. Dowd’s column was a full-on parody of Bush’s Second Inaugural speech down to the phrase. See this post for a fuller breakdown.	Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. Gee, what reminded him of that particular speech? We won’t even go into the familiarity with the oeuvre of Ryan Seacrest.
We’ll give you billions of dollars and lots of big-ticket stuff, like F-16s — no strings attached. And we’ll take you at your word that you have no intention of using them against India.	Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists.
But I looked into Mushy’s eyes and saw a master, a man committed to helping us fight terror.	When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”
Vice says Constitutions are for sissies. He doesn’t see anything wrong with Mushy’s press blackout. He thinks we can learn a few lessons from him.	Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

At least in the last item, Rich switches around who is learning from whom.

Rich then goes on to make a labored point by point comparison between Pakistan and the Bush Administration. And I went on to make a labored comparison between Rich and Dowd. And my verdict is that people should keep their eyes on their own paper, not just on the same page.

The Colbert Conspiracy

If the purpose of the Stephen Colbert stunt casting in the Sunday New York Times was intended to draw attention to the Times Select-free Maureen Dowd, it worked. The blogosphere was abuzz with the news. The general consensus was that stale Colbert was better than hot Dowd. Let’s take a look at some of the more creative headlines:

Caveat Bettor, per Diem: The best Maureen Dowd column ever
Baseball Crank: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever Written
Wonkette: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever Written by Stephen Colbert
SteveSilver.net: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever

Spot a trend? Plenty of other places simply took the stunt at face value:

DailyKos: NYT: Stephen Colbert Replaces Maureen Dowd
NoFactZone.net (a Colbert fansite): Stephen Colbert, ‘New York Times’ columnist?
The Body Politik: Colbert Takes Over Maureen Dowd Column
Verum Serum: Stephen Colbert Writes for Maureen Dowd (and Frank Rich)
Dara Weinberg: Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column

The only place that was the most remotely skeptical was Editor and Publisher with their caveat:

But was this just another bit of fakery, and Dowd actually did an excellent job of mocking the mock views of Colbert? Was it faux keeps or not?

Here at MoDo Manor, we tend to be from Missouri when it comes to the guest voices inside Dowd’s head. What would her motive be to pretend to be a fake commentator when she already has a bully platform of her own? The most quoted line in the piece was the faux Frank Rich part:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Frank Rich, the theater critic turned pundit, briefly bumped her off the premiere Sunday spot for a while until calmer heads prevailed. Could this be her way of exacting a pound of his ample flesh? It's obvious that Rich cribs off Dowd fairly frequently. By putting words in the mouth of a Straw Colbert, she gets to have her revenge and eat it cold.

You would think that Comedy Central would have been in on the act from the start if the real Colbert were involved, but their blogpost was possibly ambiguous:

Yesterday's New York Times readers were in for a surprise when Maureen Dowd 'dared' Stephen Colbert to write her op-ed column. In it, Stephen both squelches and fans rumors that he might run for public office

Note the ‘scare’ quotes around ‘dared’. Plus, that post didn’t appear until 1:34 p.m on Monday, a good 36 hours after the NYT page went live. And let’s face it, if Colbert and his TV overlords were caught flat-footed by Dowd, would they let on?

The sign of a good conspiracy theory is that facts never get in the way of thinking with your gut. I think Colbert would agree.

The Colbert Retort

A Mock Columnist, Amok
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007

The phrase “running amok (or amuck)” comes the Malay word “Amuco” and has come to mean any sort of violent senseless rampage. Amok Time would be a good name for a Fox News Network talk show.

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

George Will wrote a column this week on how tough it is to be a billionaire in "today’s plutonomy". Will may have been writing tongue-in-cheek, but as with MoDo, sometimes it can be tough to tell since so much of his opining already verges on self-parody.

Stephen Colbert is a character on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report played by Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert the character is a caricature of an over-the-top right-wing commenter. Stephen Colbert the comedian is a hopeless commie pinko.

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Stephen Colbert’s new book is non-sequiturly titled I Am America (And So Can You!). For the second week in a row, Dowd has gotten her inspiration from the New Releases table at BigBoxOfBooks™. Dowd then channels the Stephen Colbert character for the rest of her column:

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito.

James Bond super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld always had a fluffy white cat. Sarah Jessica Parker’s vapid self-centered Sex and The City character drank lots of fancy alcoholic drinks while extolling the travails of living in upper-class Manhattan. The mental image of Marueen Dowd as a slutty, drunk, evil despot probably appeals to a lot of people. I know it does to me.

Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Frank Rich is a fellow New York Times columnist who is more predictable and reliably liberal than even Maureen Dowd, except with a narrower range of hot-button topics.

I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

This sort of left-handed compliment is Colbert’s stock in trade, most famously exhibited when Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Association dinner and called George Bush an idiot in so many words to his face.

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Or Clarence Thomas.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

MaureenColbert has a very salient point here. While all the Republican candidates are white, male, and nominally Christian, some evangelical groups have sent up smoke signals threatening to support a third party candidate if the Republican nominee is insufficiently theocratic.

And there is the rub with ouroburosian attempts at satire. Many people are incapable of discerning the difference and it becomes tough to see the humor. At what point does a liberal columnist imitating a fake right wing pundit come out of the other end of the rabbit hole as an unironic Rush Limbaugh clone?

Blog Watch: Is MoDo Liberal?

With all the changes going on with the Jericho blasting of Times Select, the powers that be at the New York Times have been spinning it as best they could. The Times of course always get pillared for being THE Liberal Media and the stable of columnists is always trotted out as Exhibit A.

In an NYT interview Andrew Rosenthal, the dynastic scion of the late Abe "I'm Writing as Bad as I can" Rosenthal, claims not to be able to detect bias in Maureen Dowd’s writing:

I would defy anyone to label Maureen Dowd by party affiliation or ideology. I've known her and worked closely with her for 20 years and I can't tell you the answer to either one.

This eye-rollingly oblivious assessment has been seized upon by those to the right of the dittoheads as further proof of the inherent pinko-ness of the Times.

Mark Finkelstein of Newsbusters (self-described as “Exposing and Combatting Liberal Media Bias” as if it were an IED on the Information Superhighway) calls Rosenthal a drooling idiot in so many words:

What would be worse: that when Times editorial page editor Rosenthal claims not to know Maureen Dowd's politics he's not being honest -- or that he is?

Hoystory picks up on that kernel of a talking point and runs with it:

Is he serious? Maureen Dowd is a left wing liberal who hasn’t voted for a Republican for any elected office, from dog catcher on up, for her entire adult life.

I defy Maureen Dowd to prove me wrong. I’ve read, shudder, her columns for a handful of years and can tell you that.

Who does Rosenthal thinks buys that — on the left or the right?

Talk about treating your readers like complete morons. And some people wonder why the business is going in the tank.

If we can get one more blogger in the echo chamber, Rush Limbaugh might pick up on this groaner.

To put this tempest in a teabag to rest, let’s go to the Liberal Media itself. A study of North Carolina newspapers revealed that they ran more conservative editorials than liberal or progressive ones. Chad Killebrew, the executive editor of The Dispatch (a member of the New York Times Regional Media Group), examines the results and observes:

While some readers might disagree into which camp a certain columnist falls, I think for most writers it's rather obvious. No one will accuse Cal Thomas, for example, of being liberal or Maureen Dowd of being conservative.

Not only does he feel MoDo is liberal, he singles her out as the breed standard.

She is many other things such as wickedly funny, sharply sarcastic, and bitterly vicious, but she is also clearly liberal. Now that we have solved that conundrum I can move on to other important issues of the day like establishing ursine scatological habits and determining papal religious affiliations.

Blog Watch: Slinking Back

Hometown conservative blog Missoulapolis notes the delicious irony of the first MoDo column after the fall of Times Select to be about slinking back. She quotes the Alan (Not Atlas) Shrugged column's opening lines:

It’s a lost art, slinking away.

Now the fashion is slinking back.

Draw your own conclusion about how veiled that dig is at her NYT masters for keeping her off the pundit market for two years.