Palin's Run

Sarah’s Ghoulish Carousel
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 15, 2009

It's been weeks since Maureen Dowd has thrown out a really interesting pop-cultural reference, but when she returns to form, she does so in a big way with this week's Movies With Maureen® moment. Eschewing her typical chick flick and AMC genres, she goes straight for the high geek euthanasia touchstone.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

It's good to know that Farrah Fawcett's biggest big screen triumph will live on in our memories forever.

Then Dowd doubles down with an even more obscure Separated At Birth call-out.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

You have to really know your Swiss surrealist sculptors to pull that one out of your butt. And just to prove this is no fluke she also throws in a bonus Movie Moment that doubles as an Alliteration Alert™.

So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion.

All I can say is: Maureen, welcome to Sanctuary.

Bitter Morning Brew

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Maureen Dowd got woken up at quarter to four to discuss her Sunday column comparing Hillary Clinton favorably to Sarah Palin (which sure counts as faint praise in our book) on MSNBC. Maureen Dowd says:

I love Sarah Palin. I love her more than anyone because as a journalist she is the best story ever.

When asked about Palin's chances in 2012, Maureen thinks that Palin absolutely has a shot at the nomination.

She is the first person to ever fuse politics with reality TV. I think she could absolutely be the nominee. She is sort of playing to people's darker impulses. And that core of the Republican party that is left, that is very bitter, is loving her.

And just like pots and kettles, Maureen can spot bitter a mile away.

Something Fishy

Sarah’s Secret Diary
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 7, 2009

Today's column is done in faux-Palin speak, a time honored Dowd gimmick guaranteed to keep wingnuts revved up about how Maureen Dowd is jealous and snobby and elitist. Therefore, it's helpful to review the source material to show that if anything Maureen with her innate need for complete sentences and coherent thoughts is actually undershooting the parody potential.



And there a few other pop cultural references to be illustrated.

I posed for a cheesecake shot in Runner’s World with short-shorts and a crumpled American flag that’s destined to be on the bedroom wall of every conservative 12-year-old boy. It’s the metaphor, stupid! Heck yeah, I’m running! As I learned when I was a beauty contestant — flags and gams show you it’s about country.

And before you say anything though about the glam shots of me stretching and preening on the waterfront in my cute running outfits, don’t bother. That would be a sexist double standard.

It’s just like when Obama, the One Who Must Be Obeyed, said his family was off-limits so everyone left them alone. But they never left mine alone. Thank goodness for that though because we hate being out of the limelight! It was a blast to see Bristol with my grandbaby Tripp on the cover of People as the ambassadress of abstinence!

But Maureen, through Fake Palin, knows what is really driving Sarah. Caribou Barbie has eyes fixed on an bigger race.

It’s about me running the country.

It’s about me running.

It’s about me.

The game Dowd is playing is that by posing phony Palin as a presidential hopeful it might force Sarah into some sort of non-denial that can be used against her latter. But then Maureen falls into wishful thinking.

The media doesn’t get Sarah Palin. I hear planes buzzing. Oh, no!! Have they all left??

If only we could.

The Drudge Attack

It's a pretty poorly kept secret that Maureen Dowd's Sunday columns are often available late on Saturday to anyone that bothers to check out the NYT website frequently enough. This sort of advanced investigative journalism led Matt Drudge of his eponymous report to issue the following scoop Saturday afternoon:

MAUREEN DOWD TRASHES 'NUTTY' PALIN
Sat Jul 04 2009 14:40:36 ET

NY TIMES Op-Ed Queen Maureen Dowd runs out of adjectives and insults while ripping away at Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in an upcoming Sunday column.

Palin is "one nutty puppy", in the mind of Dowd, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT, with "erratic and egoistic behavior".

Dowd spits her holiday barbecue in 800 words, designed for fireworks.

"Exquisite battiness... solipsistic meltdown so strange... incoherent, breathless and prickly... Sarah's country-music melodramas... girlish burbling."

Developing...

Since the entire column was already available online (since yours truly was also able to get the post up early as well), I'm not sure what was 'developing', but it was enough to drive his minions into action.

I'm not shocked that Drudge took umbrage at a column ridiculing Palin. I'd be more shocked if Dowd hadn't opined about the resigning guv. What was amusing was how quickly Drudge's blogiteriat fell in line and spread his breathless excitement. Much of that brief item was reproduced nearly in full by the following blogs:

Chicago Ray Report (complete with some new-to-me tasteless photoshops)
The Virginian
Red Stater (my new favorite rabid wing nut)
Invincible Armor
Worcester Right
and others

Then, on the Washington Times website, Andrew Breitbart had this assessment:

Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey - Obama's Angels (featuring Joy Behar in the role of "Bosley") - used a potent mix of mockery, snobbery and vitriol to undermine Mrs. Palin's feminist bona fides.

They are what my wife calls "pad throwers," an allusion to the shower room scene in the Stephen King film "Carrie," in which the popular girls throw sanitary napkins and tampons at the film's namesake.

Maureen's one defender on the right is one Liz Trotta who also had not much good to day about Palin, but did have this to say about Dowd's column:

[Maureen Dowd's column] was a well written, funny piece. And, you know, there's one other element here, and I think most writers are afraid to bring it up. They sort of skirt the idea that this is a woman who has used her good looks and her gender to really get ahead in the political world. That's something, of course, the men don't want to admit, and certainly not the women.

(h/t to Freedom Eden for the transcript.)

One recurring theme in the counter-attacks on Dowd is that her single childless life makes her wholly incapable of empathizing with Palin who is presumably putting the needs of family first. It is most bluntly laid out by Scipio:

Poor Maureen can never admit what really drives her batty about Palin. It is so obvious. Dowd has the envy the empty wombed have for the fecund.

In their attack the messenger strategy, the wingnuts are going after Dowd's looks and age, blaming her bitterness on her lack of a spouse and kids, and calling her jealous of Palin's accomplishments. You know, the failed vice-presidential candidate that went to five colleges before getting a degree and has yet to complete a full term of an elected office.

The boomerang attack is noted Rovian tactic and by calling Dowd unhinged, they seem to be subconsciously projecting their fears about the stability of their favored (soon to be) X-GILF. Which only makes Maureen's theory that Palin is one 'nutty puppy' all that more plausible. But I think that most of the knuckle dragging defenders of Sarah are just hoping for a hair-pulling catfight because as Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother observes, never break up a a girlfight because you never know if they'll start kissing.

Crazy Town Critters

Now, Sarah’s Folly
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 4, 2009

Maureen Dowd likes to go on little riffs where she puts in as many puns on a theme as she can. Today she has two different trends going based on Sarah Palin's surprise resignation.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

As is clear from the example above, in this column she is combining references to mental illness with examples from the animal kingdom. She is clearly trying to pack in as many of each as possible, so let's keep score. With the addition of 'caribou' that gives the critters a 2-1 lead.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

'Battiness' could go either way, so we will give each side a point there. And while 'gnawing' is often done by mad dogs, it doesn't rise to the level of a full reference.

The White House can drive its inhabitants loopy.

That's a slam-dunk for the crazy category. but then we have another tough call.

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.

Since 'salmon' isn't used as a metaphor, we are going to disqualify that, but we do give full credit for 'meltdown.'

On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness to a small group in her Wasilla yard. Gobsmacked Alaska politicians, Republican big shots, the national press, her brother, the D.C. lawyer who helped create her political action committee and yes, even Fox News, played catch-up.

Here we give the fauna a 'fowl' shot with 'incoherent' scoring on the rebound. No points for 'Cub' since that is an aviation reference and not an avian one. We would love to give 'Fox News' a point, but without an accompanying 'crazy as' it falls short.

She can hunt wolves from the air and field-dress a moose, but she fears being a lame duck? Some brickbats over her ethics and diva turns as John McCain’s running mate, and that dewy skin turns awfully thin.

Then the wildife goes on a hat trick tear with a bonus point coming from 'brickbat'. The crazy side gets a mercy score with 'diva.'

Maybe there’s another red Naughty Monkey high heel to drop — there’s often a hidden twist in Sarah’s country-music melodramas. Or is this a reckless high-speed escape from small-pond Alaska, where her popularity is dropping, to the big time Below?

The primate-named footwear call-out scores as does the 'reckless' remark, but 'small-pond' goes in the basket as well.

Even some conservative analysts admitted that the governor’s move seemed ga-ga before venturing the spin that Palin might be “crazy like a fox,” as Sarah’s original cheerleader, Bill Kristol, put it.

We finally get our 'crazy as a fox' call-out as a quote from the equally unhinged Kristol Meth. Under normal circumstances the use of 'cheerleader' would be worth mentioning as the second sports metaphor of the column, but the other trends are having a barnburner of match.

Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”

'Crazy Town' is also a Betty Boop short with this IMDB description:

Betty Boop and Bimbo take a wild streetcar ride to Crazy Town, where birds swim, fish fly, and everthing else reverses normal behavior.

The birds and fishes reference is too oblique to count so this one scores only on 'Crazy'. While that is stretch for a Movies With Maureen moment, the next paragraph is a clear Crossword Clue. That also doubles as an Alliteration Alert.

Palin’s speech is classic casuistry.

.The NYT handy pop-up dictionary defines it as "Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead" so we will give it to the unhinged side of the column.

Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town.

In another instant replay situation, 'milk' doesn't cut the mustard and 'fish' only scores once.

Sometimes, she explained, if you’re the star, you have to “call an audible and pass the ball” and leave at halftime, “so the team can win” somehow without you.

To round out the column, we get another misplaced sports metaphor, but then Maureen finishes strong.

The musher must jump out of the dogsled when warmer climes call. As Palin’s spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, says, “The world is literally her oyster.”

And the final score is:
Nutty: 10
Puppy: 14

But the real winners are the voters of Alaska who no longer have to deal with this batshit crazy squirrelly nutjob. Now if only the rest of the country could say the same.

Dowd Profiles Fey

Maureen Dowd is moonlighting as a celebrity journalist and has a profile of Tina Fey in this month’s Vanity Fair. Most of it chronicles the ugly duckling/rags-to-comedy-gold/My Fair Lady rise from chubby staff writer to pin-up girl for the Mensa set. Or as Maureen quotes another wag:

...the New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter calls “the sex symbol for every man who reads without moving his lips.”

As part of her research, she gets to hang out on the Upper West Side drinking vodka martinis, not exactly heavy lifting. She paints Tina as a ball-buster with a soft side. Tina’s husband is kept on a short leash.

Richmond wades in. “When we were first dating,” he says, harking back to Chicago in 1994, “some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over—”’
”’—over to the Doll House,”’ Fey finishes. “ ‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.”’

{snip}

And Fey still recoils. “It didn’t go great when you came back, did it? I was very angry. It was disrespectful.”

Maureen even slips in a second-hand Rude Name®:

There’s a reason her former S.N.L. pal Colin Quinn dubbed Tina Fey “Herman the German.” She’s a sprite with a Rommel battle plan.

Other literary and pop cultural allusions thrown out include:

• Leni Riefenstahl the Nazi filmographer
• Elly May Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies
• Sally Bowles from Cabaret
• Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby
• Elaine from Seinfeld
• Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show

And of course there are the Sarah Palin references as well as plenty of compare/contrast bits (mostly compare) between Tina and Liz Lemon, her 30 Rock alter ego.

Maureen seems to be carving out a niche as a interviewer of smart and funny celebs. It takes one snarky semi-bitter babe to know one.

Silk Stalkings

Boxers, Briefs or Silks?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 11, 2008

Sarah Palin is the best thing to happen to Maureen Dowd’s sense of sarcasm since Monica Lewinsky snapped her thong in front of Big Dog Bill Clinton who deigned to answer the original version of the titular question. The sartorial scandal caused by Palin purloining GOP party dresses is garment gold. Just listen to the Alliteration Alert™ alarm as she executes a rare intertwined fusillade of funny phonics.

The snippy McCain snipers once loved Palin’s sassy ability to burn Barack Obama and Joe Biden with snide little remarks.

Palin is sending Dowd to new heights of invective. Maureen has made the My Fair Lady analogy three times in as many months, but she has now given it an extra sting by spinning it into a Rude Name®.

Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told The Associated Press over the weekend that his daughter was “frantically” trying to sort out the clothes she got as Eliza Knowlittle so she could send them back.

“You know,” Heath said, “the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.”

And the mention of unmentionables just drives Dowd delirious.

The campaign was charged for silk boxers, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry the designer duds, Shear reported, adding that one source said, “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance” in October. Silk boxers and custom-designed underpinnings? Sounds like Sarah and Todd were treating the vice presidential run as a second honeymoon.

And keeping with the undergarments theme, she concludes with a giggle about girdles.

Palin should follow her own reformer precedent and put the borrowed underpinnings on eBay. The windfall would undergird her new presidential bid.

Talk about establishing a firm foundation. Someone needs to tell Palin not to get her panties in knot if she expects to have a run at the presidency rather than just get one in her stockings.

Today’s photo illustrations are used with permission
(a novel concept for us here at Dowd Central)
from fashion blog Sparked
which has plenty of its own Palin snark.

Palin's Pretty Woman Shopping Spree

A Makeover With an Ugly Gloss
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 26, 2008

Anyone thinking Maureen Dowd wouldn’t go off on the reports of Sarah Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree was sadly mistaken.

Politico broke the news that the Republican National Committee spent over $150,000 on a “Pretty Woman”-style shopping spree for Palin, including about $75,000 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and St. Louis.

But the Julia Roberts "hooker with a heart of gold and credit card of platinum" movie isn’t the only Movies With Maureen® we get. She also returns to the My Fair Lady motif she mined back in the “My Fair Veep” column.

Instead, with the economy cratering and the McCain campaign running on an “average Joe” theme, dunderheaded aides, led by the former Bushies Nicolle Wallace and Tracey Schmitt, costumed their Eliza Doolittle for a ball when she should have been dressing for a bailout.

And it seems the Cockney flower girl make-over metaphor went as far as actually hiring Sarah a diction coach to make sure "the snow in Juneau falls mainly on the moose."

In The New York Times Magazine today, Robert Draper reveals that the campaign also hired a former New York stage and screen actress, Priscilla Shanks, to be her voice coach for the convention. The expense was listed in finance reports as Operating Expenditures and Get-Out-The-Vote consulting. Apparently getting out the vote includes teaching a potential vice president the correct way to pronounce “nuclear.”

And just to drum in the Palin-as-plaything point, Maureen extends the Barbie metaphor to breaking.

McCain advisers have been scathing about the “sexism” of critics who dismiss Sarah Palin as Caribou Barbie.

How odd then, to learn that McCain advisers have been treating their own vice presidential candidate like Valentino Barbie, dressing her up in fancy clothes and endlessly playing with her hair.

Dowd also deploys a pretty clever Dowdversion™ stealing VH1's "Best Week Ever" upgrade/downgrade bit.

The sartorial upgrade was bound to turn into a strategy downgrade, as Palin pressed her case as a homespun gal who was ever so much more American than the elite, foreignish Obama, while she was gussied up in Italian couture.

And some nice Alliteration Alerts® are buried in this line:

The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers:

The McCains own 13 cars, eight homes and access to a corporate jet, and Cindy had her Marie Antoinette moment at the convention.

To drive home the “let them eat cake” hypocrisy of the candidates, Dowd enumerates the convention night couture on parade.

Vanity Fair calculated that her outfit cost $300,000, with three-carat diamond earrings worth $280,000, an Oscar de la Renta dress valued at $3,000, a Chanel white ceramic watch clocking in at $4,500 and a four-strand pearl necklace worth between $11,000 and $25,000. While presenting herself as an I’m-just-like-you hockey mom frugal enough to put the Alaska state plane up for sale on eBay, Palin made her big speech at the convention wearing a $2,500 cream silk Valentino jacket that the McCain staff had gotten her at Saks.

Maureen also pays Palin two rather left-handed compliments:

She is so naturally good-looking, there is no need to gild the Last Frontier lily.
{snip}
As a former beauty pageant contestant and sports anchor on TV, Palin already seemed on top of her grooming before the McCain campaign made her traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi, the highest-paid individual on the campaign for the first two weeks of October.

At the end of the column, Maureen makes a suspicious presidential succession assumption.

The conservative big shots who have not deserted Palin and still think she can be Reagan in a Valentino skirt are furious at those who have mishandled the governor and dimmed her star power. They mourn that she may have to wait now until 2016 to get rid of the phony stench of designer populism.

Makeovers are every woman’s dream. But this makeover has simply pushed back Palin’s dream of being president.

This scenario seems to assume that if the McCain/Palin ticket would win that McCain wouldn’t survive two full terms. Hoping for that sort of tragic upgrade is too much for even a Cinderella-in-go-go-boots to hope for.

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.

Going For Baroque

Hey, in some parts of the universe, maybe not in contempo-casual, but in some parts, it's considered cool to know what's going on in the world.

-Clueless

Sarah’s Pompom Palaver
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 4, 2008

I’ve always hypothesized that the level of Maureen Dowd’s anger can be measured by the number of alliterations she tosses into a column. When she puts one right into the headline (and shouldn't it be "Palin's Pompom Palavar"?), we know we are in for a bumpy ride.

I had hoped I was finally done with acting as an interpreter for politicians whose relationship with the English language was tumultuous.

And then Maureen builds up a head of steam with a rich rash of Alliteration Alerts®.

There’s W.’s gummy grammar, of course, like the classic, “Is our children learning?”

Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch.

Sarah’s running against the Democrat’s highfalutin eloquence by speakin’ in homespun haikus.

Did Joe Biden have to rhetorically rush over to Home Depot before Sarah could once more brandish “a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there brought to Washington, D.C.?”

With her pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism, Palin can bridge contradictory ideas that lead nowhere…

That last one alluding to that bridge that leads the same place. And she winds down with a triple Lindy.

Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.”

But Dowd also attacks Palin’s speaking style or lack therof.

She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”

Palin also has a strange habit of insisting that “impact” is a noun, and a plural one at that.

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loathe to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”

Dowd calls these folksy-isms for the faux frontierism that they are:

As Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.”

Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last Frontier.

And behind Palin’s aural abuses are, like totally, VapidVille as Dowd invokes the Movies With Maureen® pick with the title that sums up Palin’s grasp of the big issues.

At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)

This all-out assault on Sarah is severe and sustained. Most of all, Dowd hits on the central mis-aligned metaphor of the self-styled mavericks.

Palin, by contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True mavericks don’t brand themselves.

If you have to call yourself a maverick, you aren’t one. Plus, mavericks aren’t known for being team players.

Doctor K and Mayor Moose

"Let the end of days come, but may I not live to see them", because they will be filled with so much conflict and suffering."

-The Talmud.

Park Avenue Diplomacy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 23, 2008

Maureen Dowd doesn’t think much of Henry Kissinger. Here is her description of him in her latest column:

How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

But she has been this dismissive of Doctor Death and his favorite Bond Girl since at least 2002:

When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself ''a secret swinger.''

In Walter Isaacson's biography, ''Kissinger,'' the same words cascade: ''deceitful,'' ''disingenuous,'' ''paranoid,'' ''insecure,'' ''temper tantrum,'' ''flatterer,'' ''two-faced'' and ''secretive.''

Tiffany Case made another appearance in this 2007 column with a fictional quote giving advice to Dubya:

Henry Kissinger oils his way across the floor. “Mr. President,” he rumbles through the door, “it’s not so bad bungling a war. I got to date Jill St. John.”

Dowd seems overly hard on the former Batman villainess, when she could also pick on other former Henry the Kiss flames like Marlo Thomas or Candace Bergen. And part of Dowd’s point is how the mighty have fallen.

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse.

It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.

Maureen now holds the record for the worst Palin lipstick pun put to print, a pretty noteworthy accomplishment. The point was to point out Palin’s potential preoccupation with Pentecostal preaching.

Governor Palin knows a lot about the End of Days from her years at the Pentecostal Wasilla Assembly of God, which had preached (after a war in the Middle East about light vanquishing darkness) that Alaska would be a shelter for Rapturous “saved” Christians at the end of times when they ascend to heaven.

“Rapturous” being yet another pun, this time on the Christian vision of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations.

But Dowd doesn’t just pillar Palin, she saves enough scorn for Dubya to attempt a Dowdversion® and mix a metaphor, neither very successfully.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking.

Maureen finishes up with Bill Clinton hypothesizing in advance why Palin might help McCain win. After all, the Big Dog is a leading authority on the attractiveness of rural women with big hair.

“I come from Arkansas. I get why she is hot out there,” he said authoritatively, adding: “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’"

She sees that as part of the continuing Subtle Sabotage Strategy of the Clintons accusing Bill of...

... still sulking and plotting for 2012.

And the Clintons making another run in 2012 would be a sign of the Apocalypse.

Maureen Among The Moose

You know, I imagine there's only one thing that's been in as many different hotel rooms as I have: the Gideon Bible. Don't tangle with me on the Good Book. I must've read it through at least a dozen times.

-Sky Masterson, Guys and Dolls

‘Barbies for War!’
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still taking it upon herself to emphasize Sarah Palin’s excruciatingly evident lack of foreign policy expertise.

The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain is taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can’t contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” a poy-son could develop a cold war.

Cold sore is more like it. Dowd put one her traveling boots (go-go or Army, it doesn’t matter which) to get a feel for the Artic atmosphere that spawned the Palin-nomena. She is so stupefied to be among the hoi polloi that she resorts to serial Alliteration Alerts®:

I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.

I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.

In the midst of that, she even pulls off the soulless strip mall/soulful mountain Dowdversion®. Maureen’s anthropological expedition takes her to a Wal-Mart and an alliterative CaffeinatedBeverageEmporium named after the local large cold weather ruminant.

I had many “Sarahs,” as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. “I’ve seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup,” said manager Karena Forster, “and she’s just as beautiful.”

“Skinny white mocha,” indeed. Now there is a metaphor just begging to be set free. Speaking of freedom, Palin’s religious establishments of choice believe that sexuality is a choice. And offers help to those that have made bad ones.

In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah’s current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians “journey out” of same-sex attraction.

And in her talks with tattooed former teenage mothers and ex-gay evangelicals, she comes across a Fairbanks educator that gives what may or may not be a compliment.

R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. “She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,” she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.”

And we know what happens to Mean Girls in the movies. With Maureen tracking her back to her home turf, Sarah is going to learn that in trying to be the Queen Bee, she isn't in the bush leagues anymore.

Sarah, Palin and Tall

Bering Straight Talk
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 13, 2008

Maureen Dowd has decamped to Alaska, leaving her Georgetown townhouse for Seward’s Icebox. And she must be staying at a Holiday Inn Express, because she feels so much smarter already.

I’ve been in Alaska only a week, but I’m already feeling ever so much smarter about Russia.

I can’t quite see it from my hotel window, but, hey, I know it’s out there somewhere, beyond all the stuffed bears and cruise ships and glaciers and oil derricks.

To show off her improved intelligence, she rushes right into a Dowdversion™, contrasting brain cramps with Palin’s tough talk about Georgia.

An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving.

Whew, say that three times fast, Charlie Gibson. Maureen is so smart she is even doing exponential math:

The trigger-happy John McCain has indeed found a soul mate. Trigger squared. In Fairbanks on Thursday, at a deployment ceremony for her son who is going to Iraq, Governor Palin followed the lead of McCain and W. in fusing Osama bin Laden’s diabolical work on 9/11 and the mission in Iraq.

Now that line about Palin conflating Al Qaeda with Al Qaeda in Iraq (which didn’t exist until after the invasion) is going to get as much wing-nut push back as her jibes about dinosaurs. You can argue that Maureen made two consecutive dinosaur jokes, which seem to me be based on a satirical e-mail making the rounds, tongue-in-cheek, but there is no wink and nod with Palin’s saber(toothed) rattling.

If Sarah had been reading about the world she feels so confident about leading rather than just parroting by rote what Randy Scheunemann and the neocons around McCain drilled into her last week — Drill, baby, drill! — she might have realized that as heinous as Russia’s behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked. The State Department has let it be known that it warned McCain’s friend, Misha, the hotheaded president of Georgia, not to send troops in to crush the rebellion in two breakaway states.

It’s this overall lack of nuance and depth that Dowd, of all people, is taking her to task for. Palin reminds Maureen of another none-too-bright ingénue that stumbled onto the world stage with a similary outdoorsy folksy style.

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

The Tundra Governor has so enlivened Dowd that she only throws out one emasculating aside at Obama, but she does make-up for it with an Alliteration Alert®.

Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead.

Maureen is so worked up, she only throws us one pop-cultural bone, and it is to another Sarah, Jessica Parker that is, who is about as far from Wasilla geographically and culturally as possible.

Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.

The pioneer spirit makes her Sarah, Palin and tall. Sorry, that was a terrible pun and not as clever as Maureen’s parting shotgun shot.

Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.

"Positive unthinking" is just one of Dowd’s brilliant tossed-off Parker-esque bon mots that bears repeating. Polar bears repeating even.

The Kodiak Flower Girl

My Fair Veep
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 9, 2008

The Sarah Palin nomination has opened new horizons for Maureen Dowd and her weekly Movies With Maureen® column. Last week the Alaskan Gov was Miss Congeniality (and isn’t that movie just Pygmalion with Benjamin Bratt and beauty pageants?); this week it’s the Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn classic My Fair Lady.

I hope John McCain doesn’t throw his slippers at Sarah Palin’s head or get as acerbic as Henry Higgins did with Eliza Doolittle when she did not learn quickly enough. McCain’s Pygmalion has to be careful, because his Galatea might be armed with more than a sharp tongue.

And just to be a little highbrow and show off her way around Bullfinch’s, she throws out the Greek mythological inspirations. I’m not sure why Geraldine Ferraro doesn’t count (not as inexperienced or young perhaps), but Dowd sees this nomination and the subsequent crash candidacy class as historic.

For the first time in American history, we have a “My Fair Lady” moment, as teams of experts bustle around the most famous woman in politics, intensely coaching her for her big moment at the ball — her first unscripted interview here this week with ABC News’s Charlie Gibson.

Then Dowd delightfully mixes up a barnyard metaphor.

She’s already shown that she can shoot the pig, put lipstick on it, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.

This one sentence works on three levels. Palin compared herself to a hunting hockey mom that's a pit bull with lipstick. The popular phrase “put some lipstick on that pig” means to try to hide something ugly with a little window dressing. And finally, the "bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan" is from the proto-feminist anthem (and Enjoli commercial) “I’m A Woman.” Maureen managed to use every part of that metaphor except the squeal.



Dowd, like the Mean Girls with “Fetch”, keeps trying to make “Palinistas” happen, this time alliterating it with "posse".

McCain vetters, who are belatedly doing their job checking to see if Palin is a qualified White House contender and doing their best to shut down Troopergate and assembling a “truth squad” posse of Palinistas to rebut any criticism and push back any prying reporters; and journalists — from Sydney to Washington — who are here to draw back the curtain on the shiny reformer image that the McCain camp has conjured for their political ingénue and see what’s behind it.

And just in case My Fair Lady isn’t enough, she throws in a Wizard of Oz call out.

The rest of the column is a suggested list of topics for Chuckie G to grill Palin on in an interview and covers the range of PalinIssues such as her creative expense accounting, her free spending administrations, the reversal of her position on “the bridge to nowhere”, her fundamentalist evolution-doubting beliefs, and of course, Troopergate and the related abuse of power. Maureen does sometimes get just a little too obscure. For example:

Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants and a ban on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian?

While the abortion and Harry Potter bit combines her extreme pro-life position and her clumsy attempt to censor the local library, I have no idea where the trans-fat call-out comes from. There must have been some obscure quote I missed, or it could just be a metaphor taken too far. And the book burning is a good piece of witchy Alliteration Alert®.

Dowd's penultimate rhetorical question combines in just ten words the image of Palin as a snake-handling religious nut with an environment-be-damned hunting machine by Dowdverting on the word “tongues.”

Does she talk in tongues or just eat caribou tongues?

But back to the Eliza Doolittle metaphor, the tale of an older cynical man taking a young lady under his wing always backfires because once the woman is on her own, she eclipses her mentor in the public eye. Or, to look at it another way, in the film version, Audrey Hepburns singing was dubbed in by another actress. Who is pulling the strings on this made for the media manufactured maverick? Let the show begin.

Cat Fight Of The Century

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

-Fargo (last lines)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.