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.

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.

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 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?

Dowd n' Rich, Joined At The Lip

Both Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd used their valuable Sunday NYT Op-Ed space to either trash or advance Hillary Clinton depending on how you read the tea leaves (and here's my take). Let’s see how the pundits reacted to the tag team of MoRich (or is it FraDo?):

Joseph Palermo of the Huffington Post thinks the Hilary Democratic Coronation is a given, but summarizes the FraDo worries about Gore Syndrome and Clinton Fatigue:

In yesterday's New York Times, both Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd raise good points about what I call the "Hillary toboggan," the nearly universal sense among the commentariat that Ms. Clinton is destined to slide effortlessly downhill to the Democratic presidential nomination. For Rich, Clinton's overly cautious, stage-managed campaign, which "doesn't make gaffes, never goes off-message and never makes news" is reminiscent of Al Gore's languid 2000 effort, and we all know how that turned out. In Dowd's view the nation is already saturated with the Hillary brand name and her sixteen years of public fame could provide an opening for a lesser-known Republican out of sheer fatigue.

That sounds like a pretty concise summary. Others took it to be a little shriller. The Liberal Doomsayer tasks reliable liberals MoRich for trashing a Democrat instead focusing on the evil Republicans:

And no, my objection is not based on the fact that Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd were taking on Democrats as opposed to Republicans.

However, between Rich and fellow pundit Maureen Dowd, I believe the latter wins the nod for most fatuous “reporting.”

doomsy then goes on to completely misinterpret Dowd’s point that Hillary is the more competent of the two frontrunners in the nepotism derby. When Dowd says that Hillary is qualified to be president of Vassar, the response is:

That’s a pretty loathsome insult towards someone who has served in the United States Senate for the last seven years representing New York state.

Uh, I think it was meant as a compliment.

Scott Lemieux of The American Prospect's TAPPED blog sees Dowd being the more misogynist half of the opining couple because she quotes somebody that said mean sexist things about Hillary. Because nobody will hear them if we ignore them.

And, of course, when it comes to crocodile tears about Bush after working assiduously for a year to put him in the White House, even Rich can't hold a candle to his embarrassing colleague Maureen Dowd.

I’m not sure how Dowd or Rich ever helped Bush, but he then makes constructive criticism of the Democratic frontrunner tantamount to disloyalty:

Again, it's pretty clear that [Dowd's] too-little-too-late discovery that Bush is a bad president won't stop her from mounting an airhead assault on the most likely Democratic nominee. It would be nice if the Times could replace Dowd n' Rich with some columnists who actually write about politics.

Dowd n' Rich. Sounds like a country duo. Who has the big hair and who gets to wear the ass-kicking boots?