Real Gone

I'm American made but I like Chevrolet
My momma taught me wrong from right.

I was born in the South
Sometimes I have a big mouth
When I see something that I don't like
I gotta say it.

Well, we've been driving this road for a mighty long time
Paying no mind to the signs
Well, this neighborhood's changed
It's all been rearranged
We left that team somewhere behind.

-Sheryl Crow "Real Gone"

I Ponied Up for Sheryl Crow?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 24, 2009

Maureen Dowd is Howard Beale mad-as-hell still at financial institutions flouting their fiscal prolificacy. This time it is at Northern Trust of Chicago which earns itself a couple of Rude Names™, a rare honor for a non-politician.

Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.

Not only are they wasting taxpayers' money, they are doing it on bad AOR has-beens. And Maureen could have used the entire lyrics of 'Real Gone' (Crow's hit from the Pixar movie Cars) to emphasize the irony instead of just the verse she picked.

“Slow down, you’re gonna crash,
Baby, you’re a-screaming it’s a blast, blast, blast
Look out babe, you’ve got your blinders on ...
But there’s a new cat in town
He’s got high payin’ friends
Thinks he’s gonna change history.”

And it's not one of Dowd's now infamous rants without a BlingList®:

The entertainment Web site TMZ broke the story Tuesday that Northern Trust of Chicago, which got $1.5 billion in bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags.

The second RudeName™ is tipped with a swizzle stick of sarcasm.

Northern Untrustworthy even offered junketeers the chance to attend a seminar on the credit crunch where they could no doubt learn that the U.S. government is just the latest way to finance your deals and keep your office swathed in $87,000 area rugs.

All this wild spending is summed up in a rather harsh Dowdversion®.

The bank cloaks itself in a philanthropic glow while wasting our money, acting like the American Cancer Society when in fact it’s a cancer on American society.

And she ends with a long rolling rile of a Alliteration Alert™ along with another Wolfe-ian aside.

[Andrew Cuomo] gets incensed about how ingrained, indoctrinated and insensitive the ex-masters of the universe are. “They think of themselves as kings and queens,” he said. And they’re not ready to abdicate.

Normally a Royal Reference™ is a good thing in a Dowd column, but lately she is fighting mad at those who act to the manor borne. And that is how revolutions begin. Perhaps another Sheryl Crow song sums it up: "A Change Would Do You Good."

Prince Charming Bungles The Rescue

Potomac’s Postpartisan Depression
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 7, 2009

Maureen Dowd has been reading fairy tales again and she always loves a Royalty Metaphor™.

Once upon a time, America thought Prince Charming would glide in and kiss her, reviving her from a coma induced by a poison apple of greed, deceit, carelessness, recklessness and overreaching.

The problem is that post-modern Prince Charmings are no longer what they are cracked up to be. In the Shrek movies Prince Charming is a vacuous villain. In Disney’s Enchanted, he is, while still quite charming, not quite up to the transition from 2-D to 3-D. In Maureen Dowd’s version of the tale, he’s also a bit of bumbler.

But then the prince got distracted, seeing Lincoln in the mirror, and instead gave the kiss of life to a bunch of flat-lining Republican tax-cut fetishists.

According to Dowd, Obama is getting run roughshod by the House Republicans.

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.

Rep. Cantor (R-VA) is the House Whip, a job with a metaphorical title that Dowd feels Obama should be employing.

The president and his aides seemed a bit snow-blinded by the White House, overwhelmed and slow to understand that they were losing the high ground and the whip hand.

Her other favorite leadership metaphor is the carrot and stick (discussed at length here).

But the carrot-stick ratio was way out of whack.

She feels the stick should be used to whack a mole, or perhaps a groundhog.

Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

Which is the first of a couple of Dowdversions® used to describe this shift in the power structure.

In his first weeks padding around a White House that still has nails on the walls waiting for new pictures, and phone and e-mail kinks, Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.

She points to the bungled Daschle nomination as where Obama lost his mojo with this zenlike observation.

They wanted him because he was the ultimate insider and they lost him because he was the ultimate insider. Now Daschle’s punishment for getting too rich with special interests will be to get richer with special interests.

Maureen’s advice was to be just a little less ambitious in rescuing the damsal and be a little more of a schlemiel.

Mr. Obama should have written up a kosher (as in pork-free) bill that Americans could trust — and Republicans couldn’t as easily mock — and jammed it through.

So after all this whipping and whacking and bullying and jamming, where does that leave Obama? All alone.

President Obama doesn’t need to leave his new home to be isolated. That’s the specialty of the White House.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, no matter how charming the prince is.

Un-Convention-al Wisdom

Yes, She Can
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 12, 2008

Nothing gets Maureen Dowd’s dander up more than an attempt by the Clintons to remain in the spotlight as long as possible. It got her excited enough to fit not one, but two, Rude Names® into a single paragraph.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

And she gets bonus points for sneaking in a reference to Barack’s weight or lack thereof.

We also get two Shakespeare allusions, both involving mad royalty that have had their thrones stolen from them.

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

And the Royalty Theme® is also alluded to in this quasi-quote:

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

All of this is Cassandra Dowd raising the cry (as the column title implies) that Hillary is engaging the Subliminal Sabotage Strategy to submarine the Obama candidacy to clear the way for a future run.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.

In support of this, Dowd references a YouTube video (found via the Sweetness and Light blog) where Hillary is disingenuously pandering to her PUMA (Party Unity, My Ass) patrons.

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.

Dowd is on such a roll that she even outsources her Alliteration Alerts™. The first comes from the Hillary -hijacked portions of the party platform:

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

And the second comes from The Atlantic dissecting the mismanagement skills of Senator Clinton:

Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

But as Maureen keeps warning us, Hillary will be back. Whether we want her or not.

Eve Of Destruction

Funny business, a woman's career, the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman.

-All About Eve

All About Eve
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 25, 2008

Maureen Dowd's synopsis of the latest campaign gaffe (using the Michael Kinsley definition of a gaffe as being a politician accidentally telling the truth) goes as follows:

In an interview with The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, Hillary disagreed that she’s hurting party unity: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

She was talking about the timeline for June, not wishing physical harm upon her rival. But many Democrats were upset. Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina called her words “beyond the pale.”

Maureen's reasonably rational explanation is that like any dedicated athlete, Hillary knows that a contest isn't over until fat lady sings. A true competitor never quits while there is still hope, even if the only hope is the opponent self-destructing.

Maybe a tired, stressed Hillary was giving an unfiltered version of a blunt conversation that she’s had with her husband and advisers about staying in the race, using R.F.K. as an anything-can-happen example, in the same way she fantasizes about Sean Hannity breaking a story that would demolish Obama.

I'm not quite sure what Mount Rushmore and Deadwood have to do with it, but the mention of this week's Movie With Maureen® (and column title), All About Eve implies that perhaps Hillary wouldn't mind giving this hypothetical Obama immolation a little push.

Maybe it was the proximity of Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but something caused Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington to leap out in South Dakota.

And while many of Dowd's rhetorical flourishes lately have been a little over-the-top and too clever by half, she hits just the right note with this paragraph:

But coming right after the anniversary of the King assassination, right before the anniversary of the Bobby Kennedy assassination, right in the midst of the wrenching news about Teddy Kennedy’s brain tumor, and right in the middle of Billary’s hostile takeover attempt on the vice president’s mansion, the image was jarring.

The confluence with the Kennedys brings back a Dowd's magical metaphor:

Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.

But Hillary is waiting in the wings, the understudy that feels she should have the starring role. In those cases, Dowd suggests that it is best not letting those types of ambitious actors backstage in the first place.

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

By now it's nearly reflexive, but there is just a little tinge of the Royalty Metaphor® coupled with an emasculating aside in the final paragraph where Maureen compares Barack with defrocked beauty queen Vanessa Williams.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.

And while an actual nude picture of Obama may do even more for his support among women than his famous Venus-from-the-sea bathing suit shot, you have to wonder what are the skeletons in the skinny guy's closest that still give Hillary hope.

Gone Bowling

Maureen Dowd is off today. Some might argue that she is a little off everyday. We presume she is out brushing up on her 7-10 split for the inevitable White House Press Correspondents' Bowling Tournament.


Today's photoshop comes from DailyKos diarist assyrian64 who has mad skilz (note the shadow on the wall) and was obviously inspired by her April 16 column and this soon to be immortal confession from Maureen:

My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.

With cred like that, perhaps she should run for president.

BlogWatch: Barry's Raspberry Beret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dark Side And The White Knight

Darkness and Light
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 6, 2008

Not in the least; everybody allows that Lady Sneerwell can do more with a word or a look than many can with the most labored detail, even when they happen to have a little truth on their side to support it.

-School For Scandal, 1777

The Dowd thesaurus had been taken out of mothballs and Heading 421 in particular is burning from the furious page flipping. We can’t get to them all, but let’s get a sampling:

Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.

But her pitch is the color of pitch

Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

Note the use of pitch(shill)/pitch(tar), as in "pitch black" and in "tar and feather", giving three levels of allusion. The pathological/{dark} path pair is also well played. We even get an art lesson:

Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro.

From Wikipedia:

Chiaroscuro (Italian for clear-dark) is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.

And according to Dowd, never has the contrast been clearer. And we get a nice Alliteration Alert® AND a new Rude Name® with Diffident Debutante. A nice opposite to Debate Dominatrix.

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

We also get the boxing metaphor we last saw in November back in action:

For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic?

And on “laconic/iconic/bionic” the rhyming dictionary bursts into flames. Flames from a fire-breathing dragon{lady}:

But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.

Obama is clearly Dowd's white knight.

More Mean Girl Movies

There Will Be Blood
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 3, 2008

I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

It time for another night of Movies With Maureen®. While movie allusions are a common feature of Maureen Dowd columns, sometimes the combination of too much late night MSNBC and Starz causes her movie mania to go into overdrive. The last time was as part of her Dubya of Arabia coverage. This time her film focus is on the Democratic nomination race.

She starts out by invoking the love/hate relationship between Rick and Captain Renault in Casablanca.

And so it is with Barack and Hillary. Thursday night was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Just a beautiful, dare we say, fairy tale.

The fairy tale of course being Bill Clinton’s take on Barry’s Iraq policy. Dowd also echoes her invocation of Seven Days in May back in December by saying that with Bill in the East Wing, the Oval Office will be off-limits to any Veep usurpation.

There won’t be any Dick Cheney-style coup in Hillary’s White House.

But if Bill is the Big Dog, Hillary is the ultimate toothy terror, Bruce The Shark from Jaws, devouring anything in her path to the presidency. Obama will need more than a few rides on Teddy’s sailboat to sink her ambitions.

Team Obama refers to the Clinton campaign as “Jaws” because “just when things are quiet, they keep trying to come back and capsize the boat.”

The movie Mean Girls (which is a MoDo metaphor explored fuller earlier this week) was based on a parental advice book called Queen Bees and Wannabes which posits that in any social pecking order there is only room for one Alpha Hillary and she will lie, gossip, and scheme as much as necessary to keep her standing as Queen of the Cafeteria.

Maureen then gives a very lengthy anecdote about a showdown that takes place on a runway rather than at recess, but there are just as many accusations of back-stabbing, vicious gossiping, insincere apologies, and arguing over who said what to whom and when as any Lindsey Lohan movie.

Hillary sent word to Obama that she wanted to talk to him. Obama’s aides figured that she wanted to make a pro forma apology for the comments of Billy Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, who had told The Washington Post that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use in his late teens. Shaheen would step down the next day, but Camp Obama did not think the slam was a mere slip of the tongue.

In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.”

Mean Girls use proxies and lackeys to do their dirty work and the Clintons are no exception.

He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.

The rest of the story involves physical contact that almost starts a cat-fight complete with name-calling and hair-pulling. But the Mean Girls/Queen Bee call-out also segues into the Clinton Royalty Metaphor® of the week with jostle/joust just close enough together to trigger an Alliteration Alert®:

As Queen Bee of the Clinton hive, Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission, so something that wasn’t even a jostle was perceived as a joust.

This recap of the animosity between former colleagues is meant to show that any show of congeniality on the part of the candidates is just Oscar-worthy acting.

But on Thursday, when he leaned down to whisper and put his hand on her shoulder, she looked up at him with a glowing smile. They really should have taken home gold statuettes.

And for Dowd, Super Tuesday will have all the glamour and drama of the Academy Awards.

C'est Moi

Savior or Saboteur?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 23, 2007

C'est moi! C'est moi!
I'm forced to admit
'Tis I, I humbly reply
That mortal who
These marvels can do
C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I
I've never lost
In battle or game
I'm simply the best by far

-Alan Jay Lerner
and Frederick Loewe

Maureen Dowd returns to what she does best, Billary bashing. She claims to be reluctant to draw from this well again.

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Methinks she protests too much, since he does it with such relish and gusto. Her thesis is that the Clintons symbiotically thrive on crisis.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline.

She identifies Hillary’s biggest weakness as the person without whom she would never even be considered a candidate, Slick Willie. Bill of course has a different opinion.

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

With the “C’est moi!” interjection, Dowd is not implying that Bill thinks he is the Sun King. Instead, she is comparing him to the very arrogant Lancelot from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, which provided the central metaphor of a much older Democratic dynasty.



In this case, history is repeating itself not as tragedy, but as “endless soap opera”.

And Billary bashing brings out the best in in Maureen’s alliterative alacrity:

Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt.

He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well.

And in that line, Dowd gives Bill a new moniker. In 1992, he flopped in Iowa only to show promise (but not winning) in New Hampshire. He dubbed himself the Comeback Kid. Now as the Boy That Can’t Help Himself, he is the loose cannon prone to friendly fire. Not only can’t he help himself, he will end up hurting Hillary and sinking her hopes for higher office.