All The President's Women

Vice and Spice
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 23, 2009
Warning: Link from picture at right is NSFW

Maureen Dowd made her mark and earned her Pulitzer prying over the peccadilloes of a President that couldn't keep his pants on. With our current president hopelessly squeaky clean (except for his occasional cancer stick, which we will discuss later), she has had to focus overseas for a suitably salacious sex scandal. Previously Dowd has fixated on France's Sarkozy, but now she moves down the boot to Italy with a nice Alliteration Alert™.

Our president is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi, whose Vesuvial vices spurred a trio of women academics in Italy to write an “Appeal to the First Ladies.” It urges Michelle Obama and other wives of world leaders to boycott next month’s G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, to protest the Italian prime minister’s “sexist” and “offensive” manner toward women.

What's so fun about this one is that even the wronged woman is not exactly in the right, since she is a forme mistress of his.

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet whom he later appointed as Minister of Equal Opportunities; and again last month when Lario charged her randy hubby with “consorting with minors” after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace.

Said birthday girl was one Noemi Letizia. In addition to the 6,000 euro necklace, he gave her a rather creepy souvenir according to a gossip site.

Silvio Berlusconi, 72, also signed a photograph of himself for Noemi Letizia as well as a book in which he had written a goosebumps-raising dedication to her saying: ‘To my little Noemi, my little graphic artist, your little daddy teacher.”

It takes more than some intergenerational hanky-panky to qualify as a scandal in Italy, so it helps that there are call girls to check out.

And a comely 23-year-old starlet named Barbara Montereale told La Repubblica this week that she got paid by a hospital equipment vendor for going to the villa in January — an incident now under police investigation.

In her interview (available on YouTube for those of you that speak Italian or just like to watch women speak Italian) she names another woman wishing to exchange favors.

She claimed she went with another girl, an “escort” named Patrizia D’Addario, who told her that she had had sex with the 72-year-old prime minister and asked for a favor about a building project but never got it. Now a disillusioned D’Addario has released a secret recording she made in which Berlusconi’s voice is heard saying: “Go and wait for me in the big bed.”

But even all this salacious detail doesn't get Maureen to 800 words, so in clumsy contrast, she excerpts long transcripts of Barack getting the third degree over his smoking habits. And to make the transition, she employs her latest favorite Crossword Puzzle Clue© (which she helped get on the NYT list of most looked up words).

Given Berlusconi’s louche ways, L’Aquila is a safe place for President Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit.

Maureen has been on Barry's butt over his butts for at least a year. Instead she suggests a closer venue for the random nic-fit.

It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke.

But Dowd did make it through an entire column of scandal (big or imagined) without mentioning The Big Dog once. Perhaps she is on the road to recovery.

BlogWatch: Whips and Chains

With Maureen Dowd talking dirty, it’s fair to wonder how far her BDSM metaphor can stretch. Nearly everybody picked up on her very unsubtly calling Obama a wuss, but Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire put it best:

Dood, MoDo says, you are so whipped!

In MoDo's world, where strong women must be balanced out by weak men, the idea of a mutually strong relationship is unthinkable (which may be why Hill and Bill confuse her so much).

Dohiyi Mir thinks that maybe there is even a subtext below the sexual one:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

Brilliant opening frame! Sexualize Hillary, but in a way that's sure to intimidate a lot of men, plus it gives you a chance to bring up whips and use the title "Mistress" when talking about a NEGRO!

See, the Democrats' House Negro feels a need for obeisance in front of The Bitch. Rudy, being a strong man, a real man, a WHITE man (we'll ignore the fact that he's a WOP), would never be dominated by a lady. At least not one without a tiara.

Dependable Renagade puts it even more bluntly (if that's possible):

Maureen. Get off the plantation already. The racist Mandingo fantasies belong on your nightstand, not in an internationally distributed "newspaper of record".

On the other hand, Lady Chatterley who writes The Feminist Surrenders thinks that all the bondage talk reveals a part of Maureen we haven’t seen.

Dowd seems pretty obsessed with this stuff. If I were to do to Dowd what she does to everyone else, I would guess she's pretty obsessed with the BDSM stuff, but hasn't acted on it and still keeps it at the 'eww' factor in order to avoid coming to terms with her own desires.

She goes on to be offended by Maureen using the dominance and submission metaphor incorrectly.

It is part of the marginalization of kinky folk and has a voyeuristic, tittering, smirking quality. Maybe most of the "of course, I'm not into that" are really wishing to submit to whatever their desires are. "Can you believe, oh my God! No one should do that." It enforces social norms by shame and humiliation.

So even the leather corset set can find common ground with the wider world in their disgust with Maureen Dowd’s shallow stereotypes.

Dowd Domination

Shake, Rattle and Roll
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 18, 2007

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man

I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
Well, you never do nothin' to save your doggone soul

Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
You look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice

On a meta-level, the lyrics to the Jesse Stone penned bluesy rock classic that has been recorded by Bill Haley and Elvis Presley is more appropriate than can be imagined. We got kitchens, souls, dresses, and ice-cold hearts, all staples of the Dowd patois when discussing Clinton.

And speaking of rolls, Maureen is on one, right from the opening line:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

We first met Obambi nearly a year ago in Dowd’s December 13, 2006 column back when he was battling Hillzilla. Debate dominatrix was a throw away line I first noticed as a allusive alliteration in the French fiasco. This week, Dowd takes the bondage metaphor and runs it in a blender beyond recognition.

Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid.

She has continued to flick the whip in debates.

With so much at stake, she had to do it again in Vegas, this time using her voice, gaze and body language to such punishing effect that Obama looked as if he had been brought to heel.

If you don’t need a cold shower after all that dirty BDSM talk, check your pulse. And Dowd can’t mention Obambi with calling out how pussy-whipped he is.

Michelle said she let her husband run for president only when he agreed to give up smoking, and she’s a master at the art of the loving conjugal put-down.

And now for a Dowdified mash-up:

She owned him … after a tortured exchange… from that devastating… position… that could have dragged her to defeat.

All this hot talk has Maureen so worked up that she can’t wait for the main event because:

Rudy will not be so easy to spank.

I’ll want to get the pay-per-view for that X-rated confrontation especially if we can get Dowd as the ring announcer.

Flintstone Fred Vs Ringtone Rudy

Uxorious or Spurious?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 23, 2007

Uxorious: 1) Excessively submissive or devoted to one's wife.(FreeDictionary) 2) A perverted affection that has strayed to one’s own wife. (Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce)

MoDo uses the NRA convention to illustrate the difference between Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson. She sets up the convention speeches as a Wild West shoot-out.

…there was only one other ingredient needed for Flintstone Fred’s testosterone cocktail: a sexy blonde. Introducing his wife, Jeri, he drawled, “I think she’d make a much better first lady than Bill Clinton.”

The call-out to the animated caveman conjures a certain level of Neanderthalness in both appearance and political outlook.



Then there is a long discussion of the possibly pre-arranged bit where Rudy Giuliani takes a call from his wife. MoDo calls bullshit.

This suggests either that Friday’s call was staged to humanize the dictatorial former mayor, or that Rudy is afraid of Judi’s digital wrath, or that the candidate is still struggling with how to integrate his third wife into his campaign, after her puppy-killing, husband-hiding, cabinet-sitting rough start.

In six hyphenated words Dowd dredges up Judi Giuliani’s former career with a company that used animals to demonstrate surgical products, her previously undisclosed first (of three) husbands, and some overly generous offers of unappointed political power.

Mitt Romney’s camp…found video of the first cellus interruptus and sent reporters links to YouTube clips of both calls.

Coitus interruptus changed to cellus drives home that Rudy may be both pistol-whipped and pussy-whipped.