Hammer Time!

Where the Wild Thing Is
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 22, 2009

Former Speaker of the House Tom Delay in order to supplement his meager government pension has joined cheesy reality series Dancing With The Stars on the confident assurance that he won't have to do more than three or four episodes. The Huffington Post has the full non-embeddable video here.

And where politics intersects pop culture, you are sure to find Maureen Dowd who is not without some moves of her own. Her signature verbal flourish is the Dowdversion® where the same phrase is repeated in the same sentence with just a little twist. Take this spectacular example:

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he’s trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have “a strategy to whip the vote” on “Dancing.”

That my friends, is a Double Dowdversion.

Perhaps next season we can get Maureen on the dance floor with Mario Lopez and see if she is as good on the boards as she is at the keyboard.

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.

The Oddball Couple

Oval Newlywed Game
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 14, 2009

Maureen Dowd has been hitting the cable box pretty hard this week. The title of the column comes from the Gameshow Network with Bill Convey's classic double entendre-laden The Newlywed Game which was designed to make couples reveal embarrassing things about each other. Dowd detects a bit of mocking bitterness in Obama's reaction to a Biden gaffe.

And yet, the minute the president began to laugh and answer Garrett, I feared Joe would be the butt.

“I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to,” said Mr. Obama, who couldn’t resist adding, “not surprisingly.”

On the real Newlywed Game, that would get the partner slapped with the answer card.

But then she flips the channel to Nick At Nite where Barack is Felix Ungar to Joe Biden's Oscar Madison.

It can’t be easy for someone with a highly defined superego to be bound to the wacky Biden id, for one so disciplined to be tied to one so undisciplined, for a man so coolly unsentimental to be paired with someone so exuberantly sentimental.

Joe is nothing if not loyal. And the president should return that quality, and not leave his lieutenant vulnerable to “Odd Couple” parodies.

And Maureen loves the late night sketch comedy.

On a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit, Jason Sudeikis’s Biden leaned over Fred Armisen’s Obama, to tell Americans: “Look, I know $819 billion sounds like a lot of money. But it’s just a tip of the iceberg.”

Armisen’s clenched Obama murmurs: “Couldn’t pick Hillary. I just couldn’t.”

But for the main Movies With Maureen® moment, she heads over to Masterpiece Theater territory for her second Jane Austen analogy in the past year (the first time Barack was the haughty Mr. Darcy) to compare Obama with Emma.

Still, the president should brush up on his Jane Austen. When Emma Woodhouse belittles Miss Bates, an older and poorer friend, at a picnic, Mr. Knightly pulls her aside to remonstrate. “How could you be so insolent in your wit?” he chides, reminding her that it is unfeeling to humble someone less fortunate in front of others who will be guided by the way she behaves.

And when you live in the big fancy house, it's only proper to be kind to the hired help no matter how embarrassing they are. Maureen is just trying to inspire some noblesse oblige.

Rose Defends Dowd

David Denby went on to The Charlie Rose Show to flog his rather thin and poorly researched treatise on snark, cleverly called Snark. See my earlier post about that flaming pile. About half the segment dealt, either directly or indirectly, with Denby’s perplexingly misguided focus on Maureen Dowd on what he sees as the faults of snark. As second movie string critic for the New Yorker (a magazine I am assured by some DailyKos diarists is still read and loved) Denby is a frequent guest on Rose's show critquing movies and other pop cultural flotsam. This time Denby is the one on the hot seat.



The full segment (link here) is nearly twenty minutes long, so I have painstakingly transcribed the portions that pertain most directly to Dowd. It is not an official transcript and I have done minor editing for clarity. For example, there is a lot of cross-talk that I have consolidated. That said, all errors is spelling, grammar, and punctuation that are not evident from the taped archive are mine alone.

I’m also dispensing with my usual color-coded blockquote format for just this post. My parenthetical asides are in italics.

Denby: Some people ask me “How you can attack Maureen Dowd of the New York Times for being snarky…

Rose: Exactly.

Denby: …and praise John Stewart?”

Rose: Yes!

Denby: “Isn’t he snarky? Or Keith Olbermann?”

Rose: It’s seems to me those are very different people because they’re in very different mediums, but go ahead.

Denby: My point was that Stewart and Colbert and Olbermann have a political passion. They think the government should not lie to the people. They think our civil liberties should not be invaded. Maureen Dowd makes fun of people’s appearance and affect and manner and so on. I don’t see any political idea at all of what government should be doing or what the point of government is or what the point of politics is. It’s all about ambition and sham.

So I’m to assume that by inference Denby is accusing Dowd of thinking the government should lie and invade our civil liberties. That is a shameful slur.

Rose: I’ll rise to defend Maureen because I differ with you about this. Plus, I like her and she’s a friend and all of that.

Denby: There is nothing personal here.

Really? Sure could have fooled me. The discussion veers off into what is and isn't snark, with the emphasis on what may or may not cover Maureen Dowd but not, say, John Stewart.

Denby: Look, Maureen Dowd, to come back to her, is brilliant. Look, We’re not talking talent here.

Rose: A Pulitzer Prize winner, I think.

Denby: Look, more than that. She’s brilliant with what she can do with language, but what I don’t see is any value there being defended. No matter what you’ve got, she’s against it. If you expose your throat, she’s going to leap with fangs. I mean she went after both Al Gore and George Bush in 2000. She reduced Gore, who is after all a serious guy who presents himself awkwardly to the public, she reduced him to a caricature.

Rose: Let me just say this...

Denby: She was widely imitated and it hurt.

Rose: If Al Gore can’t survive this, and he can. Look what happened to him, he’s done quite well. If Al Gore can’t survive whatever Maureen Dowd said…

Denby: What if he had been president instead of the disaster we had?

Rose: Wait, wait a minute…

Denby: She played a small role. She played a role. She played a role in that mess.

And here we are back to the camel's back theory of “It’s all Maureen’s fault because she said anything bad at all. If she had only be more of a team player..” hindsight. It doesn’t make sense to shoot the messenger no matter how accurate her aim was.

Rose: She played? I don’t want to make this about her because the theme is more important than one particular person, She said very, very difficult things about President Clinton at the height of his problems.

Denby: (nodding) President Bush.

Rose: …President Bush. And I suspect that at some point she will say very difficult things about President Obama.

Denby: She’s got trouble at the moment because he’s serious. He’s accountable. She can’t get a handle on him.

Rose: That criticism has been raised about everybody with respect to him.

Denby then goes on a long diatribe about how brilliant a satirist Colbert is because he is skewering right wing blowhards like O'Reilly while explaining Supreme Court decisions.

Denby: It’s not just making fun of someone who is physically vulnerable or has a strange manner or something. That’s the difference to me.

I had no idea Gore was such an drooling invalid, but Denby seems to think attacking him is on par with making fun of oddly dressed retards.

Rose: I think you are putting too much emphasis on that. You may have picked one or two columns. I mean, day in and day out, I know columnists, and I would include Maureen in this, are people who view the world of Washington with a sharp eye and sharp language. And it’s not just as you would suggest a long riff on people’s appearance.

Denby: Yes, I have no problem with that. I’m talking about a particular kind of malicious, nasty undermining humor which is value free.

Rose: Alright, let me roll tape. Here is Maureen Dowd on our show. Roll tape:

The clip is dated 8/27/04.

Dowd: The first couple of years of my column I just spent rolled up on the floor just crying. I mean, I found it so hard. And not the genre. The genre of column writing is hard, but they psychological pressure of being really tough. And with a woman they do tend to use different words. It’s like, you’re mean or you’re vituperative or you’re venomous which you don’t hear so much about Tom.

It’s like she is predicting Denby word for word.

Rose: Nobody is calling Tom Friedman “The Cobra.”

Dowd: Yeah, well you want to be liked. They don’t want everybody kind of hating.

Rose: Is there part of you that wants to be liked?

Dowd: All of me wants to be liked. What do you mean part of me? Yeah.

Rose: You like Bill Clinton?

She deftly avoids that minefield.

Dowd: Tom Friedman said once you get a column, you never make another friend.

Rose: That’s not true.

No, because Charlie has clearly become smitten.
The clip ends.

Denby: Tom Friedman is trying to save the world. He’s full of ideas.

Rose: So, wait, wait. The test of who’s snarky and who’s not snarky is what they want to do, what's their ambition in what they’re writing? That’s the test?

Denby: Yes. Seriousness in purpose. No matter how funny and nasty you are, if there is something serious behind it. And satire does that brilliantly from Jonathon Swift on down. Makes fun, but there’s some reforming instinct there. If you are just jumping at somebody’s weakness that is snark.

Rose: Alright, let’s move beyond that because if that is your test you have no basis to criticize Maureen Dowd if your test is seriousness of purpose.

Game, set and match goes to Rose. Denby’s accusations of Dowd are based on a false premise.

Denby: What is her values except that we should all be honest?

Rose: Her value is that she writes brilliantly and gives us an insight into sort of the behavioral aspects of people who aspire to lead.

Denby: She attacks everyone, Charlie. What would she have done with Abe Lincoln. I mean Honest Abe, really? Or FDR?

This is the sacred cows theory of criticism. Denby thinks some people should be above ridicule.

Rose: Hello? No worse than five or six other writers did with Abe Lincoln by the way.

Denby: Okay! But my point is that she’s often wrong.

And here is the crux of Denby’s attacks. He hates Dowd because she disagrees with him.

Rose: Moving beyond her only because it sounds like I’m trying to defend her because she’s a friend and I’m not. I think on the merit it looks that way.

No, Charlie, you’re dealing with a pompous ass with no internal logic to his arguments. Thank you for revealing that Denby’s grudge is against Dowd because he disagrees with her, not because of anything in particular about her style.

Me again. Nobody can say Maureen Dowd isn’t snarky. It’s her signature feature. What is in dispute is why Denby singles her out as the archetype of what he feels is wrong with snark. He accuses her of shallowness and a lack of perspective. He feels that some people are above criticism and he is the arbiter of what is and isn’t serious and high minded. Rose really skewers him on this point, but Denby wriggles away.

Denby postures as being high-minded and noble, but he is really just as mean and vicious as what he accuses Dowd of being. And he is far more deceptive about it and much less witty. And that is a far greater sin than being merely snarky.

Meet The Press: It's Poppycock

Rather than have boring guests full of talking points, this week's Meet The Press had a double-stacked panel. Maureen Dowd was one of the six guests along with David Brody, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ruth Marcus, Jon Meacham & Gwen Ifill. Gwen seems to be filling in the black woman chair for Michele Norris who was a pre-announced guest but didn't appear.

A lot of television punditry is a little canned and if you follow a columnist you are very likely to hear lines from current or future columns. George Will is notoriously famous for recycling his on air bon mots. Maureen Dowd is no different. Here is her take on Hillary's RFK gaffe which liberally paraphrases the best paragraph form her latest column:

Well, I think her timing was excruciatingly bad. I mean, right after the anniversary of King's death, right before the anniversary of Bobby's death, right when we learn the tragic news about Teddy Kennedy, and right when she and Bill seem engaged in kind of a hostile takeover of Obama's vice presidential mansion. So, beyond that, I think it gave delegates and a lot of Democrats the creeps, because basically the only reason she is still is in the race is that something bad will happen. Of course she doesn't wish him bodily harm, but she does want--she does wish him ill in the sense that they want a big horrible story that would debilitate him to break

Russert later asks Dowd about the Clintons blaming 'misogyny' and 'gender bias' as the reason for Hillary's campaign hitting the rocks. Her "it's poppycock" line is already gaining attention in the blogosphere.

I think it's poppycock, really. I mean, Hillary Clinton has allowed women to visualize a woman as president for the first time, in the way Colin Powell allowed people to visualize an African-American. And she dominated the debates, she, she proved that a woman can have as much tenacity and gall as any man on earth. We, we can visualize her facing down Ahmadinejad. But the thing is, Hillary hurts feminism when she uses it as opportunism. And she has a history of covering up her own mistakes behind sexism. She did it with health care right after health care didn't pass. She didn't admit that she was abrasive or mismanaged it or blew off good advice or was too secretive. She said that she was a Rorschach test for gender and that many men thought of a female boss they didn't like when they looked at her. And now she's doing the same thing, and it's very--you know, in a way it's the moral equivalent of Sharptonism. It's this victimhood and angry and turning women against men and saying that the men are trying to take it away from us, in the same way she's turning Florida and Michigan and riling up and comparing them to suffragettes and slaves. And it's very damaging to feminism.

She returns to that same topic just a little bit later:

It's inexplicable, because Harold Ickes, who works for Hillary, helped write these rules, right, about the caucuses. So I, you know, the--there's--Michelle Cottle has a piece in The New Republic quoting different people anonymously inside the Clinton campaign about saying what went wrong, and one of them said that the mismanagement of money borders on fraud, because this was someone who had raised a quarter of a billion dollars and still now has had to give 20 million of her own money because of mismanagement and still didn't have a campaign in half the states she needed.

On the other side of the spectrum, John McCain had to distance himself from Reverend Hagee who saw Hitler's persecution of the Jews as a mixed blessing.

I think it's always better not to riff on Hitler. And here's a guy who thinks we're in a nice little cult called the Catholic Church, and McCain stuck with him after that. But then when he got in trouble with the Jews, that was one too many, you know, ethnic groups that McCain couldn't offend, so he dropped him. But it makes you miss the McCain who, you know, stood up against the agents of tolerance rather than pander to them.

McCain also tried to make some jokes about the rather thin resume of Barack Obama, only it didn't come off as that funny. At least not to Maureen:

I think we learn something very interesting from this exchange. For one thing, McCain really doesn't like Obama. And, you know, he thinks he's the punk who hasn't bled, as McCain people like to say, and doesn't deserve to be in this arena. And we also learn that Obama is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton. He is much freer when he goes on the attack, much more confident. And McCain has another problem. He doesn't sound as fun and genial as he does when he's--as Reagan did when he said those lines. And also he tends to take any policy criticism as an attack on his integrity, and then attack back on the other person's integrity, and it sounds nasty.

And finally, the illness of Teddy Kennedy is starting the first round of eulogizing. And for Irish-Catholic Dowd, it's the first step towards beatification.

I think, in families like ours, working-class Irish families, we had the Kennedys' pictures mixed in with our family pictures. We grew up feeling that they were almost part of our family. And my brothers were Capitol Hill pages for JFK, Prescott Bush and Richard Nixon. And Teddy Kennedy would ask my brother Martin to play touch football with him, and he was always scared because he thought it would be like that scene in the "Wedding Crashers," part touch football, part pro-wrestling. But, I mean, they just seem like part of our family. And as Bob Schieffer said, it's like--he's like a Washington monument, you can't imagine the town without him.

The full episode can be seen below:


It's worth watching not just for Maureen Dowd, but for Ruth Marcus as well. I also noted that Jon Meacham also invoked the Kinsley Gaffe Definition. This is Dowd's second television appearance this month. Perhaps we will be seeing more of the normally reclusive redhead.

Dowd Alert: MTP Primary Wrap-Up

According to Politico:

NBC’s “Meet the Press” devotes its full hour to a roundtable on the presidential race, featuring CBN’s David Brody, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, NPR’s Michele Norris and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Look for some discussion on when Hillary will quit and when Obama will eat.

This Week With Maureen

Maureen Dowd was a member of The Roundtable on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos". The full video segment is available here.

When asked about Obama on the campaign trail, she mashed up some recent columns and said:

It was very painful watching [Obama] carbo-loading all the time. This week in Indiana he was reduced to saying that he really does like pot roast and jello and pleading with the reporters that he's not a GQ cover. I think that that basically when he had that cris de cour(sp?) about "Why can't you just let me eat my waffles?", he was saying "Why can't I just be President?" or maybe "Why can't I be ex-President?" and get rid of the pesky reporters and Hillary and everyone.

On Bill Clinton's contribution to the campaign, she says:

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that in the suburbs where [Bill Clinton] worked really hard, [Hillary] got a larger margin of the vote. So even though he was the first politician in history to play the Caucasian Card {Stephanopoulos chuckles}, some Democrats think he is really hurting her, there is some proof otherwise.

And back to Hillary:

That's the power of Hillary Clinton. That even though rationally we think that she can't possible make it mathematically, irrationally we keep saying "How is she going to make it?" I think she has done real damage in turning him from incandescent to ineffectual. She has repainted him as Bambi.

About McCain trying to distance himself from 527 groups running ads featuring the speeches of Reverend Wright:

Having been beaten that way by Dubya in 2000, a very painful way for him, I don't think he's going to to do that again. He does want the best of both worlds. There was a story in the Washington Times about how he can't get control of his party again. On the other hand, I think this is good for him the more Wright is on TV.

She was looser and more forthcoming during the Green Room segment. Asked if McCain is doing a good job getting the message out about the economy.

John McCain is not doing a good job and I don't think Barack Obama is either. He should have had a great economic speech ready to go in that last week in Pennsylvania. And he should have had a great patriotic speech ready to go also. He had one he was working on and delayed it after the San Francisco "bitter" comments. He thought it would seem to opportunistic to do it so soon, but he shouldn't have. His campaign is very static and stale on the economy.

It should just be an organic part of what he is talking about. He has a real problem relating to lower class people. Somebody said after the bitter thing, a Pennsylvania voter said, he makes us feel like we just fell off the apple cart.

On if the campaign is fun:

Well, I'm having more fun than Obama.He finds it so painful. And I'm carbo-loading. I had two cheesesteaks to do a taste comparison between the two places. He gave away his french fries. But you try to make it look fun.

Asked for suggestions, she said, "Get rid of that hi-def."

The Green Room handler said, "But you look great."

She replied, "We'll see. My hand was shaking according to Matt. It was sheer terror."

Matt then confessed that it was just a ploy to hold her hand. And who could blame him?

Disclaimer: The transcription is my own and has been editted for clarity and continuity. Any errors are mine alone.

For a backstage look at the production of the show read this blog entry by Dowd Report contributor yellojkt.

Dowd Alert: This Week With Georgie

Maureen Dowd makes fairly infrequent guest stints on the Sunday morning yakker shows. Her last appearance was on "Meet The Press" on January 27. (Dowd Central of course has a link to that in the archive.) This Week (literally) she snubs fellow Obamaphile Tim Russert to go into the lion's den of former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos. It must be some sort of penance he is paying for his uniformly panned debate moderating.

From ABC's press release:

And on our "Roundtable," the New York Times' Maureen Dowd and ABC News' Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd and George Will debate the week's politics.

Tune-in Sunday for "This Week" from the Newseum.

The Newseum is a news oriented musuem (duh) on Pennsylvania Avenue that is the new site for the "This Week With George Snufflupagus" studio. As this video explains, it will be the first Sunday morning talk show broadcast in high definition. So if you have ever wanted to see Maureen Dowd's copper tressed visage in all its glory, tomorrow morning is your chance.

The Kettle Coloring Contest

To Catch a Thief
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 20, 2008

Sometimes Maureen Dowd’s pop cultural references are a little obscure, like last column’s “caged bird sings” call-out. Other times she tosses big fat softballs.

Lenny and Squiggy were nowhere in sight.

But Hillary was doing her best to come across as a “Laverne & Shirley” factory girl as she headed away from not-a-chance Wisconsin and on to gotta-have Ohio.

No sooner does she mention Lenny and Squiggy than I am humming the Laverne and Shirley theme. And then three paragraphs later she is using the theme song as the true inner voice of the Clinton campaign. Dowd Report contributor yellojkt did a similar idea a few weeks back with a Billy Joel tune, but Dowd gets the idea down just right:

“Give us any chance, we’ll take it.
Give us any rule, we’ll break it.
We’re gonna make our dreams come true.
Doin’ it our way.”

And by “doin’ it our way,” Dowd means lying, cheating and scheming just like any silly caper the slightly slutty Laverne/Bill can talk the uptight but ambitious Shirley/Hillary into. In this episode, they accuse the Obama camp of stealing words from other well-spoken black politicians:

The Clinton camp has spent days trying to undermine Obama’s chief asset, the elegant language that has sparked a generational boom.

“We’re seeing a pattern here,” Hillary enforcer Howard Wolfson said, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. Yeah, we are. She’s losing, and looking for anything to bruise Obama.

Obama swiped a couple distinctive riffs about words and aspirations — his supposed specialty — from his pal Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, thereby violating the new cardinal rule not only of politics but of life: Don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the top favorites of YouTube.

Maureen finds the perfect metaphor for this petty pilfering that manages to also mildy emasculate Obama:

He had credited Patrick in the past, and Patrick had channeled Obama when he ran for governor in ’06, so basically they’re like two roommates sharing clothes. Or two politicians sharing a strategist. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, worked for Patrick in the gubernatorial bid.

And Dowd points out that in this kettle coloring contest, the Clintons have plenty of smudges on their face which leads to the Movies With Maureen® of the week, an Alfred Hitchcock classic about two jewel thieves after the same prize:

The Clintons are known political cat burglars. They pilfered Republican jewels in the ’90s, and Hillary has purloined as much as she can stuff in her pantsuit from her husband and Barack Obama.

She changed to Change. She co-opted “It’s time to turn the page” and “Fired up and ready to go.” She couldn’t wait to shoplift the words “yes” and “can” from Obama’s trademark “Yes, we can!” — (which he appropriated from Caesar Chavez) — even though she was cagey enough to put them in separate slogans, “Yes, we will!” and “Americans still have that can-do spirit.”

Bill, master thief, got in on the act, too. After Obama said that his election would tell the world that America is back, Bill said that Hillary’s election would tell the world that America is back.

And echoing earlier themes, Maureen takes a few cheap shots at the other spousal candidate for going off-message while getting in one last brewery pun:

The attribution problem might be small beer compared with Michelle Obama’s comment in Milwaukee on Monday: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

It’s a discordant note for the stylish, brainy 44-year-old Princeton and Harvard Law School grad. Cindy McCain showed that Republicans would jump right on a line like that, and twist it into something that sounded extremist and unpatriotic.

But even this little cat-fight hiss gets turned around into a back-handed stab at the Clintons:

Given the way the Clintons unfairly turn the tables, we’re only moments away from Hillary asking Obama: “Can’t you control your spouse?”

Which is a episode we will have to tune in for next week as Labama and Billary fight over superdelegate Carmine "The Big Ragoo" Ragusa only to confuse him with Tony "The Landlord" Rezko. Hilarity ensues.

Meet The Clinton Bashers

Maureen Dowd on Sunday joined the panel of Bash The Clintons Meet The Press where she was asked about the Caroline Kennedy endorsement of Barack Obama in the New York Times. Presumably she was the most qualified to answer the question because a) she’s a New York Times employee, and b) she got Caroline’s autograph on a bunch of Christmas presents.

MR. RUSSERT: Another event overnight, Maureen Dowd, in your paper, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the 35th president, John Kennedy, wrote an op/ed piece in The Times endorsing Barack Obama. And this is what she said: "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president--not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." Barack Obama. Are we going to see Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, town hall? How significant is this?

MS. MAUREEN DOWD: Well, I think this is huge. The Hillary people were obviously trying to get Caroline Kennedy's endorsement, and the fact that she gave it to Obama is very much like the moment that Bill Clinton pushed when he shook JFK's hand at Boy's Nation. Now, JFK probably didn't remember that at all, but the Clinton campaign made that the Arthurian moment, where Galahad took the sword out of the stone. And now Caroline has done that for Obama. But it's a real moment because she is saying, "You are like my father," after decades of politicians pretending to be like, like JFK, and Gary Hart chopping his hand, and, you know, Dan Quayle trying to act like he was JFK. She is giving him the imprimatur, and it's--I think it's huge.

Her next turn at bat let her cut loose with a greatest hits compilation of Billary bashing. She got in the Big Dog allusion and even mentioned an Onion article as a reference on Bill’s behavior.

MS. DOWD: Well, it was an astonishing spectacle of seeing a so-called first black president trying to destroy a would-be first black president. I mean, we've never seen anything like this, and it was very personal between Obama and Clinton. And I think that, in the end, Hillary gave up a good narrative for her, which is that she had carved out her own identity and that it wasn't going to be the Bickersons back in the White House, and you just saw the Clintons. And, and Mitt Romney was right, you, you visualized her in the Oval, him in the East Wing rambling around looking for mischief. And it was, you know, it was a very seamy--Phil Gaily, who's the editorial page editor of the St. Petersburg Times, said watching Clinton in South Carolina is like watching a mad dog slobber. It was about him. And, you know, as The Onion said, you know, The Onion headline was, "Screw It, I'm Running for President by Bill Clinton."

Since she was taking it easy on Bill, Tim lobbed her another softball so she could get in more digs:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen, you wrote on Wednesday, "It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."

MS. DOWD: I know. We're seeing all these astonishing things in this race, and it worked in Nevada and New Hampshire for--I think Bill Clinton helped her there. But, in this case, I just think it raised the deja vu of the Clintons will drag anyone down to their own level and trash anyone to make up for what is missing in them or what they have done wrong. During impeachment, you know, they were trashing the founding fathers. Bill Clinton's lawyers actually filed a brief saying, "Well, Alexander Hamilton had a tawdry affair, and he wasn't kicked out of office." So it's a very debilitating dynamic, you know, to drag everyone down to their level, especially when you have this alternative of optimism and hope. And they were willing to put a dagger in the heart of hope. I mean, Obama should just beat them over the head every day with the idea that Bill Clinton said he represented false hope. Because the only way they can beat him is to beat down hope and inspiration and bringing young voters and expanding the party, and they want to kill all that. And that is not a good, you know, situation for them.

After giving Obama campaign advice, she goes on to burnish his reputation as a historic watershed figure:

MS. DOWD: Tim, one of the most striking images of South Carolina--Jeff Zeleny wrote about today--was the Confederate flag flying near the capital and Obama workers holding up Obama placards. And it's, you know, an amazing historic image.

Russert also sets up a straw man in the name of Rudy for Maureen to take a few swings at. She mostly rehashes her column for the day:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, the indictment of Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner, who he proposed to be secretary of Homeland Security, stories about his New York City police detail being used to guard his then-girlfriend, now-wife Judith Nathan, did those issues just take a toll on Rudy Giuliani?

MS. DOWD: Oh, of course, you know. And, you know, he's got to stop talking about 9/11 and call 911 because he's in real trouble there. And I was expecting more of a--from a man who loves opera, more of an operatic finale, one way or the other, to save himself or to self-immolate. I mean, some Maria Callas death scene. But he's so mundane. And actually yesterday he switched his message to hope. So that's not going to work for Rudy Giuliani.
…
MS. DOWD: And he was able to jump on the headlines of the day and say something provocative, and he just seems to be sleepwalking.

MR. RUSSERT: Is he recognizing that he's not going to win and sort of protecting his next career?

MS. DOWD: I think so, and saving, and saving, you know, protecting Giuliani Partners.

Moving on to McCain, Chuck Todd and Dowd exchange a little inside baseball concerning the chumminess of fellow senators McCain and Hillary.

MS. DOWD: Well, I asked McCain about that in the green room, doing reporting, and he was saying not to think--I know he really does like Hillary Clinton--I've talked to him about that--and thinks she's really fun to travel with. But he said to expect fireworks. He's not going to lay off of her. He's already talking about how she's waving the white flag of surrender on Iraq.

MR. TODD: They enjoy the vodka shots, right?

MS. DOWD: Oh, yeah, they did in Estonia, yes.

The Indiana Jones style vodka shooter contest happened back in 2006 according the Times.
In her final say of the day, Maureen manages to put Obama on an even higher pedestal than her earlier sloppy wet-kisses:

MS. DOWD: Well, I think, you know, it's very interesting to me because I think that in, in Iowa, Obama learned how to connect with his electricity. Usually you have someone being the daddy figure, and he's like the blessed child, you know, he's learning as he goes. And we're watching him learn and get personally upset in real time, which we, we saw with McCain in South Carolina in 2000, now we're seeing with Obama. And the question is, did this give him his spine? You know, he's been struggling. Is he on the pedestal like Adlai Stevenson, or is he JFK and RFK, who knows how to fight back? And I think he's got a false choice. He doesn't have to be Tonya Harding to fight back; he could be like Reagan and just flick them away and use wit. But he's learning on the job, and he, you know, he--his speech, his victory speech last night was angry. You know, he is angry at the Clintons for what he sees as underhanded tactics, and they were underhanded. So it, it depends, is he going to get back on the pedestal or is he going to figure out some way that he's comfortable with not to do cage fight, fighting.

She had declared Obama “The Golden Child” back in December and now she want to see him double axel his way to the nomination.

Programming Alert

According to The Hotline, Maureen Dowd will be making one of her rare television appearances as part of the panel on tomorrow's Meet The Press. Tim Russert must still be smarting from the spanking he took in Talking Points Memo and HuffPo for letting Clintonista James Carville shill for Hill without any disclaimer or rebuttal. Something tells me we won't be hearing any rehashes of the NYT Hillary endorsement from the Dowdster. Full clip files and commentary to come tomorrow.

Hillary Meets The Lazio Effect

On Meet The Press today, Tim Russert asked Hillary Clinton to respond to criticism aimed at her by female commentators about her playing the victim card. She bobs and weaves masterfully. Here is that segment:



Russert quoted from Maureen Dowd's November 4, 2007 column which I discussed in "You Go Gallfriend". The quote as read on-air has a interesting omission:

If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim… surely she can become president by playing the victim now.

Those three ellipses removed the phrase “after Monica,”. I wonder what discussion went into deciding that Monica Lewinsky is not relevant to a discussion of Clinton's political career benefiting from her image as a victim.

BlogWatch: Seth Rocks

I was perhaps a little too harsh on Seth Meyers in my last post. Gothamist highlights what they think was the funniest part of the column.

The NY Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd asked Seth Meyers (who we spoke to on Tuesday) to give her a weekend update about the strike: "As a comedy writer, I am more than willing to admit that I need a world with producers, but do they need us? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, without writers whom will the studios blame for their failures? Second, seriously, whom?"

We won't pick on Seth for the who/whom usage. Anytime I hear about tv and movie writers, I am reminded about the joke where a starlet is so dumb that to get a part she sleeps with the writer.

The writer of Lazerow claims to know Seth personally and vouches for his talent.

In addition to being one of the funniest people I know, Seth is one of the smartest. So it should come as no surprise that Seth's comments, as reported by Dowd today, are both hilarious and strikingly true (excuse the pun).

Seth explains that he doesn't hate the studio heads:

"I am a fan of studios and what I like most about them is this: They know how to make money. That’s why studios and writers are such a perfect fit. Without studios we’d be back where comedy writers were 100 years ago — in some backwoods farmhouse shouting jokes at each other in a makeshift ring, while drunken audiences throw nickels at our feet."

And finally, snoskred used this Maureen Dowd quote as her thought of the day:

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

I don’t know when or in what context MoDo said it, but it sure seems to totally sum up the issues at stake between the writers and the producers.

Dorothy Parker Dowd

A Bite of the Bagel
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 11, 2007

Hollywood Money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hands and there you are.
-Dorothy Parker

Maureen Dowd makes a confession.

I keep up on the news by listening to late-night comedians. I read a lot of stuff too, and talk to people. But I’m a satirical news junkie.

That Dowd is a fan of late night satirical news shows should come as no surprise. After all, she let Stephen Colbert write her most popular column in recent memory.

To prove how bad television needs more funny writers, Dowd interviews Seth Meyers about the issues at stake.

Mr. Meyers took issue with the Times article characterizing the New York picket line of Tina Fey, himself and other NBC writers in front of Rockefeller Center as “a glamour strike,” with Writers Guild members in “arty glasses and fancy scarves” rather than “hard hats and work boots.”

The Times article can be found here. Tina Fey was the headwriter of Saturday Night Live who left SNL to star, write, and produce a sitcom about a female headwriter at an NBC sketch comedy show. Who says there are no new ideas? Seth Meyers replaced Fey on the faux news segment Weekend Update. To show how badly writers are needed, he used this example:

“Even my technologically challenged mother watches television on a computer — and she thinks an iPod is some kind of antelope,” Mr. Meyers said.

Jokes like that make one yearn for the Jimmy Fallon era. Almost.

Dowd then puts the issues into perspective.

Some industry analysts say that the writers may be engaged in a futile act, because they have no real power, can’t shut down networks that can turn to more reality TV, and may not be able to stop the conglomerates from squashing them — a scenario straight out of Paddy Chayefsky.

The movie Network is about a ratings obsessed network that uses the rantings of an insane newsman to gain an audience. It is sometimes confused as a documentary about Fox News.

And to sum up, Dowd quotes her favorite jade:

Dorothy Parker, once an unhappy writer in Hollywood, had an image of the town’s power structure as “a block-long limo with a gloved, jeweled hand sticking out the rear window holding a bagel with one bite taken out of it.”

The writers are running alongside the limo just trying to get their own bite. And maybe a schmear.

Dorothy Parker was a member of the famed Algonquin Roundtable, a group of writers known for their ferocious wit, biting satire, and bitter bon mots. According to this site, Frank Crowinshield, the managing editor of Vanity Fair, recalled that she had "the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery."

Dowd was just born a few decades too late.

French Letters

Hillary la Française, Cherchez la Femme?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 31, 2007

“Cherchez la Femme” is a French phrase roughly meaning that behind any odd behavior or other problem, you can usually find a woman involved if you look hard enough. The Phrase Finder website explains its origin:

The expression was coined by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le Monte-Cristo, 1857:

"Vous connaissez sa maxime, lorsqu'il veut découvrir un secret quelconque: cherchez la femme; dans ce cas la femme n'a pas été difficile à trouver."
(You know his maxim, when he wants to discover an unspecified secrecy: seek the woman; in this case the woman was not difficult to find.)

The phrase was adopted into English use and crossed the Atlantic by 1909. It was well enough known there by that date for O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) to use it as the title of a story - Cherchez La Femme, which includes this line:

"Ah! yes, I know most time when those men lose money you say 'Cherchez la femme' - there is somewhere the woman."

Maureen Dowd compares Hillary Clinton with the ex-wife of the current French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Cécilia Sarkozy got divorced over the philandering ways of her husband. Hillary got elected Senator.

Cécilia Sarkozy acts so American, while Hillary Clinton acts so French.
Cécilia at one point left her marriage to go to New York and seek love American-style, while Hillary lost the public love in the ’90s when she tried French-style health care reform.

Love American Style was a television comedy anthology show that featured the trials and tribulations of romance in the sexually liberated 1970s. While estranged from her husband, Cécilia and her then-lover briefly lived in New York. According the French Embassy website, the French health care system is a single-payer universal coverage system financed by a combination of payroll deductions and sin taxes. It is very similar to the system Hillary Clinton’s health care commission proposed during the first term of her husband’s presidency.

Dowd then plays up Hillary’s campaign strategy of appealing to women by trying to soften her harsh image.

She returns to Wellesley tomorrow to launch Hillblazers, a bid to attract young Hillarys to the campaign. She will be back in the setting of her 1969 feminist triumph as the commencement speaker who described her class’s desire for a “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living” and who spoke truth to power, chastising Edward Brooke for being out of touch.

The Edward Brooke incident was a watershed event in Hillary Clinton’s life as it gave her her very first national exposure. The details have been described in many places, but most recently in the October 21st edition of the International Herald Tribune, which is the European edition of the New York Times. Good to see Dowd keeps up with the house organs.

On May 31, 1969, [Clinton] gave the student commencement speech. She was preceded at the dais by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, who spoke that day against "coercive protest." Rodham later wrote she waited in vain for any mention of the pain and soul-searching of the time — Vietnam, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the podium, she peered out through thick glasses and said: "Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."

The speech was a sensation. She was featured in Life magazine.

Dowd says that Hillary’s strategy of appealing to every possible microgroup is at odds with her former tough talking ways.

Hillary doesn’t speak truth to power any more. Now that Mark Penn believes women can carry her to victory, Hillary speaks girlfriend to girlfriend.

Mark Penn is the author and Clinton strategist that Dowd wrote about recently. To round out the First Ladies Club, Dowd quotes Argentinean President-elect Fernández de Kirchner:

“And why not?,” former first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said about Hillary yesterday. “Another woman wouldn’t be bad.”

After an extensive quote from an Atlantic article on Clinton by Caitlin Flanagan, Dowd points out a telling detail:

Ms. Flanagan … was particularly bothered by Hillary’s callousness in dumping Socks, the beloved White House cat and best-selling author, on Bill’s former secretary Betty Currie.

Not only is Hillary wrong for not dumping Bill on the curb, she’s a bad pet owner too. But Dowd sees Senator Clinton’s toughness as her strength:

Few are concerned that Hillary is strong enough for the job. She is cold-eyed about wanting power and raising money and turning everything about her life into a commodity. Yet, the characteristics that are somewhat troubling are the same ones that convincingly show she will do what it takes to beat Obama and Rudy. She will not be soft or vulnerable. She will not melt in a crisis.

And to drive home the point about who the real man in the campaign is, Dowd goes back to the {verb}-up phrase she has become enamored with and emasculated Obama once more just for old time’s sake.

And, unlike Obama, she doesn’t need to talk herself into manning up. Obama whiffed in the debate last night when Brian Williams and Tim Russert teed up the first question for him to take on Hillary — something the debate dominatrix never would have done.

And with the final alliteration, we see who really wears the pants suits in the campaign. Hillary is a strong-willed political opportunist that stayed with her philandering husband just for political gain, and those are her good points.

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?

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.

Ginger or Mary Anne?

Will Rudy Let Her Rudy-Up?
by Maureen Dowd
September 16, 2007

“Rudy-up” is a variation on the street slang phrase “man-up”, meaning to take something like a man and to be tough and daring.

For months, Hillary’s comely male rivals for the Democratic nomination have tiptoed around her, letting their wives take shots at the front-runner.

By calling John Edwards and Barack Obama "comely" and accusing them of using their wives to make attacks, she is questioning their masculinity.

Enter Rudy. He may wear skirts, but he’s not afraid to take down a skirt.

Rudy Giuliani once wore a dress in a skit with Donald Trump. Some people think he enjoyed it just a little too much.

Obama has been trying to make this point for quite a while, but so gingerly that every time he sneaks up on it, Hillary surges ahead.

Rudy doesn’t do ginger.

The irony is that if you could loosen up Hillary with a few Jack and gingers, she would probably be closer to her reinvention than to his caricature.

We have at least two meanings of ginger here. “Gingerly” means gently and is an another subtle accusation of effeminateness. Additionally, the phrase “doesn’t do ginger” could be a reference to Ginger Rogers who can do everything Fred Astaire can but backwards and in heels. “Jack and ginger” means Jack Daniels and ginger ale, implying that if you got a few drinks into Hillary, she would be as tough or tougher than Rudy. I’m surprised MoDo didn’t manage a Gilligan’s Island call out.

Essentially, Dowd is calling Obama, John, and Rudy pussies and claiming that Hillary is the only man in the bunch. She’s just saying it ever so gingerly.