Inauguration Inversion

Mushy: Handsome in Uniform
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 7, 2007

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution on Saturday. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said "President Musharraf said that he would take off his uniform and that would be an important step"

Today’s column is a Bizarro World inversion of George Walker Bush’s Second Inaugural Address delivered on January 20, 2005.

Dubya’s Inauguration	Dowd’s Inversion
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.	We are led, by recent events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the repression of liberty in other lands.
In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak.	In America’s ideal of freedom, we are ennobled by a heart for the weak. But we must also have a heart for the strongmen.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.	From now on, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of tyrannical movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending democracy in our world so liberty can thrive.
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.	We will persistently clarify the moral choice before every ruler and nation: Choose oppression, which can work, as we see with our Arab allies, or freedom, which — O.K., I admit it this once — we can’t make work in Iraq.
America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.	America’s influence is not unlimited. And unfortunately for the oppressed, Mushy’s open defiance is helping to further undermine America’s influence. But we will use what influence we have left to pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains and that human beings aspire to live at the mercy of bullies.
The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.	The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to mistrust them. Stop your journey of progress and justice, and America will not only walk at your side, we’ll give you billions of dollars and lots of big-ticket stuff, like F-16s — no strings attached.
From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?	Three years ago, I believed that the most important question history would ask us was: Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? But now I am older and wiser. I know that the most important question history will ask us is: What’s a little martial law between friends?

Will history judge us by our words or by our actions?

Kos-acks Attack Dowd

Back when I checked out the Free Republic reaction to Maureen Dowd’s attacks on Cheney, I found a lot of rabid DowdBashing. Now that she has turned her sites on Hillary, it would be interesting to see how the reliably liberal Kos-acks at Daily Kos react to Nevada Dems take (see yesterday's post for those highlights).

Dowd has a very bad reputation among the heartiest of liberal partisans with long memories. An awful lot of people are still bitter over perceived sabotage of the Gore campaign.

Buzzer says (and 21 others agree):

I'm not a Hillary supporter but Maureen Dowd is worthless. She (as well as Frank Rich) were MAJOR perpetrators of dishonest, sickeningly superficial coverage of Al Gore in 2000.
There are plenty of smart people making strong cases against Hillary Clinton. Mo Dowd isn't one of them.

Happy Days semi-defended Dowd:

Maureen Dowd is witty and funny but has always been very hostile to both Clintons.

But Travis Bickle adds:

She's been very to hostile to a lot of people including Al Gore and John Kerry. U can thank her for the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" sniping in 2000, she gave a lot of that media BS legs in a major American publication. I ignore her and her condescension.

Chumley concurs:

Maureen Dowd is an awful writer. Remember, she will savage ANYONE with her Mean Girls style. Especially Democratic candidates. She's long on snotty b.s., short on substance.
She was one of the worst in going after Al Gore back in 2000. Just shameless.

Peagreen is about the only one that understands the point Dowd was trying to make:

no fan of dowd BUT

She can be righteous while playing brass-knuckle politics. She will cozy up to former enemies she can use, like Matt Drudge and David Brock, and back W.’s bellicosity if it helps banish her old image as anti-military.
There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.

I would not care who wrote this. I agree with it. And the emphasis is mine.

Do Tell agrees:

This paragraph really sums up Hillary, no matter how much I dislike Dowd. She hits the nail on the head and explains much about her current campaign, her votes, statements, and her doubletalk.
She will do anything, say anything, as long as it gets her the nomination.

Shane Hensinger takes a more balanced but personal view of Dowd's attacks:

Maureen Dowd has never met a public figure that she doesn't enjoy raking over the coals and humiliating in her little twice-a-week "gotcha" column. She's loyal to no ideology or party, only to her own self-serving interests.

Dowd is the ultimate Beltway insider, the kind who thinks she knows more than the little people, and she flaunts her connections like they're prize jewels. She's a chronic Botox addict who doesn't like anyone, especially other women, doing better than she's done. She loves to find fault with the wives of elected politicians because they constantly remind her that she's never been able to have a successful relationship.

She's a loveless, childless, bitter menopausal woman with nothing more to look forward to than more echo-chamber parties in Georgetown and the Upper West Side where everyone assures her of how relevant and important she is.

To Happy Days, the quality of Dowd’s columns depends on whose Al is getting Gored, so to speak:

Frankly, I enjoy her Bush and Cheney columns because she does have a very funny and caustic wit. But when it comes to writing about Hillary (or Bill for that matter) she's as viscious (sic) or more so than she is with Shrub and Darth--but in the case of the Clintons she takes the most superficial and un-representative things and engages in satirical cheap shots.

And that pretty much sums it up. Your view of Dowd depends on where you stand. And since she doesn’t play favorites, she takes plenty of shots from all directions.

BlogWatch: All Gall

I predicted that Maureen Dowd’s Gallic Campaign would draw umbrage from liberal quarters and they did not disappoint. All the major lefty blogs had major reactions to Dowd’s interpretation of the week’s events.

Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire (who has had words to say about Dowd before) trots out the familiar accusation of Dowd being a dupe of the right (I do like the rather Dowd-esque coinage of the epithet Idiot Princess™):

Ms. Dowd is clearly determined to spin out every wingnut fantasy about Hillary and to attack her on everything except actual issues. As it happens, I differ with Hillary on several issues, but this line of attack pisses me off. Hillary's vajayjay has nothing--nothing whatsoever--to do with her governing abilities. Only MoDo and her compatriots in The Village think it does.

And then there were these white wolves in the trees and Mo had a little cough. Below: How MoDo sees herself, facing down the dangerous seductions of Hillary. (I think Ariels's red is more natural-looking than Maureen's, however.)

Lots of people find both Ariel and MoDo sexy. I've just never pictured her without legs before though.

At Daily Kos, Nevada Dem found Dowd’s narrative “brutal” and had this reaction towards Hillary:

This column might be the most brutal interpetation of what Hillary actually is, it does make me wonder if she's even worth backing in a general election as a nominee. One major selling point about Hillary that could make one overlook her shortcomings was how her presidency could help women an deserve as a role model for girls. What she pulled after the debate is not role model material in fact it's embarassing to use the all these men ganging up on me defense.

Is this really the type of campaign that we want our democratic nominee to run and if this little episode is preducing a backlash in the democratic community it will be disasterous with the general electorate. With Hillary her gender is just another tool to doubletalk, spin and bullshit her way to the whitehouse.

Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo’s Horse’s Mouth blog disputes that what everybody else saw even happened.

People have already started taking their whacks at Maureen Dowd's dismal column today decrying Hillary for playing the "gender card." But I wanted to add one other point: The entire column is based on something that just never happened.
Dowd's whole effort is based on the idea that Camp Hillary's strategy is, as Dowd describes it, a "don’t hit me, I’m a girl" strategy. From there Dowd concludes that Hillary says she should be able to do and say whatever she wants -- or "have it both ways" on a variety of fronts -- because she's a woman.

Camp Hillary did not say men were attacking her, or that her rivals shouldn't attack her, because (italics in original) she's a woman. She just never tried to use gender as a "shield" in any meaningful sense. If someone can prove otherwise, I'll gladly post it. Without this false point, Dowd's entire column collapses.

That line of reasoning seems disingenuous at best. The syllogism at work was:
1. Hillary is being unfairly ganged up on.
2. Hillary is the only woman in the race.
3. ????
While this is fallacious logic by Socratic standards, most people connected the dots that were being laid out. If Sargent wants to claim that the two statements have no connection, that is his own intentional naiveté.

Hillary never has to play the gender card herself. That's what she has minions for. It's called plausible deniability, a common presidential perk. She learned that a long time ago from someone close to her.

You Go, Gallfriend!

Updated 11/6/07

Gift of Gall
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 4, 2007

Gall [gawl]–noun
1. impudence; effrontery.
2. bile, esp. that of an animal.
3. something bitter or severe.
4. bitterness of spirit; rancor.
Synonyms 1. nerve, audacity, brass, cheek.
-Dictionary.com

Speaking of nerve, Maureen has been watching too much of The View and has picking up the patois of that estrogen fest. Take for example:

Girlfriend had a rough week.

And

I must rush to a sister’s defense.

Which of course she doesn’t. If the feminists were outraged over Dowd’s previous treatment of Hillary Clinton, she pours gasoline on the fire this week. She begins with a baseball metaphor more tortured than a Gitmo ghost detainee.

First Hillary got brushed back by the boys in the debate. Then some women bemoaned Hillaryland’s “Don’t hit me, I’m a girl” strategy.

Then we go to the Dylan allusion:

But she can break, just like a little girl, when male chauvinists are rude enough to catch her red-handed being slippery and opportunistic.

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Ev'rybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.
-Bob Dylan, "Just Like A Woman"

Much better is her reversal of the famous Harry Truman saying “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Sometimes when Hillary takes heat, she gets paranoid and controlling. But this time she took the heat by getting into the kitchen.

Dowd then goes to examples of Hillary and her campaign milking the victimhood while trying to toughen up her image.

Meanwhile, she let her aides below the fray stir up fem-outrage by putting a video on the campaign Web site called “The Politics of Pile On,” edited to highlight men ganging up on her to the tune of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.”

And remember the time Hillville used a Washington Post story about a sighting of the senator’s cleavage in the Senate to spearhead a fund-raising drive with women? Dollars for décolletage. Genius!

No, Mo, your penchant for alliteration is genius! And "Politics of Pile-On" (video here) is coming awfully close to working your side of the street with the alliterative title, mid-brow opera soundtrack, and mild sports metaphor. Just remember that sincerity is the most flattering imitation.

It was Pulitzer Prize rival Robin Givhan that made the mountains out of those particular molehills. Keeping with the fashion beat approach, Dowd takes another incident of the week and inverts that metaphor as well.

That may be why she recently blew off a Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz at the last minute, according to Liz Smith: to show solidarity with supporters who can’t afford Vogue frocks.

She was always kind enough to let Bill hide behind her skirts when he got in trouble with women. Now she deserves to hide behind her own pantsuits when men cause her trouble.

And Dowd projects just a little when calling for the clucking commentariat to back-off on the “disgrace to feminism” tirades.

When pundettes tut-tut that playing the victim is not what a feminist should do, they forget that Hillary is not a feminist. If she were merely some clichéd version of a women’s rights advocate, she never could have so effortlessly blown off Marian Wright Edelman and Lani Guinier when Bill first got in, or played the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign.

Marian Wright Edelman was a close friend and mentor of Hillary until they became estranged over various slights during Bill’s half of the Clinton Interregnum. Similarly, Lani Guinier was a close ally dropped like a hotcake when her views were too liberal for confirmation.

The Cupcake Fury takes us back to the kitchen, but whether Dowd is talking about Gennifer Flowers or Hillary's recent Letterman Cupcake Promise is lost within the recursive mind of Maureen. But she can’t get any clearer on her much repeated assertion that Hillary has one goal: Get elected.

There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.
That’s the beauty of Hillary.

And you don’t need a fashion editor to know that kind of beauty is more than skin deep. It goes all the way to the gall and bile.


Update (11/6/07): Thanks to Jessica McBride for highlighting a particularly relevant John Irving reference:

Mark Penn presided over a conference call on Wednesday to rally supporters to the idea of a fem-backlash, during which one devoted Ellen Jamesian suggested that Tim Russert “should be shot.” The woman quickly repented, not the sentiment, but the fact that she shouldn’t have said it on a conference call. (NBC security remained on high alert.)

In The World According To Garp, the Ellen James Society was a group of radical feminists that cut off their tongues in symbolic sympathy with an eleven-year-old rape victim named Ellen James. As always, Dowd is able to reach into the recesses of 1970s pop literature and pull out the absolutely perfect metaphor.

Faux Mo

Mark Hemingway of National Review Online is not impressed with the fall of Times Select. He took one for the team and went back and read every MoDo column from the past year got into a rage.

But the biggest change has been the return of the most “colorful” writer in the Times’s stable, Maureen Dowd, whose biweekly hell-broth of tortured comparisons and pop culture references always entertain, if not illuminate.

He took every column and mixed them up into a blender and here is part of the pastiche:

They take affairs, illegitimate children, and tumultuous marriages in stride. But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. (3) It almost made Bill and Hillary seem like a model of normalcy. Almost. (4)

He says he’s not particularly fond of Celine Dion, whose “You and I” is Hillary’s insipid jingle. (10) It was an acid flashback to the cultural wasteland of Bill Clinton’s reign, when instead of Pablo Casals, we got Kenny G. (11)

In the footnotes he links back to the original articles. I may have to use them to linkback to learn what raises the hackles of a NRO columnist. I'd say pretty much anything Dowd writes.

Dowd Declares War On Iran

Maureen Dowd's sense of sarcasm is a little subtle and something got lost in translation. Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports that an English language Iranian news agency picked up Dowd's mock-Cheney interview and passed them along as dire warnings of more American sabre rattling. Someone must have tipped them off, because the report go quickly buried. According to Kamen:

It seems New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd brought us closer to the brink with a Sunday column in which she purported to interview Vice President Cheney. This is how it played on Press TV, the first international Iran-based news network to broadcast 24-7 in English.

"Cheney: Iran has WMDs, just like Iraq," said the headline on the online edition, posted Sunday.

"The US Vice President, Dick Cheney, has accused the Islamic Republic of having weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 'just like Saddam,' " the story read.

"While the negotiations are underway between Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog, the hawkish US official said the White House considers Iran's nuclear dossier in 'the final stages of diplomacy,' " the report said.

" 'We are not going to get hung up on democracy this time,' Dick Cheney said in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. 'It's time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them,' said the Vice President, when asked how close Washington was to launching military strikes on Iran. "

Note that the Iranians confuse Tim Russert with a New York Times reporter. All these MSM types look alike. Kamen continues:

The item was no longer on the site yesterday, maybe because someone realized Cheney would no more sit down and chat with Dowd than he would with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Chatting with us yesterday, Dowd noted that satire has its risks.

Ya think?

According to National Review Online mediablog, this is not the first time that an Iranian news agency has picked up Dowd's commenting as reporting. Her earlier Cheney as Madman column (and they are beginning to get hard to keep straight). The NRO spin is nicely summarized in the title Islamic Regime’s New Pin-up Girl: Maureen Dowd. It goes on to say:

First Maureen Dowd writes a piece of agit-prop against the American government, and it is published in The New York Times yesterday under the title “Madness as Method.”

Then today, the Islamic Republic News Agency – one of the propaganda arms of the Iranian regime, and an outlet that has helped Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust – repeats much of Dowd’s column almost verbatim (although without Dowd’s by line)

The Iranian version of her column is online here. I hope Maureen is getting royalties from all these reprints.

Blog Watch: French Feminist Felines

Nothing brings out the DowdHaters like a good attack on a Democrat. When MoDo launched her left-handed Left Bank compliment to Hillary on Wednesday, it was bound to grab some attention. Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire thought it was a disgrace to feminism:

It's hardly news that Maureen Dowd is a shallow, bitchy Mean Girl more interested in fashion and surfaces than policy. Her place on the NYTimes opinion page reveals the lie that feminism has accomplished all it needed to and we're done with it: she's taking a place which rightly belongs to Digby or Echidne or Katha Pollitt and filling it with gossipy crap, confirming with every word she writes snotty misogynist ideas about what women are interested in and what they're "really" like.

Zachary Drake would prefer the Times replace Dowd with Digby. As a dude, he can’t get as worked up about the feminism angle so he rants about why being French is some sort of veiled insult:

Maureen Dowd's gossipy style has always bothered me. It seems to reduce politics to some sort of middle school playground ritual about who is cool and who is not. And Dowd seems to often use silly comparisons and inversions that don't really illuminate anything.

And what was "French" about reforming American health care? Every industrialized nation has some kind of national health care, not just the French. She could have called it European, or Canadian, or British. And even if these characterizations were accurate, what do the alleged American-ness of Sarkozy and Frenchness of Clinton tell us about anything? What underlying dynamic is illuminated? What mystery is made clear? What policy implications does it have? It's not even very juicy gossip.

Speaking of Echidne, she pretty much nails the beef Dowd has with Hillary standing by her man.

You see, it's important to point out that Hillary is not a real feminist, because she elected to stay in a marriage after her husband's infidelity was revealed to all and sundry. Real feminists bugger off the minute such an insult is revealed, and real feminists are all about emotions.

It's less exciting to note that their ideas of feminism seem to include the demand that a woman is responsible for fixing the consequences of her husband's peccadillos, that all "less sophisticated" women need Hillary Clinton to defend them, and that for someone to be a girlfriend she must dish out all the dirt on her husband's infidelities and especially her own guilt in not somehow keeping him off those other women. But I do admit that I'd love to hear Rudy Giuliani dish out all the dirt on his own infidelities, girlfriend to girlfriend. Then we could braid each other's hair before we'd go out to vote together.

With friends like Maureen Dowd do Democrats even need any enemies?

At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin explains the whole Socks incident (and sneaks in a namedrop):

Dominatrix-detesting Dowd barged onto my breakfast table with the arresting report that Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic 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."

On which momentous matter, Sidney Blumenthal writes me as follows: "Socks was Chelsea's cat. Bill got Buddy the dog. Buddy and Socks didn't get along. Chelsea went to college. Betty liked Socks and took him home. So, this is about Hillary's character?"

There you have it. Four bloggers from the left ready to throw MoDo off the island the minute she goes off message. And they call Maureen catty. Meooow.