BlogWatch: While Condi Fiddles

BraveNew Films (which I don’t know why is reading MoDo) has a rave review of the latest column:

Another absolutely brilliant column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times written in her uniquely lucid and eloquent style where she lays bare the truth about the new Middle East peace initiative and other things. I hope Condi picks up The New York Times today. Perhaps she will read it to George.

The best metaphor to come out of the Condoleezza Rice Workout for Peace revelation was this one on The Gist:

Nero fiddled -- Condi does cardio. We've commented many times on the show about Rice's workout routine and the elliptical machine that is sometimes brought to her hotel room when she jets about -- and we have a lot of audio of her discussing her weight, her dieting tips and her exercise routine, which seem to take precedent over diplomacy. But I hadn't realized how much she has literally been ellipticizing while the world burns.

And Americablog reacts with to aerobicizer anecdote with this:

Wow.

Pretty much sums it up.

Worked Up Over Working Out

Jump on the Peace Train
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 28, 2007

Now I've been crying lately,
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating,
why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country,
come take me home again

-Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam

In a serendipitous bit of luck, New York Times writer, the ever lovely Elizabeth Bumiller has written a bio titled Condoleezza Rice: An American Life which has supplied Dowd with the central metaphor for the Bush Administration’s Middle East peace process.

So it is telling that in Annapolis she is running such a seat-of-the-pants operation, which seems designed to rescue the images of a secretary of state and president who have spent more time working out in the gym than working on the peace process.

In an interview with USA Today, Condi serves up a movie metaphor for the Palestinian problem that Dowd slam dunks.

Nick Burns said — I felt — when he said it, I felt exactly that way, that we would think we had it all pieced together, we would go home, and it's like Groundhog Day; the next day you would come in and it had come apart again.

Condi has compared trying to broker deals in the Middle East to “Groundhog Day.” An Annapolis-inspired breakthrough would be thrilling, but it will be tough for Madame Secretary to turn around her reputation after so many instances of Mideast malpractice.

You see, even though Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again, he eventually learns from his mistakes and triumphs. No such signs of progress are predicted in Annapolis.

When Dowd gets worked up, her alliterative activity goes on overdrive.

The tight-as-a-tick team of W. and Condi have been consistently culturally obtuse on the Middle East, even with a pricey worldwide operation designed to keep them in the loop.

First, Condi missed the scorching significance of the August 2001 presidential daily brief headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” “An explosive title on a nonexplosive piece,” as she later dismissively described it.

Then she and W. failed to fathom that if Iraq went wrong, Iran would benefit.

She enabled Bush’s bellicosity rather than putting a brake on it.

She let Rummy waltz away with the occupation and only got back some control after he’d made a historic hash of it.

Then Dowd returns to the central metaphor of the article, the exercise routine.

As she described it to Bumiller, she went upstairs at 5 a.m. the morning after the Palestinian elections in 2006 to the gym in her Watergate apartment to exercise on her elliptical machine. She saw the news crawl reporting the Hamas victory.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’ ” she said. She kept exercising for awhile but finally got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department. “I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’ and they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness! Hamas won?’ ”

When she couldn’t reach the State Department official on the ground in the Palestinian territories, she did what any loyal Bushie would do: She got back on the elliptical.

“I thought, might as well finish exercising,” Rice told Bumiller. “It’s going to be a really long day.” It was one of the few times she was prescient on the Middle East.

You see, just like trying to achieve peace in the Middle East, working out on an elliptical machine takes a lot of effort and gets you all sweaty but you always end up back in the same place you started.

Out Of Fashion

What is amazing about Maureen Dowd is that she instills such strong passion even when she doesn’t have a current column. Lapata in Chapati Mystery takes on the entire New York Times stable of columnists, but singles out Maureen Dowd in particular.

I am willing to cede the point that numerous op-ed writers for that newspaper of record often appear to lack even the most basic skills needed in making a logical argument. In the case of Maureen Dowd, of course, logical argument is not, it is hoped, even a goal. In her column, the formula of pegging every political figure and situation to a corresponding character in a widely viewed prime-time hit television show does not require logical argument, but only a fit of insinuating pique.

What brought on his pique? It seems he is rather smitten with the prose of one Guy Trebay, the NYT fashion columnist.

Guy Trebay would never be invited to write an op-ed column in the Times, nor would his byline grace the columns of the first section of any newspaper. Guy Trebay would never call the world flat, or compare prime ministers of foreign nations fictional mafia dons or devote whole columns to baby names.

Lapata, of course, is calling out Flat Earth Friedman, and the baby names column by David Brooks is pretty silly, but of all the poisoned paragraphs by the Dowdster, what does he pick on? A five-month old item titled “A Tale of Two Tonys, Exiting Tormented”. Let’s have a look:

They’re both going out, not with a bang, but with a bing.

As they go dark, the two Tonys are bitter, paranoid and worn down by their enemies and scheming erstwhile allies. They both live in a bleak universe of half-truths, compromises and betrayals, a world changed utterly by the violence they set in motion. They were both brought low by high-stakes mistakes.

Tony Blair fears the feral beast. Tony Soprano is the feral beast.

The two Tonys found that their skin was never thick enough. And they stumbled into trouble with their Juniors, Junior Bush and Junior Soprano. Before he steps down in two weeks, Tony Blair decided to let loose with one of those self-pitying Tony Soprano-style rants that drove Dr. Melfi to terminate him. Call it No. 10 Downer Street.

It may not be Coward, or even Parker, but it’s fresh, clever, and topical (at least at the time). I would have never come up with the Blair in the Bada Bing Club allusion, but Dowd makes it work. As always, she stretches a metaphor a little further than it should go, like here:

I worry more about the press when it’s reverent rather than irreverent, when it’s a tame lapdog, as it was in the buildup to Iraq, than when it’s a feral beast. And I worry about politicians like W. and Blair being black and white rather than gray, as they were in building their hysterical, phony case against Saddam. We would have been well-served back then if Mr. Blair had explained to the jejune Junior that there’s some good, some bad, and some gray in the world, and that sometimes it’s smarter to squeeze tyrants, rather than Shock-and-Awe them.

It may not have the flowery flourishes of a Guy Trebay who can milk four paragraphs out of leering at supermodels at the tail end of a pout about hirsute hipsters, but I would rather spend an afternoon just staring at a Maureen Dowd column than read purple prose about underfed fashionistas.

The Lazio Effect

Some talking points never die. Ann Althouse (who Molly Ivors sees as a Dowd-manque) is resurrecting the kerfuffle over Rick Lazio harassing Hillary in a debate during the Senate campaign. Maureen Dowd briefly alluded to it earlier this month when she said:

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 after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now.

Althouse claims that Lazio was never anything but a complete gentleman and then unearths a video that she claims proves her point. It actually does the opposite. In the video, Lazio crosses the center of the stage twice and harangues Hillary for over twenty seconds (an eternity in YouTube time) before returning to his podium.

Maureen Dowd who was covering that race closely, predicted that it would be a turning point in the campaign by making the aspiring Senator a sympathetic figure, no small task considering both her baggage and Bill's that she was carrying.

From "Her Brute Strength" on September 17, 2000:

After the Buffalo debate Wednesday night, a woman in the audience came up to Tim Russert, the moderator. She said she had liked Rick Lazio until he stalked Hillary Clinton, pestering her to sign his soft-money pledge.

At that moment, she confided, the Long Island congressman suddenly conjured up the image of her husband, waving a credit card receipt in her face, yelling at her that she had overcharged, his eyes bulging, his veins popping, screaming at her to return everything to the store.

Little Ricky reminds every woman of her husband on a peevish tear about expenses, just like those classic scenes from ''I Love Lucy,'' when Big Ricky's eyes would pop and veins would bulge as he waved a bill at Lucy and ordered her to stop spending the household money on hats.

Hillary got into the New York race because of one badly behaved man. Now she may win it because of another badly behaved man.

One more brute slapping her around and she may be home free.

Three days later in "A Man and a Woman", Dowd further elucidates:

…the Senate race may turn on a wagging finger.

Many of the women who had liked the glowing Long Island congressman recoiled from his glowering performance in Buffalo.

Speaking at a women's lunch on Monday, Mrs. Clinton mocked Mr. Lazio's alpha bits: ''I knew I was going to share a stage. I didn't think I was going to have to share a podium.''

Mr. Lazio Just Doesn't Get It. His race is charged with gender, but his problem at the debate was more a matter of sense and manners.

A man who felt confident of his own masculinity, of course, would never have marched over to bluster at the first lady. It's impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan trying to cow a female opponent with such muscular histrionics.

Upon reviewing the tape, I have to side with Dowd’s assessment of Lazio’s actions. They were meant to intimidate and by behaving calmly and rationally in the face of a ranting bully, Hillary won herself a senatorial stepping stone. If the next president is named Clinton, we may have Little Ricky and his wagging finger to thank or blame as the case may be.

FlashBack: Mean Girls

Maureen Dowd took Turkey Day off, so let’s look back at a classic column.

Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd
22 October 2005

One of the major reasons used for the invasion of Iraq was the Saddam Hussein's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Much of the evidence of WMDs was reported by Judith Miller who used now-discredited Iraqi expatriate Ahmad Chalabi as a source.

Any good schoolyard battle between two queen bees always starts with sarcastic declarations of devotion:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

Becky Sharp is one of the most famous amoral social climbers in literature. It implies a rise strewn with discarded relationships in a quest for power. An implication Dowd makes more explicit in the very next paragraph:

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of and hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

And it wouldn’t be a cat fight without an argument over cafeteria table assignments.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

Which of course includes an alliterative attack, one of several including “hard work and hauteur” above and these:

This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Other trademark Dowdisms are the silly nickname:

She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

And the lowbrow pop-culture reference:

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame."

Perhaps it would be too much credit to think Judith Miller was as familiar with The Fantastic Four as Dowd seems to be. But as always, Maureen saves the heaviest salvo for last:

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

When the paper of record is caught carrying water, even the op/ed page has to turn up its nose at the bias.

MoDo or FauxDo

Anna Shane at DailyKos wrote a parody of Maureen Dowd's She's No Morgenthau column that someone must have flagged it as copyright infringement. Let's look a little closer to see how close to the bone it cuts

MoDo	FauxDo
Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.	Barack Obama, who’s seemed way too respectful of the girl running for president, maybe cause she reminds him of his Midwestern moms and apple pie, finally stepped up to the plate, and sent one zinging over right field. In Dodge Stadium, he slammed a clearly and, in my opinion, obviously spontaneous and, unlike you-know-who, unscripted, ‘fly ‘n ball’ that knocked that ‘wife candidate’ on her no longer fire proof fanny.
It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.	It may have taken him a full nine-month pregnancy, but he finally delivered the perfect slap that made his ‘knock-her-down-and-then-laugh-at-her’ point. Rudy took note, and he immediately gave up his dream to elevate Judi to succeed his coming monarchy.
She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.	If she’d even been the top adviser she claims she was, she must have had a Nixonian (paranoid, get it?) bent for secrecy and his knack for hard-core porn, I mean, politicking, but Obama rightly points out, ain’t so, the girlie was just a wife, I’m saying wife here, not husband. The real powers behind the throne were Carville and Stephanopoulos, and they would both be leading the pack, if they would both just quit working for the big-bucks media and get back to public service, and both of them are men, get it?

The problem here is that the attempt at parody is too pitch perfect. It's not enough to paraphrase the Dowdster, you have to somehow out-style her. And that is a tough order. Better luck next time.

BlogWatch: Foreign Affairs

As I mentioned in my analysis on Maureen Dowd’s most recent Hillary-bashing column (and they are hard to keep up with), her final line is less slam dunk rhetorical than she thinks. Let’s look back at it:

But is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?

Steve Soto’s answer at The Left Coaster is:

Yes, you twit. Or do you think being on the inside seeing how the world works at the highest level possible for eight years means nothing?

The major card she has left is experience, and despite the idiotic Obama love letters from the likes of Dowd, Hillary should frame the remaining debate along these lines and let voters make the call.

On the other hand, Pissed On Politics agrees with Dowd's assessment and elaborates:

It appears Hillary's charges that Obama lacks 'experience' is nothing more than a projection of her own campaign insecurities; that if people really take a closer look at her they'll see she is the one who lacks the necessary experience to be President.

What Hillary doesn't lack in experience is cut-throat politicking doused with secrecy. Perhaps what she means is that Obama lacks the cold calculating political experience necessary to manipulate the media and parley that control into an election victory. If that's the kind of experience Hillary is talking about, she can keep it.

Maureen Down says it better than I ever could.

MikeTrap also thinks Dowd has a point:

Great, balanced editorial by Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes. While she expresses reservations about the depth of Obama’s foriegn policy experience, she finally says what only another woman could say about Hillary.

Finally for today, Chris LaRoche wonders what the title of the column has to do with the substance:

The title of the piece — "She's No Morgenthau" — looks to be an on-topic reference to Hans J. Morgenthau, an international relations theorist and University of Chicago professor who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland after living through World War II.

But there are no further references to Morgenthau in the story proper, nor would a candidate's possession of foreign policy experience necessarily make he or she "Morgenthauian."

My guess is that Dowd is just showing off arcane knowledge imprecisely so that folks like us have to run to Wikipedia to figure out what she’s talking about. Maureen, just stick to pop culture like 50s rock songs.