McCain Bans Dowd

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in a post-debate spin wrap-up lets slip that a certain red-tressed NYT columnist is persona non grata on Straight Talk One.

Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC's Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane. And the Obama camp seemed to show its media leanings when it texted followers to watch the debate -- on CNN.)

So much for an open and honest campaign. Hat-tip to the Washington Independent that notes that snubbing Maureen is a Republican rite of passage. Here at Dowd Central, we're more interested in getting a pic of that Elvis shirt.

A Few Good Movies With Maureen

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline.

-A Few Good Men, screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

Sound, but No Fury
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 27, 2008

Making up for a few columns with poor or non-existent Movies With Maureen® segments, Maureen Dowd makes up for it with an extended take on the Aaron Sorkin military courtroom drama. (I wonder what reminded her of that flick. Hmmm….)

The first debate seemed like the perfect moment for Barack Obama to re-enact the Code Red courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men,” to slide under John McCain’s skin and irritate until he goaded McCain into doing exactly what he really wanted to do: tell off the whippersnapper who’d never bled for his country.

Tom Cruise’s trick in that movie was to make Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, lose his cool and blow up. But the usually hot-headed McCain refused to play his role.

It would have been easy for smarty-pants Obama to get in the face of the temperamental older guy, just as Tom Cruise did with Jack Nicholson, to push him into erupting into some version of that climactic speech, like, “Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at your fancy faculty club, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

Dowd says that McCain kept his cool despite the incoherent ramblings of his running mate. Sarah Palin has been kept under such tight wraps that Dowd compares her to another famous recluse.

Once Garbo began to speak, and people realized that Palin had a few key lacunae in her understanding of the globe and even of her running mate’s record, the myth of the Alaska superwoman continued to unravel.

And Maureen is repeating her Crossword Clues Of The Week®. “Lacunae” was used back in July when it was Obama that wanted to cover up any gaps in his judgment. The runner-up Crossword Clue for this week is “bête noire” (meaning nemesis from the French for “black beast”), which shows up in this slam at Dubya:

The president, who is so insecure that he could only choose a vice president he knew would never hold his title, and so insecure that he needs proof of presidency emblazoned everywhere, even riding a Trek bike with the presidential seal affixed, was suddenly faced with his bête noire: sitting at a table in the White House with the two men who want his job, either of whom would do a better job, given that nearly everyone in the country thinks things are going horribly.

Mountain Bike One was described in a Washington Post article thusly:

The Trek has "United States of America" painted in white letters across the blue top tube, and a 2-inch presidential seal affixed to both sides of the head tube.

Maureen sees Bush’s preoccupation with biking as a metaphor for his inattention to the business of state, by citing four examples where Dubya had been warned, but did nothing.

The Republicans had a lot to answer for. The Bush administration had been warned about Osama bin Laden attacking and did nothing. It had been warned that there would be a civil war and insurgency if it attacked Iraq. It had been warned that Katrina was coming. It had been warned that the country’s financial casinos were courting disaster.

W. biked through all those eves of destruction.

She also mentioned him biking off a cliff in her previous column as well which mentioned the End of Days, tying into the "eve of destruction" apocalyptic image as well (not to mention a nasty Barry McGuire tune cootie). That earlier column also took some swipes at Nobel Prize winning bomber Henry Kissinger. McCain’s mention of Dr. K in the debate allows Dowd to take one more shot.

And who cares what Henry Kissinger thinks? He was wrong 35 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

Maureen calls the debate a draw on points since Obama failed to bait the bear sufficiently.

Obama did a poor job of getting under McCain’s skin. Or maybe McCain did an exceptional job of not letting Obama get under his skin. McCain nattered about earmarks and Obama ran out of gas.

But while McCain-Obama should have been the main event, she holds out for a better fight in the undercard match.

We’re left waiting for a knockout debate. On to Palin-Biden.

We need a catchy name for this matchup. Perhaps The Beauty Queen versus the Plagiarizing Pugilist. We’ll be watching.

Maureen at Angelo State

Maureen Dowd made one of her rare public appearances Thursday at Angelo State University in Texas. She talked to a mixture of journalism and government students.

On the importance of newspapers as primary sources she said:

"The nightly news still takes its cues from The New York Times and the Washington Post."

More quips and quotes are available here.

Doctor K and Mayor Moose

"Let the end of days come, but may I not live to see them", because they will be filled with so much conflict and suffering."

-The Talmud.

Park Avenue Diplomacy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 23, 2008

Maureen Dowd doesn’t think much of Henry Kissinger. Here is her description of him in her latest column:

How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

But she has been this dismissive of Doctor Death and his favorite Bond Girl since at least 2002:

When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself ''a secret swinger.''

In Walter Isaacson's biography, ''Kissinger,'' the same words cascade: ''deceitful,'' ''disingenuous,'' ''paranoid,'' ''insecure,'' ''temper tantrum,'' ''flatterer,'' ''two-faced'' and ''secretive.''

Tiffany Case made another appearance in this 2007 column with a fictional quote giving advice to Dubya:

Henry Kissinger oils his way across the floor. “Mr. President,” he rumbles through the door, “it’s not so bad bungling a war. I got to date Jill St. John.”

Dowd seems overly hard on the former Batman villainess, when she could also pick on other former Henry the Kiss flames like Marlo Thomas or Candace Bergen. And part of Dowd’s point is how the mighty have fallen.

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse.

It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.

Maureen now holds the record for the worst Palin lipstick pun put to print, a pretty noteworthy accomplishment. The point was to point out Palin’s potential preoccupation with Pentecostal preaching.

Governor Palin knows a lot about the End of Days from her years at the Pentecostal Wasilla Assembly of God, which had preached (after a war in the Middle East about light vanquishing darkness) that Alaska would be a shelter for Rapturous “saved” Christians at the end of times when they ascend to heaven.

“Rapturous” being yet another pun, this time on the Christian vision of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations.

But Dowd doesn’t just pillar Palin, she saves enough scorn for Dubya to attempt a Dowdversion® and mix a metaphor, neither very successfully.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking.

Maureen finishes up with Bill Clinton hypothesizing in advance why Palin might help McCain win. After all, the Big Dog is a leading authority on the attractiveness of rural women with big hair.

“I come from Arkansas. I get why she is hot out there,” he said authoritatively, adding: “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’"

She sees that as part of the continuing Subtle Sabotage Strategy of the Clintons accusing Bill of...

... still sulking and plotting for 2012.

And the Clintons making another run in 2012 would be a sign of the Apocalypse.

West Winging It

Seeking a President Who Gives Goose Bumps? So’s Obama.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 20, 2008

In the lasted twist on the trademarked MoDo Faux Conversations, Barack Obama gets a pep talk from fictional former president Jeb Bartlet. The column is full of the similarly trademarked Sorkin cross-talk. You can almost picture Martin Sheen and Dulé Hill (as Barack) walking and talking across the West Wing set. Take this example:

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

It may indeed be real Sorkin dialog. Maureen disingenuously muddies the water with this set-up.

I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting.

The last time Dowd had a guest/ghost writer it was Stephen Colbert (well, his staff at least) and it became her most popular column of the year. And Maureen would definitely have Sorkin’s phone number in her Rolodex, even if she sometimes gets his e-mail mixed up. At least according to the New York Post (via New York magazine)

Dowd’s other well-documented romance was with The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. In May 2001, the New York Post reported that Dowd had accidentally sent “randy” e-mails intended for Aaron Sorkin to her colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin. “That’s a real cautionary tale of e-mail,” she says. “I had only met him; I didn’t really know him and I was just trying to kind of give him tidbits of political things. So I just would e-mail him funny things, and that one was a joke that some guys at a bar said, but when it appeared in the New York Post it was as if I were saying it. Which was so embarrassing, because it was just such a dumb line, and so at least if they were going to catch you with some flirtatious e-mail—which we weren’t doing at that point—you’d like it to be, like, a cool kind of line. And it was also embarrassing because I think he was married then.”

And she later had to make an embarrassing confession when a thinly-veiled Dowdish character made it into a West Wing script recounted here by LA Times gossip columnist Elizabeth Snead:

Sorkin admitted he often thought of Dowd while writing witty banter for actresses. And he did tell a funny, if slightly embarrassing, shoe fetish tale about Dowd, whom he met during the first season of "The West Wing" when he was shooting scenes in Washington, D.C.

“I wrote an off-screen character who was a powerful, highly feared female columnist for the New York Times. One of the White House staffers had inadvertently made a joke about her shoes and was afraid that the administration was going to suffer if he didn’t apologize.”

To thank Dowd for being “a good sport” about the thinly veiled reference, Sorkin sent her a slew of expensive shoes from Barneys the day the show aired.

“She liked them a lot,” recalled Sorkin. “But she told me that because she sometimes covers Hollywood in her column, to accept the gift was unethical. But she didn’t give back the shoes. What she has done, and this was five or six years ago, is, every once in a while, she will just give me cash. Forty, sixty, one hundred dollars … It’s not clear to me how giving me cash makes the ethical picture less murky, but it was terribly important to Maureen that this be done right and this is her version. She just gives me cash.”

“It’s gonna take me to the year 2030 to pay off those shoes,” confessed Dowd, still smiling, albeit not quite as sweetly.

That ties into an earlier anecdote where Sorkin fishes for a compliment.

Sorkin tried out an old joke. “You are the most respected, revered columnist in the country and you have a Pulitizer Prize and you dated me for a while. What was that like?”

"I asked you in the green room not to mention that," replied Dowd, smiling through gritted teeth. "It was fantastic, of course."

And the column was fantastic as a call to arms for Obama to get on message and go on the attack. I only have to wonder what side of the designer shoe debit ledger that a guest column script goes onto.

The Defiant Ones

The Alpha Dogs Bark
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: September 19, 2008

Normally, here at Dowd Central, we don't pay a lot of attention to other New York Times columnists unless Maureen is on vacation or battling the flu on Air Force One. Why settle for hamburger when you can smell the steak sizzling? But today's column by Gail Collins has a pitch perfect Movies With Maureen® metaphor in it.

The Republicans have discovered that McCain can’t draw a crowd without Palin, and the dangers of letting her float off by herself are apparent. So the two are manacled together these days like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in that old escape-from-a-chain-gang movie.

Truly worthy of the master. Maureen must be proud. I just want to know which is Tony and which is Sidney.

Maureen Among The Moose

You know, I imagine there's only one thing that's been in as many different hotel rooms as I have: the Gideon Bible. Don't tangle with me on the Good Book. I must've read it through at least a dozen times.

-Sky Masterson, Guys and Dolls

‘Barbies for War!’
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still taking it upon herself to emphasize Sarah Palin’s excruciatingly evident lack of foreign policy expertise.

The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain is taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can’t contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” a poy-son could develop a cold war.

Cold sore is more like it. Dowd put one her traveling boots (go-go or Army, it doesn’t matter which) to get a feel for the Artic atmosphere that spawned the Palin-nomena. She is so stupefied to be among the hoi polloi that she resorts to serial Alliteration Alerts®:

I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.

I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.

In the midst of that, she even pulls off the soulless strip mall/soulful mountain Dowdversion®. Maureen’s anthropological expedition takes her to a Wal-Mart and an alliterative CaffeinatedBeverageEmporium named after the local large cold weather ruminant.

I had many “Sarahs,” as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. “I’ve seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup,” said manager Karena Forster, “and she’s just as beautiful.”

“Skinny white mocha,” indeed. Now there is a metaphor just begging to be set free. Speaking of freedom, Palin’s religious establishments of choice believe that sexuality is a choice. And offers help to those that have made bad ones.

In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah’s current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians “journey out” of same-sex attraction.

And in her talks with tattooed former teenage mothers and ex-gay evangelicals, she comes across a Fairbanks educator that gives what may or may not be a compliment.

R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. “She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,” she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.”

And we know what happens to Mean Girls in the movies. With Maureen tracking her back to her home turf, Sarah is going to learn that in trying to be the Queen Bee, she isn't in the bush leagues anymore.