Dowd Quotes McGrory Quoting Yeats

When Maureen Dowd was on Larry King last week, Larry asked her a typical junior high question if she found writing easy. Her reply:

No, I find writing — what did Mary McGrory used to quote? It is about going down into the marrow of your bones.

Vila H. of The Smoking Section caught that that was originally from Yeats. His poem 'Adam's Curse' in particular. Below is the first stanza:

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.'

The rest of the poem can be found here. Just listening to Dowd can be so educational and inspiring.

Bonfire Of The Vanity Table

Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 27, 2009

Maureen Dowd must have checked her 401(k) because she is going Biblical on the moneychangers.

As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.

Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?

Normally Dowd leaves the finance stuff to Krugman and the guys that understand numbers, but luxury goods she understands. The entire column is a Robb Report of umbrage full of outrageous prices. From corporate jets:

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

To furniture:

Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”

She even borrows a RudeName from the Post for the collectively clueless leadership of the country’s biggest bank.

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

We get one Wolfe-ian reference that is pretty slim, but since it can count as both a Movies With Maureen® (especially since Tom Hanks was the most famous of the shut-outs at her now infamous Georgetown kegger) and a Dowdversion®, so it will have to do.

The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours.

She is so outraged, she is ready to storm the castle with pitchforks.

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Let this be a lesson to the titans of finance. If you want to raise the ire of Maureen Dowd to the level she usually reserves for the Clintons, just go buy some office furnishings that would look better in her 2.5 million dollar townhome.

Kristol Klear

Here at Dowd Central we tend to ignore the other lesser New York Times columnists like the ones that win mere Nobel Prizes. However, we are sad to bid adieu to William Kristol, the beneficiary of the Gray Lady's year-long conservative columnist internship program. Alas, his lackluster style and casual approach to fact-checking doomed his tenure.

For a neocon with an unblemished record for never being right about anything, he went out the same way he came in, passing on blatant falsehoods as divine truths. Anyone who can read, let alone write, these sentences without gagging is well beyond delusional:

Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day {snip} Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

This is about his fifth post-election column where he waxes nostalgic and praises the conservative movement on its many accomplishments proving that he is well-ensconced in the Denial Stage of Grief. It's unlikely he will ever move to Bargaining, let alone Guilt.

Hallmarks of his style included bland over-generalizations, contrived anecdotes (his tendancy to find classic works of literature in airport newsstands made Friedman's propensity for citing cabdrivers seem charming), and cliched quotations. His farewell column included a full paragraph of fairly familiar Thomas Paine. Bartlett deserved cowriter credit on most of his columns.

Even fans of Kristol Meth's fevered fantasies noted that he saved his best stuff (such as it was) for The Weekly Standard treating his Times column much as Mick Jagger treated his solo albums. He even went so far as to bite the hand that fed him on the Jon Stewart show.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Bill Kristol

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Rumor has it that Bill will be taking his schtick to the Washington Post on a monthly basis because Charles Krauthammer doesn't quite fill their quota for second-hand neo-con idiocy.

Us fans of Maureen appreciated Kristol for one huge favor he regularly did for Maureen: He served as a lightning rod for criticism over the Op/Ed page. He quickly replaced the Dowdster as the Times's most reviled columnist. Like Kristol's favored flypaper theory of fighting terrorism, the shear number of haters he drew far dwarfed the quantity of any native critics of Dowd. With Bill gone, Maureen will once again become the focus of unhinged hatred vaguely directed at the Times.

We have only one hope and plea to Andrew Rosenthal: Please, please, please hire Megan McArdle. For Dowd's sake.

Flick Flack

Which Governor Is Wackier?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 24, 2009

Maureen Dowd is bitter. Even more so than usual. Two weeks ago she came out as an advocate for Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate. The answer to her titular rhetorical question is made clear by figuring out which governor crossed her. This week Governor David Paterson named Congresswoman Kirsten Gilibrand to the seat instead.

How mad is Maureen? Mad enough to praise disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (whose full name she never bothers to spell out in full).

I love Blago.

I love his beady little eyes. I love his Serbian shock of hair. I love his flaring nostrils. I love the way he jogs through the snow under indictment, like a stork in spandex trying to gallop.

That is a lot of love to merit a Alliteration Alert® like that. And why does she love Blago so much? Because of the brilliantly Machiavellian way in which he handled his Senate selection as she points out in the following rhyming Dowdversion®.

I love the hurly-burly way the Illinois governor rammed through his choice for the Senate, compared with the namby-pamby way the New York governor strangled his best choice for the Senate.

The best choice being Dowd’s bookstore buddy, Caroline Kennedy. So who do we end up with instead? Maureen goes with Movie Moment® comparison that will dog all ambitious mildly doughy blondes for all time.

So now we have an N.R.A. handmaiden in Bobby Kennedy’s old seat? Kirsten Gillibrand, a k a Tracy Flick, accepting the honor with her Republican pal Al D’Amato beside her on stage? Gross.

Tracy Flick being the hyper-ambitious anti-heroine of the dark comedy Election. A comparison so important she makes it twice.

The 42-year-old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunistic and sharp- elbowed. Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues in the New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.

The Reese Witherspoon reference is not original to Dowd. Political gossip-mongers like Politico and HuffPo have stated that that is what her colleagues call her behind and her back and definitely not on the record.

The last politician Maureen called a Tracy Flick was Hillary Clinton back in April. And as with anything that raises Dowd’s dander, she sees the fingerprints of the Clintons on.

Paterson’s five weeks of dithering let the jealous vindictiveness of the Clintons and friends — still fuming over Caroline’s endorsement of Obama and Teddy’s blocking Hillary from a leading health care role in the Senate — poison the air. With his usual sense of entitlement and aggrievement, Bill Clinton of Arkansas did not want Caroline Kennedy of New York to have the seat that Hillary Clinton of Illinois held.

So in Dowd’s rampage she is calling a pox on everybody’s house. The presumed rival to Caroline was Andrew Cuomo, so she now implicitly endorses him over Paterson.

Paterson wasn’t thinking of New York, only of how an upstate ally who was a woman would bolster his own chances for re-election. We can only hope that an avenging Andrew Cuomo takes him out in a primary.

Since her campaigning for Caroline went so well, Dowd also names her preferred choice for taking out Gillibrand in revenge.

Carolyn McCarthy, who ran for Congress on an antigun platform after her husband was killed and her son wounded by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993, said she may challenge the “N.R.A. poster child” in 2010.

And the senior senator from New York takes a jab just for being in the line of fire.

Chuck Schumer embraced Gillibrand because at long last he can be the best-known senator from New York, something that would have been impossible with Kennedy.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the rampage that Maureen is on is from Election out of Tracy’s mouth:

It's like my mom says, "The weak are always trying to sabotage the strong."

So true, Tracy. So true

Dowd and King

Maureen Dowd was the guest on Larry King Thursday night with her unique take on current events. The full transcript is here, but I've distilled some of the better quotes.

On Obama's start:

I think that Obama is getting a huge and deserved amount of credit for doing things that are normal things, but have not been done in politics here for a long time.

On the power of liquor as a poltitcal lubricant:

Remember Bob Strauss, he told George Bush Sr., just have some people for cocktails on the Truman Balcony. They will do whatever you want. They will help you get your tax plan passed and everything.

On BFF Caroline Kennedy:

I'm very disappointed, because I think she's really smart and is very -- had the nerve to endorse Obama, and she can push back against pressure. And I think the Senate could have used someone like that, because too often they don't have profiles in courage. They have profiles in conventional wisdom. I think she would have been great.

On social engineering:

Bush and Cheney had this huge social engineering scheme, where they were going to change the psyche of Americans, and make us less afraid of using force overseas after Vietnam. And they were going to change the psyche of the Middle East and make them scared to death of us.

But Obama also has a social engineering scheme. He said the other day he wants kids to have different priorities about service. He wants neighbors to have different priorities about how they treat each other. He wants to integrate the city of Washington with the political Oz of Washington, because in -- in the past, Washington has been a place where there's a high crime rate and a lot of poverty, and it all happens in the shadow of the Capital and the White House. And no one has ever treated it like a real city. And he's doing that right off the bat.

On Sarah Palin's future as talk-show host:

She has presence and I think she could make a comeback in politics, or she might get a show on Fox, competing against you, Larry. You never know.

On Secretary of State Clinton:

I think she could be a superstar. She said something very critical today when she had her first meeting with employees. She said she welcomes people pushing back against her and she welcomes open debate. If that is true, she could have an amazing run. But her history is to confuse dissent with disloyalty and bad management. So it depends if she's learned lessons from that in the past. She could be amazing.

On Barack dealing with Bill:

[Obama]'s trying to separate the little bit of tackiness and all this foreign money that Clintons get from their amazing ability to be great public servants. And if he can do that, then I think he can use them both effectively. But that's never been done before.

On whether it's fun to knock her subjects:

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.

Her ambitions with Barack:

I'm going to try and keep [Obama] on his toes, but I also want to celebrate the moment of trying to obey the Constitution again. So I took some champagne to the Lincoln Memorial at dawn the other day, just for that purpose.

There you have it. Watch your back, Barack because Maureen is watching you.

Maureen Makes The List

Forbes has placed Maureen Dowd on their 25 Most Influential Liberals List, proving that their rather elastic definition of 'liberal' includes anybody to the left of David Brooks that can make a pun. As they describe her:

Known for her exclamatory columns, Dowd writes about politics with a biting, pop-culture-infused spin. She is much better at meowing at her own side, though, so the Obama administration could see her recover the cat-wit she appeared to have lost in her formulaic Bush years.

Just so you can calibrate their scale, Arianna Huffington came in at #2, Chris Matthews at #12, and Andrew Sullivan at #19. NYT stablemates making the list included Paul Krugman at the top and Thomas Friedman at #4. She's just going to have to work snarkier, not harder.

Klaatu Baracka Nikto

Exit the Boy King
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 20, 2009

Rather than revel in Obama's inaugural triumph, Maureen Dowd takes the opportunity to kick Dubya in the ass one more time on his way out the door with a Movies With Maureen® moment.

It was the Instant the Earth Stood Still.

Not since Klaatu landed in a flying saucer on the Ellipse has Washington been so mesmerized by an object whirring through the sky.

But this one was departing, not arriving.

Her eyes mist up as the erstwhile Marine One took the Decider back to the ranch.

I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands...

Uh, Maureen, a bunch of those people were only waving one finger.

Maureen also spins her take on the Roberts oath kerfuffle with another movie metaphor, Clash of The Titans mixed with a gunslinger metaphor.

There was also that match of the titan smarty-pants — the new Democratic president face to face with the conservative chief justice he voted against.

First John Roberts had to say, Easy, cowboy, after Mr. Obama jumped the gun on “I” at the start of the oath of office. Then the president, who had obviously been looking over his lines, graciously offered the chief justice a chance to correct his negligent syntax, when he put the “faithfully” and other words out of place.

Dowd points out that Obama snuck in a few parting shots at his predecessor invoking her favorite truth-to-power comedian.

With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was — (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said to wild applause (and to Bartlett’s), adding: “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.” He said America is choosing hope over fear, unity over discord, setting aside “false promises” and “childish things.”

Letting a little air out of the highest hopes about what one man, even “The One,” can do, he emphasized the word “our.” He stressed that rebuilding after the wreckage of W. and Cheney will be a shared burden and that “giving our all to a difficult task” isn’t as bad as it sounds.

And being the every thrifty wordsmith, she recycles some of her 'integration has arrived in DC' spiel from her MSNBC interview comparing DC with The Emerald City for yet another movie metaphor.

I grew up here, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen the city wholly, happily integrated, with a mood redolent of New York in the weeks after 9/11. The Obamas have made an unprecedented pledge to get involved in the real city that lies beyond the political Oz, and have already started doing so in many ways, including starting the night out at the D.C. Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.

I'm not sure the post 9/11 mood is the right one to evoke unless she is comparing the Bush Administration to the planes that hit the World Trade Center. Well, maybe she has a point. Dowd also notes that now that Bush is gone the party can begin.

And revelers stepped up to a spot where you could pick out a colored magic marker and complete posters that began, “Mr. President, I hope for ...”

Entries ranged from “burning less oil” to “healthcare for all” to “a cure for cancer” to this lofty and entirely understandable sentiment: “a sick inauguration party.”

And we all know who had the sickest inauguration party this week. Let the good times roll, Maureen.