Safire On Lingerie

On Safire
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 29, 2009

In the list of conversations you really didn't need to be privy to, add the mental image of Maureen Dowd discussing ladies' undergarments with the late William Safire:

“There’s a word here [in the Starr Report] I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”

I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.

Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”

He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”

Maureen also waxes nostalgic over the good times she had with the former Agnew speech writer. She admired his way with words, even the four-letter kind.

Married to the gorgeous English rose Helene, he was a man who loved women; his novels, even the one about the founding fathers, were full of zesty sex scenes.

And if those two quotes weren't enough to make you reach for the brain bleach, try not to picture Baba Wawa in a negligee after reading this:

He told me the story of how when Barbara Walters worked for him at the famous New York P.R. company of Tex McCrary, back in the “Mad Men” era, he wanted to loosen up Barbara, who was very serious. So one Christmas he gave her a sheer black shorty nightgown with matching panties.

And now we know where she gets her affinity for alliteration and bad puns as she adds just one more TMI moment about the toilet arrangements on Murderers' Row.

When I became his “colleague in columny,” as he called me, we shared a bathroom, and I teased him for being the one who kept hair spray there.

William Safire was a wit and wordsmith who will be missed. Especially by Maureen who has done as much to abuse the English language as he did to illuminate it.

Dowd And Bruni On Food

If you ever wanted to listen to a former New York Times food critic discuss the ins and outs of the restaurant business, tonight is your night. The talk is being moderated by Maureen Dowd at 7 pm at Politics And Prose in DC.

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.

Clinton On Dowd On Tiger

Taylor Branch has just written a new book titled The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President based on his private recorded interviews with Bill Clinton while the Big Dog was still in office. This oral (nudge, nudge) history is full of dishy dirt. According to Mother Jones magazine, Slick Willie had a few things to say about Maureen Dowd's Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary about the Clinton presidency:

In 1997, after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an acerbic column about Clinton and golfer Tiger Woods—maintaining that the the two green-eyed hucksters deserved each other—Clinton told Branch, "She must live in mortal fear that there's somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life."

The article in question was about Tiger declining an invite from Clinton to a ceremony honoring Jackie Robinson:

The leader of the free world offered to send an Air Force plane to pick up Tiger Woods so he could come to Shea Stadium to honor Jackie Robinson, the most important African-American athlete in history.

It would have been an amazing moment: the new legend who effortlessly broke a color line in golf taking a moment to genuflect to the old legend who courageously broke the color line in baseball -- 50 years earlier.

But the 21-year-old who is often described as the Jackie Robinson of golf blew off Jackie Robinson -- and the Fan in Chief. He had more pressing matters, following his dazzling Masters triumph.

She digresses on about the significance of the snub and concludes:

These two guys should get together on the green. They have a lot in common. And it's green.

Now that Bill has more time on his hands maybe they can play a round. Just don't invite Maureen to fill out the foursome.

Chuckie K Says That Dowd Is Off Her Meds

For those of you without reliable video capability, here is what Charles Krauthammer said:

As for Maureen Dowd imagining a word that wasn't said, well, in my previous profession [psychiatry] I saw a lot of people who also heard words that weren't said. They were called patients. Many of them were actually helped with medication.

The word that was heard but not said refers to this line from her Sunday column:

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Please insert your own pot-calling-kettle-black remark about describing people as delusional.

BaRocky

Less Spocky, More Rocky
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 8, 2009

Maureen Dowd has made many movie allusions about Barack Obama before. Everything from Obambi to Spock. Now she returns to the Sylvester Stallone oeuvre to portray his as a punch-drunk loser.




She has used the action hero before, but with Obama's pit bull chief of staff.

If Obama didn’t have a knife-thrower like Rahmbo in the Oval, Democrats would be totally convinced that the president would fold in a heartbeat.

So her advice to Obama is to start running up those steps with the Bill Conti music in the background.

The president told students on Tuesday that “being successful is hard” and “you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.”

He should take his own words to heart. He can live long and prosper by being less Spocky and more Rocky.

And to prove she is no one trick pony, in addition to her Movies With Maureen® magic, Dowd has peppered this piece with nearly a dozen Crossword Clues©. See if you can find all these words:

ensorcelled
puerile
elucidation
scintillating
somnambulant
verities
mojo
Sisyphean
malarkey
demagoon
risible

Bonus points if you can figure out the one she just made up. Even a lug like Barocky should be able to figure that out.

Dowd Fires Salvo Against Anonymous Bloggers

Stung by the Perfect Sting
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 25, 2009

Maureen Dowd has this revelation today about here secret fantasy life:

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

As tempting as that lifestyle would be, what prompted that thought was the Battle of The Blonde Bimbo Bloggers.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Completely unaware of the Streisand Effect, Cohen lawyers up.

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

But, according to Dowd, the bigger issue here is the nature of online anonymity.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

And this point I start squirming uncomfortably. Dowd makes a brief half-hearted defense of Pseudonym-Americans as Jon Swift (the anonymous blogger one, not the Irish babies one) calls them us.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. {snip}

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But, and there is always a but, Maureen comes down hard on us poor anonymous snarkers.

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Ouch, that hurts. I snark because I love. So Maureen, if you want to know who I really am, don't call the legal department. Just send me an e-mail to dowdreport AT gmail.com. We'll talk.