Liz Cheney: Desist!
By MAUREEN DOWD
March 6, 2012
Maureen Dowd has some harsh words for Mitt Romney about a recent warmongering speech, but here is her real beef:
“I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door,” he said as if he were playing Risk. Not afraid to employ “military might” (or alarming alliteration),Be careful, Mitt. Maureen is working that side of the street. Remember what she did to Clinton. Don't make her pull her Pulitzer out on you.
Tension on the Tarmac
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 28, 2012
Our Miss Maureen loves her some alliteration, starting right from the titillating title. Some days she tries to fit in as many fanciful phrases as she can. She starts by waxing nostalgic for the days when Clintons were campaigning.
But No Drama Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.But it's not until the middle of the missive that she really builds up a head of steam. Check out these cheeky chestnuts:
Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.
But Hillary did not like it, feeling she was being held in place and patronized, even “manhandled,” as her aide put it to a reporter.Having rehashed a Hillary Clinton anecdote, Dowd turns to the newer tempestuous contretemps at an airport, the one with Arizona governor Jan Brewer.
The toxic dominatrix of illegal immigration, the woman who turned every Latino in her state into a suspect, was flustered and gesticulating at the president as he put his hand on her arm to chill her out.Culminating in this colorful collage:
After his brouhaha with Brewer, dubbed “the dust-up in the desert,” he became a hero to the Hispanics he had gone West to court. They loved seeing their Cruella de Vil get dressed down.Try saying any of those phrases three times fast. But it doesn't end there. The going is just getting good.
Everything is breaking Barry’s way, as Mitt and Newt rip into each other in vicious ads and debates like alligators going after house pets.
Romney was tutored in Florida by Brett O’Donnell, a new debate coach. Too bad he can’t find a conviction coach.The alliterative lilt is perhaps the most underestimated of Dowd's rhetorical reaches, but when she strikes her stride, nobody can hold a candle to her cadence.
O’Donnell manned up Mittens and taught him how to pummel Newt in “moments of strength,” as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls them.
Mitt’s Big Love
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 14, 2012
Recently an internet mash-up featured clips of Mitt Romney cut into Jule Andrews singing "A Few Of My Favorite Things" from A Sound Of Music:
Romney recoiled from ’60s counterculture and was “proudly square” as he went from seeing “The Sound of Music” with [future wife] Ann to avoiding the Grateful Dead at college, Kranish and Helman report.
Once a year, Maureen Dowd turns her column over to her very conservative brother, Kevin. This year the story had a touching preamble:After a random blood test last summer, my brother learned that he had a 20.3 centimeter malignant tumor in his kidney, struggling to burst out like the creature in “Alien.” With the guidance of the saintly Dr. Jerry Groopman, and the brilliance of the Sloan-Kettering surgical team — the exuberantly blunt Paul Russo, the mystically serene Manjit Bains and the calmly proficient Gerald Soff — Kevin survived to enjoy Christmas with his wife, Ellen, his three sons and his 15 crèches.
I hope he enjoys many more.
Cain Not Able
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 1, 2011
Maureen Dowd is always at her best when there is a whiff of sexual scandal in the air. It's what won her her Pulitzer after all. So the Herman Cain scandal is right up her alley. And this affair has her pining for prim and proper alliterative Austen novels.
It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.Which allows her to put her twist on one of the most famous opening lines in the English language (a gimmick she used on another politician back in 2008):
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.And she elaborates the analogy further by placing the actors with the characters:
The Herminator was just a raffish passing fancy, like Mr. Wickham, a place for Republicans to store their affections while they try to overcome their aversion to Mitt Romney’s Mr. Darcy.The eighteenth century landed gentry lived by a strict moral code and Dowd gives us an update useful in the 21st:
It is never right for any boss, especially the president of the United States, to mess with an intern, even if she’s the aggressor.But she says that this particular tale is not a bodice-ripping potboiler, it is something far more pedestrian.
It is the most hackneyed story in Washington — another powerful man who crossed the line and then, when caught, tried to blame the women.And our Maureen has too much sense and sensibility to let anyone get away with that.
Tempest in a Tea Party
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 30, 2011
Maureen Dowd invokes the name of a 1990's animated series featuring long dormant creatures who are awakened, but cannot be controlled, by an evil mastermind hell-bent on world domination.
Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes.
Simply the Worst
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 12, 2011
While the rest of world was fixating on the revolution in Egypt and its ramifications, Maureen Dowd was amortizing her purchase of Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs. About the unrepentant former Defense Secretary, she had this to say:
As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award.Running that French phrase through the astoundingly incompetent Babelfish translator gets the English abomination of "I regret nothing not." Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun takes issue with her lack of translation talent saying:
If Maureen Dowd is going to use French in her column on Rumsfeld, you would think she could consult with somebody who knows the language, or at least Google the Edith Piaf song.To which he links to the famous Edith Piaf song.
On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.Note that the phrase is used slightly differently then. Suitably pedantically, The Iconoclast at the New English Review diagrams the error:
It was the first month, or possibly first week, of first-year Freshman French. For her howler today -- "Je Ne Regret Rien Pas" -- was wrong in not one but several different ways. It was wrong as to the spelling of the verb, and even more embarrassingly wrong with the pleonasm of the negation: no "pas" is necesary, and the verb regretter requires a first-person singular "regrette" -- so that if she were writing correct French, the line attributed to the man she condescedingly calls "Rummy" would read "Je ne regrette rien."Somewhere there is a French teacher at Catholic University hanging her head in shame while Edith Piaf spins in her grave.
