Easy For You To Say

Bye Bye, Mubarak
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 1, 2011

Which of these three tongue twisters from today's column would be hardest to say three times fast?

The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies...

or

...stanch the uncontrolled surge...

or

...the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers.

And just to prove that we have the real deal back after a month long absence from the pundit page of the Gray Lady, Maureen throws in a patented Dowdversion®:

Cleopatra’s Egypt was modern in ancient times and Mubarak’s was ancient in modern times.

Maureen, you maniacal maven, we missed you.

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.

Sanford's Roaming Holiday

Genius in the Bottle
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 27, 2009

Maureen Dowd is practically cackling with Schadenfreude as she dissects the Mark Sanford scandal with both an Alliteration Alert™ and a Crossword Clue© combined.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

Her use of 'amante' for 'lover' also foreshadows her comparisons to come.

She also wastes no time getting right to her Movies With Maureen® Moment, a romcom from 2006, proving that Dowd has been to the theater since Audrey Hepburn died. (She does manage to namecheck Roman Holiday before the end of the column.)

He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie “The Holiday,” presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives.

And Maureen is often called emasculating but it rarely gets as obvious as this:

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

That rhetorical flourish is her patented Dowdversion® where she directly compares and contrasts two things using similar phrasing. The entire rest of the column is one long Dowdversion as she contrasts Sanford's parsimonious public political image with his Latin lover (or at least Latin-loving) alter ego who she dubs Marco.

penny-pinching millionaire Mark, who used to sleep on a futon in his Congressional office and once treated two congressmen to movie refreshments by bringing back a Coke and three straws.	Marco, international man of mystery and suave god of sex and tango.
Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment	Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires
Mark is a conservative railing against sinners;	Marco sins liberally.
Mark opposes gay marriage as a threat to traditional marriage.	Marco thinks nothing of risking his own traditional marriage, and celebrates transgressive relationships.
Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes and index cards...	Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress.
Mark is so selfish he tried to enhance his presidential chances by resisting South Carolina’s share of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, callously giving the back of his hand to the suffering state’s most vulnerable — the jobless and poor and black students.	Marco is generous, promising to send a memento of affection that Maria wants to keep by her bed.
Mark hates lying. As he said of Bill’s dalliance with Monica, “If you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.”	Marco lies with brio, misleading his family, his lieutenant governor, his staff and his state about his whereabouts, even packing camping equipment to throw off the scent from South America.
Mark, who disdains rascals, agreed that he wouldn’t [skip off to the other woman].	Marco, who is a rascal, skipped off.

Dowd sums up with the reason that Republican sex scandals are so juicy (even though she got her Pulitzer for Clinton's and has covered Edwards' with brio.)

Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.

Until then pundits will continue to play the Marco Polo game of catching hypocrites trying to weave and dodge when their transgressions are unmasked.

Prince Charming Bungles The Rescue

Potomac’s Postpartisan Depression
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 7, 2009

Maureen Dowd has been reading fairy tales again and she always loves a Royalty Metaphor™.

Once upon a time, America thought Prince Charming would glide in and kiss her, reviving her from a coma induced by a poison apple of greed, deceit, carelessness, recklessness and overreaching.

The problem is that post-modern Prince Charmings are no longer what they are cracked up to be. In the Shrek movies Prince Charming is a vacuous villain. In Disney’s Enchanted, he is, while still quite charming, not quite up to the transition from 2-D to 3-D. In Maureen Dowd’s version of the tale, he’s also a bit of bumbler.

But then the prince got distracted, seeing Lincoln in the mirror, and instead gave the kiss of life to a bunch of flat-lining Republican tax-cut fetishists.

According to Dowd, Obama is getting run roughshod by the House Republicans.

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.

Rep. Cantor (R-VA) is the House Whip, a job with a metaphorical title that Dowd feels Obama should be employing.

The president and his aides seemed a bit snow-blinded by the White House, overwhelmed and slow to understand that they were losing the high ground and the whip hand.

Her other favorite leadership metaphor is the carrot and stick (discussed at length here).

But the carrot-stick ratio was way out of whack.

She feels the stick should be used to whack a mole, or perhaps a groundhog.

Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

Which is the first of a couple of Dowdversions® used to describe this shift in the power structure.

In his first weeks padding around a White House that still has nails on the walls waiting for new pictures, and phone and e-mail kinks, Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.

She points to the bungled Daschle nomination as where Obama lost his mojo with this zenlike observation.

They wanted him because he was the ultimate insider and they lost him because he was the ultimate insider. Now Daschle’s punishment for getting too rich with special interests will be to get richer with special interests.

Maureen’s advice was to be just a little less ambitious in rescuing the damsal and be a little more of a schlemiel.

Mr. Obama should have written up a kosher (as in pork-free) bill that Americans could trust — and Republicans couldn’t as easily mock — and jammed it through.

So after all this whipping and whacking and bullying and jamming, where does that leave Obama? All alone.

President Obama doesn’t need to leave his new home to be isolated. That’s the specialty of the White House.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, no matter how charming the prince is.

Attack Of The Dowdversions

The Long, Lame Goodbye
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 17, 2009

The most lethal weapon in Maureen Dowd’s arsenal is the Dowdversion™ where two parallel phrases are used to create an ironic comparison often using a pun or play on words. Because they are so powerful she rarely uses more than one or two in a column. For her final column with Dubya still in office, she has pulled out all the stops starting with the very first two paragraphs.

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.

As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

That’s actually a very long example. Most Dowdversions are only a single sentence, like this one:

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence.

Another compare/contrast example is here:

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

And just so the difference between the two isn’t missed she shows it again:

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

That last one ends with another Dowd trademark, what we here at Dowd Central call the Alliteration Alert® and the column is chock full of them as well. She then even quotes Bush in his own Dowdversion.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

And here she strings two alliterations together:

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton.

Then, like a Bach fugue, she plays off the “cocky” and calls back the twist of a Dowdversion:

One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

And Maureen even uses a Dowdversion to deploy one of her other famous tactics, the silly Rude Name®, although in this case, her new sobriquet for Obama is much more respectful than the retired Obambi.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener.

And the following is perhaps one of the most complicated Dowdversions ever spotted. Follow it carefully. It is a large Dowdversion with a smaller one nested within it that includes two intertwined alliterations. This is the quadruple axel of Dowdversions.

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

It’s just breathtaking to see a master linguist at work. Her cunning wordplay just cuts to the quick.

And she goes out as she came in, with that comparative twist that is her stock in trade:

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.

And that is the beauty of a well-played Dowdversion. It doesn’t have to make any sound sense, it just has to sound sensitive.