She Said 'Hummer'

No More Hummer Nation
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 31, 2009

Maureen Dowd has stumbled on a cute little portmanteau of a Crossword Clue complete with a definition she lifts straight from Wikipedia.

As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

Somehow this ties into Obama's Sunday night massacre of the former GM president. Rick Wagoner was clearly in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.

And later in the column:

Wagoner showed no foresight or willingness to curb an unhealthy appetite for the big. He failed to eliminate brands and launched the Hummer line in 2001.
{snip}
Wagoner stuck to gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.’s long after it was clear that higher gas prices meant he should vary the fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles.

So that they could sit around unsold when gas prices drop again. Anyone else see the fallacy here?

But it's not a Dowd column without at least one Movies With Maureen® moment.

I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.

And the mention of anything French sends Maureen's reptilian brain free-associating to her longstanding crush for Carla Bruni.

How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?

How many rhetorical questions can you fit in one column? At least two more.

How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?

How do you fill eight hundred words when your only news pegs are a trip to the G20 summit and a fired executive? You do a fashion report.

But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.

At least next week we will have Michelle's inappropriate hugging of the Queen to discuss.

photo from Mrs.O.org

Who Needs A Cigarette?

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 27, 2008

Maureen and Barack are getting pretty chummy on the campaign trail. After a particularly chummy press conference with French president Sarkozy she asked about the post-coital bliss:

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

The scene was so steamy that Maureen began filming it in her head:

It could have been a French movie.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.

Maureen never passes up a chance to show off some French. In this case, “cinq à sept” literally means “five to seven” and refers to the time for informal socializing in France. And “tant pis” has the connotation of wistful regret. And this leads us to a special Franco-American Movies With Maureen®.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

Claude Lelouch is the famous French director of Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) which explains the politirotic allusion between the two leaders. The second feature on the bill is suggest by Barack himself as he recounts how he got stalked in the hotel gym.

In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”

Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”

The original article by the blonde reporter and her picture can be found on the Bild website. The money quote is:

I put my arm around his hip – wow, he didn’t even sweat! WHAT A MAN!

But it was a different woman that Obama, or at least his staff, missed out on meeting. And we know that Maureen has a crush on the French First Chanteuse as well.

[Obama] did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

For one column there sure is a lot of sweating and heavy breathing in this Obama-Sarkozy-Bruni-Dowd lovefest. Perhaps if and when Barack is a head of state he can arrange a more formal ménage à tête à tête. Because that sure would make an interesting French movie.

Crushing On Carla

Note: Some photos in this post may not be work-safe.

The Carla Effect
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 22, 2008

Maureen Dowd is back from her Euro-Junket with George and she returns with a crush on the wife of prominent politician. No, not Michelle, Laura, Cindy, or even Bill, but Carla Bruni. Maureen fauns over the French vixen that has won the heart (among other organs) of Nicolas Sarkozy. This is a story too good to just let words paint, so we bring a special illustrated edition of Dowd Report today.

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” to sweeten her image.

Carla Bruni was a model who posed for many “tasteful” nude pictures before becoming First Madame. When you do a GoogleImages search for Carla Bruni with SafeSearch off, it's harder to find pictures of her with her clothes on than off. Trust me on this. The photo below recently sold at auction for $91,000 dollars to a Japanese horndog collector.


One of Carla’s album covers where she is fully clothed, but just as sultry (and a little bit chilly):

And this is all in contrast to the rather tame fist-bumping Michelle does with the cacklers on Baba Wawa’s estrogen-laden talk-fest where bloggers get their undies in a wad because the potential First Lady likes to wear clothes sans sleeves.

Or if Michelle gave an interview, as Carla did in a new book, “La Véritable Histoire de Carla et Nicolas,” revealing that she fell in love with her husband for his many fertile brains.

One chapter of the book is called “Le Diable s’Habille en Carla,” or “The Devil Wears Carla.” And the most repeated anecdote is the one where Carla slyly teases the French justice minister, Rachida Dati, a Sarko protégé, as they pass by a bed in the Élysée: “You would have loved to occupy it, wouldn’t you?”

Rachida Dati (left) and Carla in formal wear.

According to British tabloid Telegraph, the incident is meant as a dig at the rather glamorous Dati for not being able to close the deal with Nicolas while Carla snuck in and snatched the brass ring, er, wedding band.

At the funeral of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, Sarkozy got some catcalls when he got out of his car, while Carla, a former model for the designer, who calls herself “nothing more than a folk singer,” got applause and oohs and aahs.

The applause and gasps may be more for her rather daring choice of formal mourning wear that does not seem to include underwear.


As far as folk singer goes, she does like to strum the guitar even if her lyrics are more Kurt Cobain than Edith Piaf.

It’s hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child”; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white. .../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.”

Carla, sensing the potential explosiveness of the songs has declined to tour until her hubby is out of office.

The magazine Le Point had a cover with Carla’s gleaming face and the headline “La Présidente,” with a picture inside of Sarko standing docilely behind his wife, as she sat at his desk and offered that assured feline gaze to the camera.

Alas, my navigation skilz for the French language magazine web archives were not l33t enough to find the feline gaze picture mentioned, so the cover picture will have to do.

Just as Carla charmed the Queen of England and Princes Charles and Philip with her demure French schoolgirl look, she charmed George and Laura Bush on their visit, inviting Laura 30 minutes early for a girls’ tête-à-tête, and then sitting next to the American president and keeping him entertained with a spirited conversation in English, one of her three languages and sort of his one language.

The barely pregnant Carla wowed the Royal Family on their recent visit.

At a press availability the next day, W. interrupted his own boring observation about “the importance of the Doha Round” to smilingly tell his pal Sarko: “It was a great pleasure to have been able to meet your wife. She’s a really smart, capable woman, and I can see why you married her. And I can see why she married you, too.”

Phony caption: “Come on Nikki, can’t we just swap for one night?
Those librarians can surprise you.”

No matter what Dubya thinks, Carla sure has had an effect on Maureen. She seems smitten with this sexually and politically liberated wife of a world leader. As Maureen states:

The French are different from you and me.

And as the French say: Vive la Différence!