McCain Plane Flak

As detailed earlier this week, the McCain camp revoked Maureen Dowd's campaign plane privileges. They basically dumped her on the side of the road in Pittsburgh and left her for dead. Tim McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes it thusly:

It all started when Maureen covered an Aug. 30 McCain-Palin rally in Washington, Pa., then wasn't let on the McCain plane afterward, Maureen Dowd/Vanity Fairforcing her to overnight at a Pittsburgh airport hotel while the traveling press went on without her.

Being on the press plane is not just a perk, it is the only realistic way a journalist can keep up with a fast moving campaign. And news organiztions pay premium for the privilege. Again McNulty:

The McCain campaign has barred her from flying in the McCain and Palin press planes, even though major media outlets routinely pay thousands to the campaigns every day for travel and expenses (and also begs the question, why didn't her media colleagues Man Up and get her aboard anyway?)

He quotes an e-mail from Dowd:

"I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn't like. So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for 'the foreseeable future.' Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicole Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane," Dowd wrote in an email.

"It was disappointing because I didn't think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney."

Comparing McCain to Cheney is fighting words, but some see the shabby treatment of Dowd as just a skirmish in a bigger battle with the Times. Back on September 22, Sam Stein at the Huffington Post reported this:

Today, the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign went to war with the Grey Lady. Asked to respond to an article that brought to light the fact that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had earned nearly $2 million in lobbying fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (based, almost primarily, on his access to McCain) at the same time that he was attacking Barack Obama for his own ties to those very institutions, aides to McCain went off.

"We are first amendment absolutists on this campaign and the press and everyone who wishes to cover this race from a blogosphere and media perspective is constitutionally protected to write whatever they want," said Steve Schmidt, the campaign's chief strategist. "But whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Gov. Palin and excuses Sen. Obama..."

Dowd of course hadn't been making friends since her August 24 column called him out on his POW Get Of Jail Free card tactics. And then there were the five columns in a row holding Sarah Palin up to ridicule.

But Maureen doesn't seem to be gathering a whole lot of sympathy. At the County Fair blog on the Media Matters website (which is decidedly liberal and frequently anti-Dowd), Eric Boehlert said:

Of course we don't like the idea of any campaign "banning" a journalist because the candidate doesn't like what was written or said about them. That's petty and wrong and disrespectful toward journalism.

But in reference to the Cheney crack, he added:

We're torn because we can't think of a single elite columnist who we'd rather not have invoking the solemn rights of the Constitution in a press fight, simply because we don't think Dowd is a serious journalist. So we're not comfortable with her representing any sort of professional journalism community.

Harsh. If a columnist for the New York Times isn't a professional journalist, who is? The Pushback blog takes a mixed stand on the issue:

John McCain’s war on the media has resulted in yet another casualty: Maureen Dowd’s access to McCain’s press plane. Let’s all remove our hats and share a moment of silence.

Now that a single manly tear has been shed by all of us, I have to confess something: I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, the McCain campaign’s open aggression against the press is both absurd and frightening. Whether or not you think that The New York Times is a good news source, it’s flat-out ridiculous to say that it’s “not … a journalistic organization.” And kicking Times staffers off the press plane for doing their job sets a pretty scary precedent.

But that’s not to say that keeping Maureen Dowd very far away from news is a bad thing. The Times is certainly a journalistic organization, but there’s no serious definition under which Dowd is a legitimate journalist...

Uh, they don't give out Pulitzer Prizes to just anybody.

FishbowlNY kind of comes to her defense:

It's not like we don't have our own numerous issues with Maureen Dowd, but kicking her off the press plane? That's just not okay.

It isn't okay, and the rest of the pres should be taking greater umbrage. Hoops And Pop Culture probably says it best:

Nothing says, "Straight Talk" like trying to intimidate and silence your critics in the press.

Bullies pick on the weak and hope to cow others. Dowd has few friends among the right-wing, but the fact that liberal guardians of free-speech are not outraged, is in itself an outrage. If this is how McCain manages his issues with the press during the campaign, how will he act if he is president? What we see so far does not bode well.

Give 'Em Hell, Maureen

Maureen Dowd has run into controversy over the quotes she uses in the past. Most recently when a military spokesman denied a quote of General Petraeus over the political make-up of the armed forces.

But the most bizarre kerfuffle I’ve run across is being fanned by David Rothman who runs a blog about e-books of all things. He was writing a book that used the famous quote from Harry Truman:

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Only he couldn’t find that quote in any of the usual sources. It’s on dozen of quote sites, but none of those cite any original sources. The best he could do was this Maureen Dowd column from March 10, 1989, back when Poppy was the Bush in the White House.

Unlike Harry Truman, who liked to say, ''If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog,'' Mr. Bush has always had great faith in the power of personal connections. Loyalty was a quality baked into him by his parents in Greenwich, Conn., and reinforced by Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society.

Only nobody knows when or to whom Harry Truman might have said it. Rothman went to the Harry S Truman Library where the best they could do is a line from the 1975 play Give ‘Em Hell, Harry featuring career Truman impersonator James Whitmore where the line is:

"You want a friend in life, get a dog!"

The quote is now popularly linked in the public imagination with Harry Truman. It’s used by pundits and presidents and even T. Boone Pickens. It was the inspiration for a Washington Life spread featuring power couples and their dogs. Somehow I doubt a single use by Maureen Dowd would catch on so ubiquitously. Rothman has found two citations in The Gray Lady herself that predate Dowd's column, so this phrasing had been around for a while.

So what are the possible explanations? The most likely one is that Dowd either saw the play or heard of it and the quote stuck. By the time she wrote the column, that play had been around for over a decade with constant tours and a movie version. It’d be unlikely that anyone in Washington had never seen the show at least once. It's likely that the phrase had been circulating around the Georgetown cocktail party circuit for years. Either consciously or unconsciously, she changed “in life” to “in Washington” and “get a dog” to “buy a dog.”

David Rothman is like a dog with a bone on this issue. He has tried to get a hold of Maureen to ask her where she heard the quote. He's tried to get to Clark Hoyt, the Times omsbudsman that gave Dowd a slapdown for her gender bending, involved but Hoyt couldn't get excited over a story so old. The story did get picked up by Jossip, but even the usual crowd of DowdHaters have been yawning.

Maybe Harry never said it and Dowd's paraphrase of a bio-play truly is the origin. By now the phrase has entered the zeitgeist and is unlikely to leave. If Truman never said it, what changes? Is Maureen supposed to dig some original source for an offhand portion of a fifteen-year-old column to save her reputation? Are we going to hound every writer that incorrectly quotes Harry Truman? Who is going to purge the dozens of quote sites that have gotten the same quote either from Dowd or from someone that got it from Dowd or perhaps even somewhere else?

But you can't prove a negative. You can't say for certain he never said it. It's not the type of saying that he'd use in a speech like his famous "Give 'em hell" speech, nor would it have physical evidence like his The Buck Stops Here sign. But does it even matter? If Mark Twain or Winston Churchill said half the things they are credited with, they would have never been silent. If Truman didn’t say it, he should have.

Obama Road Trip

Barack Obama's overseas tour is gaining as much notice for the outsized press entourage as it is for the trip itself. Howard Kurtz is the Washington Post navel-gazing media reporter and his dispatch today either consciously or unconsiously echoes the central metaphor of Maureen Dowd's Labors of Hercules column:

After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan's Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes.

A little later in the column Maureen Dowd herself makes and indirect appearance as Obama specifically mentioned her by name for some reporter repartee:

Singling out New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd yesterday, Obama said: "What are you guys going to do in Berlin? Huh? Dowd? You got any big plans?"

My guess is just stare dreamily at The One on his world tour.

Dowd For Veep

Somebody please explain how Maureen would help the McCain ticket? I guess the gist of the cartoon is that the media is so in the tank for Obama (which is entirely different from Dukakis in the tank) that the only way to get them to quit fawning over Barack is to offer them highly placed positions in the McCain Cabinet.

Besides, Dowd would make an awful vice-president. It's the president's job to make up silly names for his associates.

Dowd Hoax Update

I'm proud to have played even a small part in the exposing of a fake Maureen Dowd column that has been circulating around the internet for the past week or two. Eventually this grass roots whisper campaign against Obama in the name of Dowd has been exposed by the mainstream internet organizations.

The PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter is feature of the St. Petersburg Times that ran an excellent summary of the story and quoted yours truly copiously:

Dowd fans spot a fraud: Column had no movie references

Dowd fans were quick to see the column didn't have the writer's unique voice.

"As far as pastiches go, it makes no effort to imitate Dowd’s style in the least," wrote someone named Mo MoDo on The Dowd Report, a blog that tracks the columnist's work. "There are no silly puns, alliteration, movie references, or odd nicknames. It’s just pure unsubstantiated allegations of campaign fraud."

They even named me ahead of their interview with Dowd herself:

Dowd says she hadn't heard of the bogus column until we called her about it. She said she stopped looking herself up on the Internet years ago, after someone showed her a fake photograph of her having sex with Bill Clinton.

She's surprised people believed the column was real. "It’s hard to believe that anybody would give it any credibility as mine. It’s about money – something I know nothing about."

See, Dowd herself agrees with me that Krugman would have been the better choice.

The Huffington Post also got Maureen on the record denying it.

A comically absurd Barack Obama smear email is making the rounds right now involving a fabricated column by famed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The email, presented as a June 29 op-ed (replete with The Times' font, layout, and Dowd byline)

Dowd herself found the email an exercise in absurdity, not to mention -- quite possibly -- the first time she's been indirectly involved in a smear campaign.

{snip}

"The line about it being the 'most shocking revelation,' I don't think I've ever said those words, except in a satire. Also, it is about money, which I never write about," she told the Huffington Post. "Sometime you try and protest things you hear about, but sometimes it's just not worth it... It is hard to track down and control these things, and anyone who reads my column knows that this wasn't me. I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me."

Snarkmasters at Gawker also noted the rather sloppy imitation work.

Well, we gotta admit, the pretend rhetorical question is a kinda nice touch, there. But she's not calling him "O-Bambi" so it's obviously a phony. Also Maureen Dowd does not deal with money, numbers, or objective "facts."

Gawker also jump on Dowd's quote from the HuffPo article:

The best part of the whole thing is the real Dowd, on when she stumbled upon the email: "I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me." The second line! She couldn't remember the lede from a column from last week?

Methinks Maureen is engaging in a little self-deprecating leg-pulling of her own.

Jossip states that anyone that fell for the hoax is a complete moron. And that the world is full of morons:

...thanks to the “comically absurd” (HuffPo’s words) email’s well-executed mock up of an actual Dowd column, complete with the Times‘ font and her byline, people on the receiving end of this email might actually believe it. And as HuffPo thought to do, clicking on over to the Times website to see if the column is for real isn’t an extra step most recipients would take

That’s why these smear email campaigns work..

Like spam, they’re very easy to fabricate and send, and even if a tiny percentage of recipients believe them — an herbal supplement really can increase my size by two inches? — they prove effective.

So while everyone playing a game of political inside baseball can wave their finger at the email and feel good about how they so easily flagged it as a fake, rest assured many Americans won’t.

And Jossip is dead right here. The phony column still appears even if it is quickly hooted down. Here is a heavily abridged transcript of a forum thread at RightNation.US:

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:21 PM): More Obama financing subterfuge from our NWO friends from afar
{phony column snipped}

ilja (Jul 9 2008, 01:31 PM): Did Maureen Dowd really write this? Why is it not in the Times if she did? This is wild if it's true. I can't wait to hear more.

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:40 PM): My mother sent it to me in an email. I searched it out as I didn't want to just post an email and I found it at the Vetern's Voice. I'd like to know more about this too.

catpat (Jul 9 2008, 01:44 PM): This is a hoax. I do not know how to do links so here are a couple url's: {links snipped}

USNRETWIFE (Jul 9 2008, 01:21 PM): Thank you.

And other bloggers are getting tired of it. Ed Cone (who seems like a pretty responsible pundit) called "Enough!":

Gentle readers: Please take the hooks out of your mouths and stop sending me the fake June 29 Maureen Dowd column purporting to reveal that Obama is being funded by the Chinese and other bogeymen.

The real Maureen Dowd is bad enough.

Since many of these people that have passed along this e-mail defend themselves with how "authentic" the e-mail looked, Ed Cone was nice enough to forward it to me it as it appeared. Here is a screen capture (click to embiggen):




An embedded NYT logo, Dowd's photo, and two links that don't actually go to the column being quoted are all it takes to dupe dozens and perhaps hundreds of gullible Obama haters. For future reference, this is what you see when you get forwarded a real column from the Times:

No pictures or logos, but lots of links and ads. Note that as of this morning, Dowd's column from Sunday (which was mostly transcribed relationship advice) is still in the Top 5 E-Mailed list. This may be why she is such a tempting target to spoofers.

Since I published my blogpost, I have been getting tons of traffic from Indy Conservative Hardball who had instantly retracted the hoax and replaced it with this:

It's great to see that a liberal columnist like Dowd has her groupies... or desk jockey's that have nothing better to do with their time but as to scan the Net for any mention of their "patron saint".

To my readers, I apologize for the posting...
To the guys at the Dowd report who had a post up defending Dowd within 27 MINUTES of my posting, thanks for the link. And thanks for the somewhat increased traffic.

No, THANK YOU. My traffic over the past few days has gone up by an order of magnitude. While much of it has come from ICH, an increasing percentage is from YahooMail accounts and similar tough to trace sources. My working theory is that as this hoax column continues to make the rounds of habitual e-mail forwarders, those in the know are replying back with refuting links, including mine.

These hoaxes circulate surreptitiously forever spreading half-truths and lies which people read and believe. The best disinfectant is the bright light of the truth, so please expose and rebut this malicious abuse of the name and reputation, such as it is, of Maureen Dowd.

BlogWatch: Hoax Dowd Column Making The Rounds

Updated 7/8/08, 8:50 AM PST (updated text in italics)

There is a hoax column out in the blogosphere purporting to be an expose by Maureen Dowd on Barack Obama’s internet fund raising. Several blogs have reprinted it in toto and it has also appeared on several random message boards. It starts with this:

OBAMA’S TROUBLING INTERNET FUND RAISING
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 29, 2008

Certainly the most interesting and potentially devastating phone call I have received during this election cycle came this week from one of the Obama’s campaign internet geeks. These are the staffers who devised Obama’s internet fund raising campaign which raised in the neighborhood of $200 million so far. That is more then twice the total funds raised by any candidate in history – and this was all from the internet campaign.

It then goes on to allegedly detail that the Obama campaign has been getting internet contributions from Middle Eastern and Chinese sources.

As far as pastiches go, it makes no effort to imitate Dowd’s style in the least. There are no silly puns, alliteration, movie references, or odd nicknames. It’s just pure unsubstantiated allegations of campaign fraud.

None of the blogs provide a direct link to the hoax column. If they have a link at all, it’s to the NYT Maureen Dowd main page which obviously doesn’t include this column. The date of the fake column would have been the day the 'It’s Over Lady!’ column was published which had nothing to do with Obama or campaign financing.

What has us at Dowd Central scratching our head is that if you want to plant phony accusations at Obama, why attach Maureen Dowd’s name to it? For a fake veneer of authenticity, it seems to be a puzzling choice. Krugman as the resident Clinton supporter and the far wonkier number cruncher would have been a more plausible target.

The earliest source I could find for the hoax column is a June 29 post on a reader blog at the Arizona Republic website. The writer is unaffiliated with the newspaper and has been getting a lot of commenter pushback. It has also been posted by a particularly scurrilous anti-Obama site that published it on July 3rd, but this phony column has probably been around before that. The blogs that have reprinted it usually put in one or two lines of introduction or commentary but make no attempt to even verify if such a column even exists.

Hypocricy Rules does identify it as a hoax. Another blog, Liberal Common Sense also calls “Bullshit!” in a post correctly if not succinctly titled 'Like Maureen Dowd would write anything anti-Obama':

If you needed proof that people will believe anything without doing any fact checking here is your evidence:

{fake column snipped}

Seriously people, there are enough reasons to not support him based on the truth that you should at least do your homework before posting crap like this on the internet, it's not that difficult to take a few seconds to verify that not only did Maureen Dowd not write this, but it's not true.

But the bloggers who are passing this around uncritically (Indy's Conservative Hardball has since retracted the post) and pasting it into the comments of places like Free Republic don’t care. They just love that a liberal bastion like Dowd is blasting Obama, whether she really did or not.

Sometimes a story is just too good to check and rumors circle the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

See this post for an update.

Blog Watch: Feeding Frenzy

Updated: 6/25/08 (correction in italics)

Nothing brings out the bloodlust better than an angry mob with torches and pitchforks. Time and time again, we have seen a certain pack mentality develop once there is some blood in the water. Once the feeding frenzy starts, the metaphors mix endlessly until the piranhas have nothing left to chew on but themselves.

As noted here, Media Matters recently brought up the issue of Maureen Dowd’s long-standing use of effeminizing words for male Democratic figures (particularly Barack Obama, and to a lesser degree, John Edwards) and masculine terms towards Hillary Clinton.

About the same time, the National Organization of Women named Dowd to their Election Media Hall of Shame and began a letter writing campaign to the New York Times. This led to a June 22nd column by Times Public Editor (read ombudsman) Clark Hoyt to investigate:

Peggy Aulisio of South Dartmouth, Mass., said, “A real review of your own stories and columns is warranted.” I think so too. And I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

The case against Maureen and her defense are summarized thusly:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Despite the defense of her putative boss Andrew Rosenthal, Hoyt finds Dowd worthy of a wrist slap:

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary.
{snip}
Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

Media Matters immediately went back on the offensive citing Dowd’s “nobody had objected” phrase and then copiously quoting notorious Dowd critics Bob Somerby, Taylor Marsh and Molly Ivors. In her defense, these are bloggers that might be below Dowd's radar. Media Matters didn't find any mainstream media sources that match those folks for sheer DowdHatred.

Piling on, bloggers have been cackling with glee at the sight of a bastion of the New York Times Op/Ed page getting her knuckles rapped with a ruler. Her is just a partial list of blogs that jumped in to take a kick at the prone body:

Ed Driscoll.com
JustOneMinute
Michael Calderone at Politico
Egregious Moderation
impolitical
broadsheet at Salon
Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo
digby's Hullabaloo
Jossip
Conde Nast Portfolio
Gawker

And those are the tip of the iceberg. I really wish I had time to go through and select the most vituperative missives, but that may have to wait for another day. If you have seen a particularly vicious Dowd Driveby inspired by Hoyt's public flogging, let me know in the comments or at the tip-line. The only blogger I've come across to come to her defense is ATLmalcontent. It seems to show some sort of lockstep at work.

I’m sure Maureen Dowd will survive this bushwhacking. For every critic, there is a silent observer that agrees with her often pithy punditry. And it would be a shame to see Dowd start to pull her punches. After all, she told Clark:

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

And that just isn’t going to happen.

No Duh

Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group aimed at exposing conservative bias and founded by several Clinton supporters, has come out with a shocking revelation:

A Media Matters for America review of Maureen Dowd's New York Times columns between January 1, 2007, and June 8, 2008, reveals that Dowd has frequently characterized this election cycle's leading Democratic candidates -- Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards (NC) -- using gendered language, specifically characterizing Clinton as masculine, and Obama and Edwards as feminine.

Shocking, huh? They could have read my blog and figured that out. For two entries I even went to the trouble of highlighting the effeminizing words in pink.

Their "expose" then goes on and highlights every instance where Obama is portrayed as anything less than John Wayne macho and every case of Hillary being called The Man or anything remotely masculine.

And the point of this seemingly pointless exercise? I'm not quite sure. They do note that Dowd discussed Republican candidates far less often and, except for Rudy Giuliani's penchant for dressing in women's clothes, in less gender stereotyped terms. John McCain did get called McDiva and Mike Huckabee escaped her dress-up games altogether.

I have bookmarked the article as a useful shortcut to all sorts of perceived slurs and innuendos that they were nice enough to footnote in small print by candidate and column date. Or you could just keep reading Dowd Report and we will keep you abreast of all the sexist tirades that continue to drive the humorless Media Matters mavens insane.

BlogWatch: Barry's Raspberry Beret

This original photoshop was inspired by Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire who seemed to be the only other person in the blogosphere that got Maureen Dowd's call-out to a certain sexually ambiguous popstar:

As regulars know, I've been cataloguing Maureen Dowd's descent into madness in recent weeks, watching her flail wildly from Hillary as Blanche DuBois to Hillary as Mildred Pierce, and the parallel narrative of Barack Obama as a feminized, effete Democratic male.

But it took me a day or so to spot this in her most recent headline: "Raspberry for Barry."

So now he's the most effete black man of all.

And hidden even deeper in the Raspberry Barry column is this variation on the ever-popular royalty metaphor that Dowd is so fond of:

The lady-in-waiting would be surrounded by Obama disciples who disdained her for fighting dirty. And she would be miserable holding up the train of the young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill to trade places.

And who better to represent Barack than Prince, since purple IS the color of royalty.

BlogWatch: New York State Of Mind

After a long dry spell, the more vociferous DowdHaters® in the blogosphere have turned their attention back to the redheaded one. Molly Ivors of Whiskey Fire feels that Dowd is too safely esconed in The Establishment to speak for the great unwashed:

Of all Maureen's poses, the ones where she attempts to capture The Spirit of the Heartland© are perhaps the most annoying. Face it, Maureen: you're a Feng Shui-living Manhattanite with 100 pairs of shoes and the best dye job your inexplicably large paycheck can buy, which is to say: still a dye job. You have no secret window into the souls of West Virginians to determine why they vote as they do, and should not pretend to.

Molly does get one little fact in her diatribe wrong: Maureen is a Feng Shui-living Georgetowner, raised and educated in the District of Columbia. And I have no idea how many shoes she has. If she's like any woman, it's too many but I'm not sure how that affects her judgment adversely.

Digby of Hullabaloo is even more indignant:

"Bitter Hillary," "Fast Barry," "diffident debutante" --- this is what the Village dinner parties are tittering about these days. The old hag, the new fag, the same old shit.

And by Village, I assume he means Greenwich Village as if Maureen is some trust-funded hipster. While Maureen is part of the media elite, it seems everybody expects her to be living in New York. Digby goes on:

Dowd always says she's speaking truth to power. Not so. She speaks truthiness to power and doesn't even know the difference.

I guess if it fits your argument, it's better to put Dowd at Village dinner parties in Manhattan to make your point. That adds to the truthiness of the outrage.

BlogWatch: Maureen's Crib

It recently came to the attention of Dowd Central that Oprah Magazine did a virtual tour of Maureen Dowd’s Georgetown townhome recently. This fact came courtesy of Cannonfire blog that makes the argument that since Dowd lives in a nice house, she can’t possibly understand the working person:

Go here to visit Maureen's home:

The 1819 building was the first Maureen Dowd saw when she went house-hunting in 1995, and she fell for it immediately. There were the classic Georgetown details, including the six fireplaces, the wood floors, a pocket-size backyard, and what seemed like an endless number of rooms—two parlors, a den, a formal dining room, and three bedrooms.

Yet she claims to speak on behalf of the Democrats. Mere workers do not count.

Our second notice of the Dowd Estate came courtesy of long-time DowdHater® Bob Somersby of the Daily Howler:

PALACE LIVING: In 2006, Oprah magazine toured Dowd’s crib. If you’re curious, go ahead—just click here. “I go over the top at times with too many leopard-print pillows,” Dowd says. For ourselves, we’ve always admired journalists who can spot—and admit—their mistakes.

The timing of Somersby’s little dig right after it gets mentioned somewhere else is a curious coincidence proving to me that the world of DowdWatchers is not only small but also rather incestuous.

The house itself has a historical connection. The Oprah site says:

That President Kennedy lived there as a senator didn't lessen its appeal to Maureen the political junkie. She bought it immediately.

JFK lived in seven different places in Georgetown before becoming President and the historic significance of the one Maureen owns is summarized on the DC Traveler’s JFK Walking Tour Guide:

3260 N Street, NW (Stop 1) is where Kennedy began his career in the Senate. While living there, he attended a Georgetown dinner party in 1952 and met the captivating Jacqueline Bouvier. It was another nine months before, at another dinner party thrown by the same couple, he again met and this time, asked Jackie out on a double date to a carnival in Georgetown the following weekend.

A far more utilitarian description of the house is available on Zillow.com which estimates its current value at $1.2 million dollars, which is on the low end for toney Georgetown. The 1,608 square foot house was built in 1819 and has five bedrooms and 2.5 baths.

The Oprah tour has several pictures of the interior with this one of the bookcase. The resolution is too low to read the book titles, but there is clearly a set of Matryoshka Nesting Dolls it the form of Soviet leaders. Alas, there are no pictures of where the magic happens, and by that I mean the home office where she writes her columns. What did you think I mean, you pervs?

BlogWatch: Great Minds Dept.

Yours truly wasn't the only one inspired by Dowd's Sunday column to graft Hillary Clinton's face onto a Terminator exoskeleton. Richard Blakely of Gawker Media was also motivated to show off his photoshop skilz which are far better than my lame attempt. Here they are side by side (mine is obviously on the top):



Thanks Maureen for inspiring these Schwarzenegger/Clinton mash-ups.

BlogWatch: Cattle Prattle

Photo: Ben Sklar/Getty Images

Bob Somerby, noted DowdHater® and author of the Daily Howler accuses Maureen Dowd of mangling a quote Hillary made in El Paso, Texas, last week.

Let's be frank: The Times op-ed page is an intellectual sewer. Yesterday, Dowd was at it again. After some brain-dead Hopi humor, she lodged this hiss-spitting claim against her favorite target: "Hillary says Obama is 'all hat and no cattle.'" But The Dim One was playing her readers a tad. Here's what Clinton actually said, last Tuesday night, in Texas. We'll cite Beth Fouhy's AP report, since the Times didn't even report the comment:

FOUHY (2/13/08): She slipped into a "you all" and criticized Bush, the former Texas governor. "There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George W. Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle."

Huh! She had criticized Bush—but Obama worked better. So the Times let their crazy girl type it.

First off, the full speech is available on the New York Times website, so there goes that weird slam, but more importantly, is Dowd so crazy as to mix up W and Obambi like that? Let's read the paragraph following that cattle remark and figure out who Clinton is really talking about:

And we're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks, bringing our message about what we need in America, the kind of president that will be required on day one to be commander-in-chief to turn the economy around. I'm tested. I'm ready. Let's make it happen. (APPLAUSE) You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it -- "all hat and no cattle." Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle. Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hardworking Americans homes from foreclosure at the abusive practices of the mortgage companies.

The key phrase here is "the next three weeks." Hillary is not running, now or ever, against George Bush; she's running against Barack Obama who she is trying to portray as inexperienced and full of hot air, i.e. all hat and no cattle.

Is Muareen Dowd off-base is implying this spin to the comment. Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post was there and reported the event this way:

"You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it, 'All hat and no cattle,'" Clinton told a massive audience here. "Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat, and a lot more cattle." She continued, in an apparent swipe at both Bush and Sen. Barack Obama, the candidate gaining momenum in the Democratic race: "Texas needs a president who actually undersdtands what its going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care."

John Kelso of the Austin Statesman also saw a shot at Obama in those words:

At a campaign stop in El Paso, she took a shot at President Bush, and perhaps Obama, by using the expression "all hat and no cattle." Obama could respond by saying she's "no hat and all pants suit."

Newsweek reported the quote this way:

"There's a great saying in Texas. You've heard it: all hat and no cattle. After seven years of George Bush we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle," Clinton told the crowd, in a barely veiled swipe at her opponent. "Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hard-working Americans' homes from foreclosure."

And the well-respected Economist clearly saw the saying as an attack on Hillary's primary opponent:

Her quip on Tuesday night—that Mr Obama is "all hat and no cattle"—will provide the subtext of everything she says.

And the key word there is "subtext." A good candidate never explicitly calls out his or her opponent by name when a well crafted innuendo will do. So, no, Hillary's hat and cattle comment was not explicitly aimed at Obama but only the most blinded partisan would not realize who the jab was clearly aimed at.

BlogWatch: Coffee and Cigarettes

We have two Dowd related kerfuffles in the blogosphere today, proving that irrational Dowd Haters will latch onto anything in an attempt to make Maureen look silly or incompetent.

The first comes from the New York Post (Dowd’s employer’s rival just in case you can’t smell any ulterior motive). They rehash a column by Times of London (another NYT rival) writer Michelle Henery who describes a chance encounter with Dowd like this:

". . . She was in my face, smiling warmly, greeting me like a long-lost friend. My mind went into overdrive trying to figure out why the world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times uber-columnist . . . was speaking to me. The shock . . . left me momentarily speechless, but in those few seconds Maureen's sweet smile turned into embarrassed confusion and she scampered off."

Now even by Michelle’s account, Maureen did not address her by name, but that doesn’t prevent Henery from playing the we-all-look-alike card:

Henery continued, "The next day I e-mailed a group of American friends, asking whose doppelganger I was. They all agreed: 'She must have thought you were Michelle Obama.' "

The column ends with Henery making a joke about not being able to keep her red-headed journalists straight.

"Maureen, no hard feelings. When you came up to me, I mistook you for Arianna Huffington."

Well played. Dowd completely denies the incident ever happened and Times of London has since deleted the column. Gawker managed to obtain head shots of the two Michelles so that readers can judge for themselves the resemblance if any.




Disappearing columns or at least portions of them are at the heart of the second brouhaha. The following paragraph was in the online version of Dowd's latest column (explicated here) Wednesday morning and some early print editions.

Even though Obama stopped smoking when he started running for president, he has lost five pounds racing around the country. Just like Hollywood starlets, he works out religiously and he can make a three-course meal out of a Nicorette.

This paragraph has now Orwellianly disappeared from any official source, but like Mark Twain’s lies, it has circled the world while everyone else was putting on their shoes. Blogs have jumped on this as some sort of insidious reprimand on the part of the Times.

Digby speculates:

Did her editors finally step in and say she'd gone too far? Can we hope for more?

The Daily Howler (aka The Dowd Hater) goes even farther and suggests:

Who knows? Even the Times may have finally noticed a fact: Maureen Dowd is a gender-nut crackpot.

Humor site 23/6 gives us a technical definition of a typical Dowd rhetorical device:

Classic Dowd Pointless Antiphonal Wordplay (CLADPAW) involves combining a political reference with a pop cultural reference in the first clause of the sentence, and then recombining the two in a pointless way in the second clause, often with the addition of some kind of homophone, homonym, or pun. Turns out, it's as satisfying as it sounds.

They then offer up a poll with three choices for the most over the top sentence in the column with the choices being:

"Tuesday’s voting showed only that the voters, like moviegoers, don’t want a pat ending. Hillary and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro."

"Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t."

"The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic?"

In a McCain-thin margin (which is a good bit wider than an Obama-thin cigarette), The laconic/ironic/bionic choice is leading. Bob Somerby of The Howler (see link above) disagrees calling it “moronic.”

Everybody is entitled to their opinion. You can call Dowd a crypto-racist for a case of mistaken identity in a crowded room or you can (as Molly Ivor of Whiskey Fire does) accuse her of

dealing in the most meaningless and shallow terms, makes all the Dem candidates unelectable.

She then spins the theory that in order to have more juicy topics to write about Dowd deliberately trashes only Democrats. She then places full blame for Bush's election and the subsequent debacle in Iraq on Dowd's line about Gore lactating. And Maureen gets accused of having a "particular shallow, divisive, and damaging form of psychosis." Wow! If only Times columnists had that kind of power, we wouldn't need elections or candidates.

Laughing With MoDo

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and parody is the most flattering form of ridicule. It means you have spent enough time to mock the form and style of the subject. There have been a rash of very funny Faux-Dowds out there recently.

The cleverest one is a Chinese menu style one at 23/6 called the Maureen Dowd DIY: The 23/6 Dowd-O-Tron. By picking either Bubba, Hillzilla, or Obambi, you can make over a half million different Maureen Dowd columns that all sound vaguely familiar.

Not quite as clever, but breathtaking in scope is Jon Swift’s parody of the Hillary Cries column called The Crying of Maureen Dowd. He takes the column and pretty much replaces every instance of “Hillary” with “Dowd” and throws in some “poor lonely spinster” bashing for good measure. It wears thin fast, but DowdHaters find it hilarious. This sample is typical:

For years Dowd has been known for her cold, icy, cynical demeanor. Though some friends claim she is actually warm and witty in person, most of her colleagues don't see her as very likable and use another word to describe her that rhymes with "witch." But Hillary Clinton's stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary finally caused Dowd's calculatedly controlled demeanor to crack.

Finally, as reported by the Hillary Hit Team aka Media Matters, Don Imus who is back on the air after his forced re-education sabbatical used Wednesday’s column as a set-up for a joke about Bill being the first African American president:

McCORD: Did you see [New York Times columnist] Maureen Dowd this morning?

BERNARD McGUIRK (executive producer): They're running for president. Of course it's OK.

IMUS: No, I understand all that, but I mean, they're getting a bunch of heat from people.

McCORD: Mo Dowd is kind of coming --

McGUIRK: But they're winning.

McCORD: I think she -- you're right, Bernie. But she's -- she writes, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, this morning, here's her start: "If Bill Clinton has to trash his legacy to protect his legacy, so be it. If he has to put a dagger through the heart of hope to give Hillary hope, so be it. If he has to preside in this state as the former first black president, stopping the would-be first black president, so be it."
In other words, that they'll do anything, whatever the heck is necessary.

TONY POWELL (co-host): Another example of black-on-black crime, I guess.
[laughter]

And of course Media Matters finds nothing funny about it, but nobody has ever accused them of having a sense of humor.

BlogWatch: Hillary and Hope

Maureen Dowd’s Crying Works column drew a lot of attention from the entire blogosphere top to bottom.

There’s a certain coterie of blogs that like to trash and abuse Maureen Dowd on a regular basis. Being the new kid in town I haven’t gotten to sit at the cool kids’ table like Digby, Whiskey Fire, and Echidne of the Snakes. They love to object to anything Dowd says just on principle and are often very fun to read even as they hysterically (in all senses of the word) get all indignant. They all had a blast with that column.

At a higher level are the Daily Kos and Huffington Post bloggers that take occasional potshots at Maureen Dowd. The posts themselves are often well reasoned but the commenters can sometimes be a little strident bordering on unhinged.

And then there are the professionals. People where blogging is part of their job description and not just so they can wear pajamas all day. These are guys (and gals) that get invited on television screamer shows, write magazine articles, and move and shake the national dialog. A post by one of these folk has a ripple effect as people blog about what they blogged.

Katherine Marsh of The New Republic had this to say:

What last night really showed is that Clinton herself played the gender card brilliantly (see today's Maureen Dowd column).

Another female pundit, Kathryn Jean Lopez of NRO quoted her favorite line from the column and had this to say:

"The People from Hope are Arguing Against Hope."

I'm not proud, but I'm honest: For as long as the Clintons are around — and they will be around for a long while — reading Maureen Dowd will be a guilty pleasure.

And the biggest bear on the block, Andrew Sullivan goes even farther than Dowd. He (an open Obama endorser) claims that the race is entirely about Hillary’s legacy and not any hope for a Democratic victory:

She gets the core narcissism at the heart of the Clinton machine:

There was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing...

This is always about the Clintons. If the Democrats have to lose to McCain in November so Hillary Cliton can become the first female nominee for any major party, that's a price the country will just have to pay.

That is a heavy accusation. I rarely find an article claiming that Maureen is sugar-coating the situation and isn’t strident enough.

BlogWatch: Steaming Piles

Launching vitrolic verbal volleys at Maureen Dowd is a bit of an cottage industry, but the greatest act of invective I have seen in a while comes from Melissa McEwen at Shakesville who rants thus:

Echidne pointed me to the latest steaming turd pile dropped on the pages of the Times by Maureen Dowd in place of an actual piece of journalism. In today's plopper, she wonders "Deign or Reign?" and cobbles together a jumbled mélange of folksy anecdote, selective quoting, and indiscriminate smears, held together with her usual adhesive of smug judgment and crazy, to arrive at the gobsmackingly insipid rhetorical: "Will Queen Hillary reign? Will Prince Barack deign? And who is owed more?"

And the best part is that she nailed the column. She uses Dowd’s whining about “entitlement” to springboard a discussion of other candidates that have felt they were owed a nomination only to get shot down in flames in the general election. She returns to Dowd's column to sum up:

In fact, I will assert she does know that, but has chosen to ignore it in order to make "Deign or Reign?" work. Not just the pithy title, but the entire churlish concept, wrapped around the idea that Clinton and Obama believe they are owed something they are not. Dowd has delivered the talking point for every "progressive" bigot who doesn't like the idea of some uppity bitch and uppity negro thinking they're fit to run the country. It's not their failure to be white men that leaves the bad taste in the mouth; it's just their sense of entitlement, you see.

Sure, good liberals like Dowd support equality. Just as long as no one actually wants to use it or anything.

Particularly harsh since Maureen has been writing Obama mash notes for quite some time while ignoring Haircut Edwards as much as possible.

No slouch when it comes to DowdBashing, Echidne’s critique of Maureen’s Iowa handicapping was how content-free it was:

It may be interesting, especially if you live inside the Beltway and live your life in those little social circles, but it offers nothing about how Clinton and Obama would govern, what their policies are and which of them (or of the other candidates) would be best for a particular voter. I know that some think we live in a post-modern era, but maybe we could at least deconstruct the candidates' policies instead of their private lives or the gossips about their characters?

McEwan’s diatribe inspired a lot of me-tooism, including the Carpetbagger Report and Lawyers, Gun$, and Money, but there was at least one dissenting opinion. Bat One of Say Anything had this to say:

Whenever I run across the name Maureen Dowd, I invariably think of my other favorite Fred’s brilliant column in which he describes Dowd as “the professional spinster of the New York Times”, and her writing as “… the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry.”

But like the proverbial blind squirrel, even Dowd can occasionally stumble across something worth holding on to. Occasionally.

[snip]

If the NYT’s signature liberal feminist finds the Clintons and the Obama’s tiresome in their arrogance and their presumptuousness, I can’t help wondering if even the average Democrat voter isn’t getting a bit bored and apathetic too.

Thanks for the kind words. I think.

BlogWatch: Holiday Hopes

In keeping with the holiday spirit, in this week’s BlogWatch we are only going to cite people that have good things to say about Maureen Dowd. Our lead-off mashnote comes from Robert Bell who gushes about the latest Billary Bashing column:

She can turn a phrase, can't she?

She has put into words succinctly what I have been thinking.

Smart woman! Smarter than you-know-who!

Now Robert wrote that on BarackObama.com, so his partisanslip is showing. But on the other side of the blogosphere is Pajamas Media blog Classical Values that also liked the column.

Who is responsible for what Maureen Dowd says in her column? I'd like to give credit where credit is due, and I don't just mean the link. While I saw it this morning, I now see that Glenn Reynolds linked it late last night. He liked the "humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well" part, but the whole thing is a hoot.

I have to say, it was gratifying this morning to see some of my own thoughts echoed (if not seconded) by a left wing feminist.

Plenty of conservatives like Maureen even when she isn’t Bobbitting the Clenis. Tom Roeser makes this unusual comparison:

I gush over Maureen Dowd who is about as good as Ann Coulter in her way.

The Dowdster is about the only nominal liberal on his reading list. Roeser loves Bill Kristol and thinks National Review is much better since they got rid of that pompous windbag Bill Buckley, so comparing Maureen to Coulter is a good thing in his eyes.

Dowd’s Christmas column got a lot of links from people that normally don’t delve into politics. Library Crunch loved the maternal wisdom of the piece:

Thanks to Maureen Dowd (and her mother) for this wonderful holiday season reminder:

“Don’t cry over things that can’t cry over you.”

The Errant Æsthete called it

A surprisingly sentimental column from The New York Times‘ mellifluous scourge Maureen Dowd.

I like “mellifluous scourge” and intend to borrow the phrase some day.

And finally, from the New Years predictions of the National Review Online staff comes a left-handed right-wing compliment from Jonah Goldberg:

Maureen Dowd will become readable again because she can write about what she knows, bitchy liberal gossip and backbiting.

And in the holiday spirit we’ll take that as a good thing.

BlogWatch: Rush To Agreement

Check for falling mercury in Hades when Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd agree on something and that something is defending Hillary Clinton. The reaction to Dowd’s 12/19 column about that Drudge picture got a lot of reaction all over the map. Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters braced himself for outrage that never came.

Surely Dowd would seek to unload on Rush for having said, in commenting on an unflattering photo of Hillary that turned up on Drudge.

To the contrary, Dowd seconded Rush's read, added some analysis of her own of Hillary's looks . . . and ended with a hit on Hillary rougher than anything Rush had said.

The Hillary Project concurs:

Rush Limbaugh's ruminations on the Drudge photo of Hillary's wrinkles prompt Maureen Dowd to say Limbaugh is right about our living in a looks-obsessed society.

From the distaff side, Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast comes up with a great jab at Dowd’s perpetual relationship navel-gazing:

We know that the way our society treats older women is vexing to Dowd, who continues to behave in interviews with men as if she's the cutest girl at the malt shop and can't understand why they treat her like a columnist for one of the most prestigious newspaper in the country instead of like the cheerleader they want to take up to Lookout Point.

It's sad, then, that Dowd, whose Hillary-loathing probably outdoes even Limbaugh's, can't even put that away long enough to recognize that the furor over "Teh Photo" represents the very ageism that has MoDo, who is a good-looking woman for any age, having difficulty getting a date.

I love the malt shop metaphor. It just nails it.

Ron Coleman at Likelihood Of Success also takes a more critical look:

In a clever piece called “Rush to Judgment,” decently-well-aging Maureen Dowd accuses Rush Limbaugh of jumping in on the Hillary-is-aging-fast bandwagon.

The worst thing Rush Limbaugh can be accused of here is acknowleding (sic) that this picture exists, and that it could have a political effect. For Maureen Dowd, however, actually reading, comprehending and considering a Rush Limbaugh essay is out of the question. He’s all fat and stuff.

It seems Ron is the one obsessed with looks and weight. Maureen didn't call anybody names, for once.

But does Limbaugh think Dowd misunderstood or misrepresented him? Here are his exact words from the December 20, 2007 transcript of his show:

Now, Maureen Dowd and some others have understood, and the gals on The View got it right.

If Rush said it, then that settles it.

BlogWatch: Maureen and Moroni

This Sunday Maureen Dowd stepped out of her usual role of irritating Democratic regulars and decided to take on Republican front-runner Mitt Romney and Mormonism. Mitt of course brought this on himself by giving a speech defending his faith while reaching out to other denominations as well. Dowd, a lace Irish Catholic, exposed her naiveté about Mormonism in a much debated anecdote from her youth, whenever that may have ended, and went to her rolodex for some quotes.

I called Mr. Krakauer — who also wrote the best sellers “Into Thin Air” and “Into the Wild” — to get his opinion of Mitt’s religion speech.

And this is where the blogging community chimed in. Concurring Opinion damns Krakauer with faint praise:

Not that there's anything wrong with Krakauer. Into Thin Air -- Krakauer's bestseller about the fatal Mount Everest climb -- was a great read. And why wouldn't it be? Krakauer has decades of experience as an outdoors writer, he's got an undergraduate degree in environmental studies, and he's written prior, well-received books about survival in the outdoors.

Also, he wrote one book about Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven -- and as we now know, Maureen Dowd read that book.

It seems that maybe mountain climbing and religion are mutually exclusive. They go on to suggest many other less inflammatory books that may be better sources on contemporary Mormon thought and culture. Some about Mormons that aren’t murderous child-abusing splinter-sect polygamists. As I am sure most Mormons aren't. No more than most Catholic priests are closeted pedophiles, but that is what makes headlines.

Riehl World goes a little further in questioning Krakauer’s objectivity by quoting the NYTROB:

Yeah, he's the guy I'd called if I wanted an objective opinion, ... or, perhaps not.

He usually devotes himself to mountain climbing and seems to have a taste for the outlandish, extreme, criminal, or outrageous in whatever he approaches.

In collecting evidence, Mr. Krakauer ventures out to a lunatic fringe of polygamous self-appointed prophets, where the Mormons and the Martians are almost interchangeable.

... this book provides more voyeuristic astonishment than curiosity or understanding.

Using Krakauer as an expert on Mormonism is a little akin to getting Richard Dawkins to discuss the anti-Christian themes in The Golden Compass. While nothing she cites about LDS is false (except perhaps being a few decades behind the times on holy underwear styles), it definitely exhibits bias. A bias that On Life and Lybberty thinks is over the line:

New York Times columnist Maureen Down wrote a hateful, offensive, and untruthful article about the Mormon Church yesterday (Sunday, Dec. 9th). In it, she describes Church leaders as "authoritarian", asserts that the Church today does not "grant[] women and blacks equal status", and declares that Joseph Smith was a "lusty, charismatic Prospero." (Prospero, in case you are not aware, is a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest that uses sorcery to control the play's other characters.)

The Prospero explanation is dangerously close to working my side of the street, but based on the portrayal of Joseph Smith in practicing Mormon Orson Scott Card’s novel Saints, it seems understated. Mormon church history is full of characters that easily qualify as colorful, but the Lybberty folks take offense and go on to call for her termination.

Ms. Dowd's column falls far below the standards of professional journalism. She is loose with the facts. Her disdain for Mormons is apparent. You may recall that radio talk-show host Don Imus was forced to publicly apologize and leave his job for calling the women of the Rutgers basketball team "nappy-headed hoes." Ms. Dowd's comments were equally offensive to Mormons. I believe that she, like Don Imus, should apologize and lose her job.

I’m not sure what slur to Mormons you would have to evoke to equal “nappy-headed ho”, but if you want to get Dowd fired for being deliberately provocative, the line forms to the left. And to the right.