Rummy And Poppy

Blame, Not Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 5, 2011

Parsing the psychodrama of the Bush Dynasty is a long-lasting obsession of Maureen Dowd and a new memoir by Donald Rumsfeld adds new fuel to the fire. Maureen has a soft spot for George I with nothing but disdain for the his more hot-headed son.

As she sees it, Rumsfeld has the obverse opinion. Rummy is envious and disdainful of George H. W.:

Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. {snip} No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for.

Meanwhile, W. hero-worships the rough-hewn Rumsfeld, giving him a Rude Name® and all:

The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest. {snip} W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness.

And this is where Rumsfeld forms a hinge in Dowd's working thesis that the W.'s actions are all predicated on resolving his deep-seated daddy issues.

Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.

Rumsfeld shares one other attribute with the president who saw an invasion of Iraq as a way to right perceived weaknesses.

The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt.

If only he and the last president he served had been more right rather than so certain.

Mission Relinquished

Spock at the Bridge
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 28, 2009

Dubya may be gone from the White House but not from the thoughts of Maureen Dowd. Today's column was spurred by news that Barack Obama had given his predecessor a courtesy call.

Mr. Obama called W. on Friday to give him a heads-up about the repudiation on Iraq.

Maureen wanted to be a fly on that wall.

Wow. What a phone call that must have been.
[snip}
"That’s why I’m calling, actually. I’m ending your stupid war.”

And in addition to stupid, she has plenty of other adjectives to use.

But on Friday, the new president did exit from the inane and pernicious W. era of cartoon villains, simplistic linear thinking, and black-and-white cowboy bluster.

She even gives the new policy a snappy title

Mission Relinquished.

Which is of course a call-back to the much derided over-reaching carrier deck banner that the Bush White House has tried to Orwell out of existence.

And Maureen can't call-out Bush without employing her favorite belittling Rude Name® for him. She even adds a dollop of Alliteration Alert™ to it.

What can the disavowed dauphin possibly be thinking as Professor Obama strides up to the blackboard to erase everything W. stood for, while giving us crisp lectures about how we must get more educated, more equitable, more realistic, more responsible and more reasonable?

There are enough mores in that sentence to revive Andrea True's career. The Dubya as dauphin is caricature that Dowd has nursed since even before Dubya began wrecking the White House. Here is the first appearance from July of 2000.

W.'s campaign has always been less about vision than vindication. The dauphin must reclaim the throne because the Bushes must restore the halcyon days of the ruling-class court that thrived before that dissolute commoner Bill Clinton usurped it.

To this day, she continues to psychoanalyze all of Bush's actions as attempts to cover up his inadequacies.

W.’s strategy was inspired by his insecurity. He has acknowledged that he went to war based on body language, without a full-throated debate or analysis; there was just a vibe coming from the general direction of the Pentagon and the vice president’s office that it was a good thing to do. His only real goal was to prove he was tough.

She even uses a quote from Obama to put into perspective what a disaster Dubya has been.

But in the Lehrer interview, the president compared America to a big tanker that needed to “start moving in a better trajectory so that five years, 10 years down the road you can say, you know what, because of good decisions now our kids are safer, more secure, more prosperous, more unified than they were before.” This analogy turns W. into the Exxon Valdez.

Dowd sees Obama's boldness spilling into domestic policy as well as he and his larger than life chief of staff push their budget through the jungle of Congress.

The new commander in chief has the nerves of a riverboat gambler and, on the humongous budget and stimulus package, he and Rahmbo Emanuel are liberally applying the Rahm doctrine: Take advantage of a crisis to grab an opportunity.

But the hyper-violent action hero isn't the only Movies With Maureen® moment we get. She also compares Barack to a certain logic driven alien of mixed heritage.

Speaking of the Enterprise, Mr. Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him (and not just the funny ears). He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment.

Frankly, that comparison has been done before. For example, our guest photoshopper carlosthesecond has done a yeoman's job on that mash-up used at the top of the post that I can't hope to touch with my own humble attempt at right.

But Maureen sees enough irony in the current situation to bring emotion to the most Stoic politician.

Any mere mortal who had to tell liberals that our obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan are far from over and tell Republicans that he has a $3.6 trillion budget would probably have tears running down his face.

I'd be laughing at Dowd's observation if it weren't so tragic. Full warp speed ahead.

Spock Obama image used by permission of the artist.

Klaatu Baracka Nikto

Exit the Boy King
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 20, 2009

Rather than revel in Obama's inaugural triumph, Maureen Dowd takes the opportunity to kick Dubya in the ass one more time on his way out the door with a Movies With Maureen® moment.

It was the Instant the Earth Stood Still.

Not since Klaatu landed in a flying saucer on the Ellipse has Washington been so mesmerized by an object whirring through the sky.

But this one was departing, not arriving.

Her eyes mist up as the erstwhile Marine One took the Decider back to the ranch.

I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands...

Uh, Maureen, a bunch of those people were only waving one finger.

Maureen also spins her take on the Roberts oath kerfuffle with another movie metaphor, Clash of The Titans mixed with a gunslinger metaphor.

There was also that match of the titan smarty-pants — the new Democratic president face to face with the conservative chief justice he voted against.

First John Roberts had to say, Easy, cowboy, after Mr. Obama jumped the gun on “I” at the start of the oath of office. Then the president, who had obviously been looking over his lines, graciously offered the chief justice a chance to correct his negligent syntax, when he put the “faithfully” and other words out of place.

Dowd points out that Obama snuck in a few parting shots at his predecessor invoking her favorite truth-to-power comedian.

With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was — (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said to wild applause (and to Bartlett’s), adding: “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.” He said America is choosing hope over fear, unity over discord, setting aside “false promises” and “childish things.”

Letting a little air out of the highest hopes about what one man, even “The One,” can do, he emphasized the word “our.” He stressed that rebuilding after the wreckage of W. and Cheney will be a shared burden and that “giving our all to a difficult task” isn’t as bad as it sounds.

And being the every thrifty wordsmith, she recycles some of her 'integration has arrived in DC' spiel from her MSNBC interview comparing DC with The Emerald City for yet another movie metaphor.

I grew up here, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen the city wholly, happily integrated, with a mood redolent of New York in the weeks after 9/11. The Obamas have made an unprecedented pledge to get involved in the real city that lies beyond the political Oz, and have already started doing so in many ways, including starting the night out at the D.C. Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.

I'm not sure the post 9/11 mood is the right one to evoke unless she is comparing the Bush Administration to the planes that hit the World Trade Center. Well, maybe she has a point. Dowd also notes that now that Bush is gone the party can begin.

And revelers stepped up to a spot where you could pick out a colored magic marker and complete posters that began, “Mr. President, I hope for ...”

Entries ranged from “burning less oil” to “healthcare for all” to “a cure for cancer” to this lofty and entirely understandable sentiment: “a sick inauguration party.”

And we all know who had the sickest inauguration party this week. Let the good times roll, Maureen.

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.

All The President's Minions

America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition
Get yourself a brand new motor car
Someday soon well stop to ponder what on earths this spell we’re under
We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are.

-“The Grand Illusion”, Styx

An Extremist Makeover?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 10, 2009

As the Bush Administration acolytes do their Legacy Lap around the Georgetown Cocktail Party Circuit, Maureen Dowd has been detecting a certain sulfurous odor which she finally places.

In the past week, I’ve twice been close enough to Dick Cheney to kick him in the shins.

Or to blast him the face with a shotgun, but the Secret Service would probably not look kindly on that. At the first incident, she used a Dowdversion® to highlight the irony of Cheney invoking the document he spent so much time undermining.

The first time was Tuesday, when Cheney left the ceremony where he gave the oath of office to senators. {snip} I thought it gave the ceremony a satirical edge to have the lawless Vice presiding over lawmakers swearing to support and defend the Constitution that he soiled and defiled — right in the heart of the legislative branch he worked to diminish.

Within the snip is a comic metaphor that is a tribute to a movie genius.

The senators seemed thrilled, especially Joe Biden, who was getting sworn in for just two weeks and was excitedly showing off a family Bible the size of a Buick.

As the ever-observant nytpicker caught, Woody Allen had writ it three decades earlier.

"Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick."
-Alvy Singer, "Annie Hall," 1977

But that is not the only Movies With Maureen® moment we get. Dick Cheney himself claims that his villainous reputation is overstated.

He went on to seriously assert that his image as “a private, Darth Vader-type personality” has been “pretty dramatically overdone.”

The Darth Cheney meme is so ‘overdone’ that if you do a Google Image Search simply for “Cheney”, two different photoshops of Dick as the evil overlord make the first page of results.

But no Dr. Evil is without his minions. Maureen found them within the Cheney entourage and identifies them by Rude Name®.

The second time I crossed paths was Thursday night, at a glitzy party at Cafe Milano for Brit Hume, stepping down as a Fox anchor. It required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world.

Maureen uses fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward to confirm the incredulity of the spinning going on.

“My conscience is clear,” Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he’s interviewing people for his memoir.

Woodward was stunned. “I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was ‘by indirection, two or three steps removed,’ ” Woodward told me afterward.

And that reminds Maureen of yet another movie villain.

At least Ernst Stavro Blofeld would have the decency just to leave the scene.

And Dowd shares some derision for Dubya for whom she goes Double Dowdversion™ on.

From Gaza to the unemployment figures to the $10.6 trillion debt, things keep spiraling while W. keeps fiddling. Just as when he was in the National Guard and didn’t bother to show up, now, as the scabrous consequences of his missteps shake the economy and the world, he doesn’t bother to show up.

Maureen tries to make “biking through Katrina” the Bush version of “fiddling while Rome burns”.

After he leaves office, W. wants to go on more bike rides, because biking through Katrina was not enough.

She first tried out this metaphor last February when she said:

How could the “compassionate conservative” bike through Katrina?

But like “fetch” from Mean Girls, it just isn’t happening. But back to Cheney, she combined a Rude Name® with an Alliteration Alert® to catalog his Big Lies.

The vamoosing Vice has no apologies about turning America into a country that tortured; indeed, he denies it ever happened. “Torture,” he told [Fred] Barnes, “that word gets thrown around with great abandon.”

And a certain classic rock tune is evoked as Cheney continues to dissemble.

“I think we made good decisions,” he told [Mark] Knoller, adding with even grander delusion, “I think we knew what we were doing.”

And the key to a grand illusion is that the audience can't see the puppeteer perform his tricks or the ventriloquist's sneering lips move.

He protested “the notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not. There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”

As in the Star Wars saga, there are always two Sith Lords, a master and an apprentice.

The fact that Cheney is now putting all the blame for all the messes squarely on W. shows once more how the bureaucratic master outmaneuvers his younger partner.

Even on his way out, Vice is still on top.

Only if by "on top", you mean morassed in an unending unnecessary war with the economy in shambles. If that was Dick's goal, then he definitely gets to fly the Mission Accomplished banner and Dubya gets to be the stooge stuck with the blame.

Maureen Likes, You Know, Caroline. Uh, Really.

Oh, one, touching one, reaching out
Touching me, touching you
Oh, sweet Caroline
Good times never seem so good
Oh I've been inclined to believe it never would
-Neil Diamond

(And yes, the song was inspired by her)

Sweet on Caroline
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 6, 2009

The Maureen Dowd we know and love is back and better than ever. Just to show that she hasn’t lost her touch, she touches on her entire bag of tricks to pump up her buddy Caroline Kennedy. Last year, if you were on Maureen’s Christmas gift list, you got a signed copy of Caroline’s A Family Christmas. Us mere mortals had to make due with a cloyingly sweet column about it instead.

But before she endorses Kennedy’s congressional aspirations, Maureen can’t help herself from making a few cheap shots by putting Caroline’s dad's most famous line through the “you know” Filter.

Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.

And perhaps Maureen is paying tribute to John F. Kennedy as well, because his masterful inauguration address words are the greatest Dowdversion® ever, which only makes Caroline verbal tics that much more painful in contrast to her father's eloquence.


Caroline can use “ums” and “you knows” at a rate exceeding twelve a minute as listeners to a leaked NYT interview can attest. But Maureen says that unless you have a polished silver tongue, don’t go casting the first stone. She cites herself as a similarly awkward public speaker.

I know about “you knows.” I use that verbal crutch myself, a bad habit that develops from shyness and reticence about public speaking.

Later in the column she again clips a phrase from Caroline’s famous father.

I know Caroline Kennedy. She’s smart, cultivated, serious and unpretentious. The Senate, shamefully sparse on profiles in courage during Dick Cheney’s reign of terror, would be lucky to get her.

The family connections are the elephant in the room and rather than going for the easy musical theater Camelot allusion, Dowd digs deep into Bullfinch’s to come up with a different mythological family.

I always thought that Caroline and her brother, John, had special magic capital in America because of their heartbreaking roles in the Kennedy House of Atreus.

I’m not sure I would have gone with the Atreidae since according to Wikipedia, intrigue and assassination are the stock in trade of Greek royal families.

Atreus and his twin brother Thyestes were exiled by their father for murdering their half-brother Chrysippus in their desire for the throne of Olympia.

That sort of thing would seem like a touchy subject around the increasingly less crowded tragedy-stricken Kennedy family table.

It’s only about half way down the column that you figure out that Dowd is praising Caroline, not burying her. The sum of her argument seem to be “Meh, you could do worse.”

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Torricelli.

To show that her writing skills haven't atrophied over the holidays, Dowd combine some Alliteration Alert® with a Crossword Puzzle Clue® in some parting shots at the Bush Dynasty.

Although Americans still have enough British in their genes to be drawn to dynasties, W. has no doubt soured the country on scions.

"Scion" being one of her favorite words. She has trotted it out about once a year during the W. Administration. It only seems more frequently, you know.

To make sure you didn’t miss the point, she makes the Kennedy/Bush comparison more pointed.

Congress, which abdicated its oversight role as the Bush crew wrecked the globe and the economy, desperately needs fresh faces and new perspectives, an infusion of class, intelligence and guts.

After a long list of Senatorial legacies that owe their seats to family or fortune or both, she again hammers home that should would rather have a branch of the Kennedys in power than a whole field of Bushes.

It isn’t what your name is. It’s what you do with it. Or, in the case of W., don’t.

And while Maureen's heart seems in the right place, comparing Caroline favorably with Dubya seems like mighty faint praise.

Doctor K and Mayor Moose

"Let the end of days come, but may I not live to see them", because they will be filled with so much conflict and suffering."

-The Talmud.

Park Avenue Diplomacy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 23, 2008

Maureen Dowd doesn’t think much of Henry Kissinger. Here is her description of him in her latest column:

How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

But she has been this dismissive of Doctor Death and his favorite Bond Girl since at least 2002:

When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself ''a secret swinger.''

In Walter Isaacson's biography, ''Kissinger,'' the same words cascade: ''deceitful,'' ''disingenuous,'' ''paranoid,'' ''insecure,'' ''temper tantrum,'' ''flatterer,'' ''two-faced'' and ''secretive.''

Tiffany Case made another appearance in this 2007 column with a fictional quote giving advice to Dubya:

Henry Kissinger oils his way across the floor. “Mr. President,” he rumbles through the door, “it’s not so bad bungling a war. I got to date Jill St. John.”

Dowd seems overly hard on the former Batman villainess, when she could also pick on other former Henry the Kiss flames like Marlo Thomas or Candace Bergen. And part of Dowd’s point is how the mighty have fallen.

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse.

It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.

Maureen now holds the record for the worst Palin lipstick pun put to print, a pretty noteworthy accomplishment. The point was to point out Palin’s potential preoccupation with Pentecostal preaching.

Governor Palin knows a lot about the End of Days from her years at the Pentecostal Wasilla Assembly of God, which had preached (after a war in the Middle East about light vanquishing darkness) that Alaska would be a shelter for Rapturous “saved” Christians at the end of times when they ascend to heaven.

“Rapturous” being yet another pun, this time on the Christian vision of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations.

But Dowd doesn’t just pillar Palin, she saves enough scorn for Dubya to attempt a Dowdversion® and mix a metaphor, neither very successfully.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking.

Maureen finishes up with Bill Clinton hypothesizing in advance why Palin might help McCain win. After all, the Big Dog is a leading authority on the attractiveness of rural women with big hair.

“I come from Arkansas. I get why she is hot out there,” he said authoritatively, adding: “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’"

She sees that as part of the continuing Subtle Sabotage Strategy of the Clintons accusing Bill of...

... still sulking and plotting for 2012.

And the Clintons making another run in 2012 would be a sign of the Apocalypse.

Cheerleader In Chief

Russia Is Not Jamaica
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd is often accused of not being tough enough on the current administration, but when she she focuses on them, she let’s loose with the whole arsenal. There are three sets of Alliteration Alerts® in this paragraph alone.

After eight years, the president’s gut remains gullible. He’ll go out as he came in — ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

It’s no secret that 43 has a rather leisurely approach to leadership, but Maureen takes him to task with the arithmetic of the vacation.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there’s still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

Bush's ill-timed foray to the Olympics (while tanks were rolling in Ossetia, Putin was sitting a few seats down from Dubya at the opening ceremonies) makes him look like a lecherous frat boy instead of a world leader, prompting Maureen to give him a new Rude Name®:

We knew we could count on the cheerleader in chief to be jumping around like a kid in Beijing with bikini-clad beach volleyball players while the Re-Evil Empire was sending columns of tanks into its former republic.

And for of those keeping track, that could be taken an emasculating swipe at Bush, but since he really was a cheerleader in college, you could argue it's a clean shot.

The rest of the column is a pretty hard to argue against synopsis of the missteps we have made against the putative socialist powers. Dowd does manage to scramble one metaphor to birds nest soup standards.

China has bought so much of America that we’d be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires — all through our addiction to oil.

When you are cataloging the mistakes of the Bush Administration, it's tough to find the humor, even if the president himself refuses to take the job seriously.

Rove's Richie Rich Rant

More Phony Myths
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 25, 2008

The crush that almost died as a result of Barack’s bitter comment (way back in April) is back. Nothing raises the hackles of a woman in love more than seeing her beau picked on.

The bully in this case is Karl Rove using last elections playbook and trying to paint Obama as a Kerry-esque elitist. Dowd had her own daydreams about Obama and sees as more of a college professory wonk. Let’s compare the two competing images of Obama.

Rove's Rant	Dowd's Dream
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”	He might be smoking, but it would be at a cafe, hunched over a New York Times, an Atlantic magazine, his MacBook and some organic fruit-flavored tea, listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” on his iPod.

Dowd uses the opening to open both barrels on Karl’s former boss (or his lackey depending on how you see that power relationship going):

He’s not Richie Rich, saved time and again by Daddy’s influence and Daddy’s friends, the one who got waved into Yale and Harvard and cushy business deals, who drank too much and snickered at the intellectuals and gave them snide nicknames.

Maureen is indulging in just a little pot calling a kettle a namecaller with the slam on snide nicknames but you get the point, which is the hypocrisy of people with patrician lines like the Scion of Prescott pretending to be common folk.

Haven’t we had enough of this hypocritical comedy of people in the elite disowning their social status for political purposes? The Bushes had to move all the way to Texas from Greenwich to make their blue blood appear more red.

Just having Rove call Obama an elitist has her seeing red, but Dowd sees nothing wrong with a little elitism:

Everyone who ever became president was in the elite one way or another, including Andrew Jackson.

And after holding back the vocabulary for a few weeks, we have three contenders for Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week®. The first entry is a word meaning "to outline" that is not often seen outside deconstructionist literature classes:

But even as the Republicans limn him as John Kerry, as someone who is too haughty and too “foreign,” Obama is determined not to repeat what Kerry thinks was a big mistake: not having enough money to compete against the Republicans in 2004.

Our second entry is not quite as obscure, but its interchangeable meaning, coupled with a cringe-inducing brand-name Dowdversion that brings up rather frightening mental images. The less we connect Obama with loincloths, the better.

For some of Obama’s critics, it’s a breathtaking bit of fungible principles, as though Gandhi suddenly donned a Dolce & Gabbana, or Dolce & Mahatma, loincloth.

Finally, we have a word that implies that it the Republicans that are living the pampered life:

Conservatives love playing this little game, acting as if the “elite” Democratic candidates are not in touch with people like themselves, even though the guys doing the attacking — like Rove, Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Hannity — are wealthy and cosseted.

There is one noticeable Andre The Giant-sized rhetorical thud in the column:

The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove. When was the last time he kicked back with a corncob pipe to watch professional wrestling?

Given that Barry has admitted to drug use in the past, it’s probably best we stay away from references to pipes of any variety.

But Maureen has worked herself up into a fury and lets the rhetorical questions fly:

Rove’s mythmaking about Obama won’t fly. If he means that Obama has brains, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama is successful, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what’s wrong with that?

And if a NYT columnist wears her heart on her sleeve for the guy she wants to win the election, what’s wrong with that?

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!

By George, By Jeeves

American President Pleads Guilty to Hopeless Idealism
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 18, 2008

Maureen Dowd continues her European romp with Dubya and the next stop is Britain where we still have an ally, for the time being. Like the langoustes of the last column, she obsesses over the menu:

Maybe he was excited by the prospect of sharing some Gloucestershire beef, Yorkshire pudding and fruit trifle with a world leader more unpopular than he is.

Dubya’s relationship with recent prime ministers has been complicated and Maureen trots out a pack of canine metaphors.

Britain is still smarting about being cast as poodle to W.’s pit bull…

Which she then randomly mixes the metaphor into Dubya as some sort of avian predator.

If Mr. Brown had any thought of promoting himself as the anti-poodle with some arm’s length body language, W. swiftly disabused him. He spread his wingspan to draw in Gordon and Sarah, and then clasped Gordon so heartily around the shoulders that the Brit was forced to grab W.’s waist in a shy embrace as they entered the building.

In another attempt to draw a parallel, she reaches for British farce and compares Bush and Brown with P. G. Wodehouse’s comic duo:

Poppy Bush was often compared to Bertie Wooster, and W. seems to have found his own stiff-backed Jeeves. Mr. Brown agreed to send more troops to Afghanistan, put more sanctions on Iran and decide on Iraq troop withdrawals based on conditions on the ground.

First off, Maureen, that was YOU that compared Poppy to Bertie. From a 1995 column titled “The Impression of Green”:

The last Administration was run by Bertie Wooster of Kennebunkport and filled with Top-Sidered Anglophiles.

That aside, in the Jeeves stories, the genial doofus Bertie is constantly having his hare-brained schemes pulled out of the fire by his preternaturally clever manservant. Dubya IS a unaware self-involved bumbling idiot, but Gordon Brown is hardly any genius in disguise and none of their plans have turned into surprise successes. Like most Dowd metaphors, I’m not sure it stands up to much scrutiny beyond its initial quasi-literary recognition value.

Dowd did unveil a new RudeName® for the veep, presumably inspired by the water-drip torture of the continuing leaks over who authorized what in our quest to extract a pound of aggressively interrogated flesh from the enemy combatants we captured.

Or perhaps after working with Torquemada Cheney all these years, W. simply feels more at home in a monarchy.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but this metaphor was a little more left-field than usual. Dowd Report correspondent yellojkt did the Torquemada thing much better back when befuddled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was still around.

But Cheney is invoked in the column to rebut one of Dubya’s favorite strawmen:

He said … “There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal,” he asserted, adding that he rejected as elitist the notion that “maybe it’s only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government.”

The subject-verb agreement mangled “some” in this case are as nebulous as most of Maureen’s anonymous sources, but she gets in one last zinger.

If there’s one thing W. and Cheney have proved, beyond a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, it’s that at least two white-guy Methodists are not capable of self-government.

Maybe spreading democracy, like charity, should begin at home.

Cowboy Diplomacy

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

-Kris Kristofferson

W. Regrets Almost Nothing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 15, 2008

George Bush went to France and Maureen Dowd got to tag along. I hope it goes better for her than their trip to Saudi Arabia did. Today’s column has a Paris dateline so she must be there. W is making a greatest hits tour of Europe, but it’s not exactly selling out to packed houses.

A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV.

President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty.

Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.)

The Dowdversion on the song made famous by Janis Joplin also recalls its cowboy poet author, Kris Kristofferson. And speaking of cowboys, for this piece Maureen breaks out all sorts of cowboy metaphors.

He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.

We are going to ignore the Movies With Maureen® potential of “blazing hostility” and go on to the faux French which loosely translates as “idiot cowboy administration.” Maureen dips into her nun-taught French one more time to use a phrase which means “No regrets.”

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Alluding to the Edith Piaf classic "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is triply ironic because the song has its roots in French Foreign Legion lore as France tried vainly to hang onto its empire. From Wikipedia:

Piaf dedicated her recording of the song to the French Foreign Legion. At the time of the recording, France was engaged in a military conflict, the Algerian War (1956–1962), and the 1er R E P (Premier Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes, First Regiment Foreign Paratroopers) — who had backed a temporary putsch by the French military against the civilian leadership of Algeria—adopted the song when their resistance was broken in April 1961.

Dowd claims that Dubya is trying to play on France’s sympathies as one failed imperial power to another:

He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.

The parallels between France and the US in Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere would seem to be a cautionary tale that Dubya is deaf to, but Maureen sees a deeper drama happening.

In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem. The actions were the problem. W. was really anxious for war. He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.

Because his dad failed to march to Baghdad, Bush the Younger is determined to stick by his own course of action.

A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered. “I will never do that to them,” 43 said.

Sounds like Oedipal déjà vu all over again.

And Greek tragedies, even when translated into French and set in the Old West, never end well.

Gut Check

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque.

-Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

Cult of Deception
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 1, 2008

Maureen Dowd reflects on the revelations of Scott McClellan’s book What Happened (which should really include a question mark in the title) and comes up with this conclusion:

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

Either they had a James Coburn marathon on Movies With Maureen® last night or Dowd has been reading Bush On The Couch by Justin Frank. Either way she concludes that McClellan is Rosencrantz to Bush’s Hamlet, a former friend tasked with betraying the hero. Only in the Shakespearean version, the tables get turned and Rosencrantz gets the shaft.

In the nearly equally famous Tom Stoppard play, Rozencrantz (and mirror image Guildenstern) stumble around cluelessly never quite realizing the significance of the events around them. Either way, calling McClellan Rosencrantz is not quite a compliment.

Behind alliteration, one of Maureen Dowd’s favorite rhetorical devises is the Dowdversion®, a sentence with a parallel structure but with a twist or a pun in it. At the top of the column she tries three with little success.

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

The first one isn’t bad with lots and lots of adjectival opposites but no real panache. She moves on (while calling McClellan a bit of a dunce) to this one:

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

This one is better because the twist is that there is no twist. Dubya always has been and always will be a moronic loser besmirching the proud patrician Bush line. He aspires to be Jeb but only ends up making Neil look like the honest one.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

This is the worst of the bunch with the only difference between the two being changing "restore" to "scraping". These three rhetorical retorts are not her best work and you can almost see the scratch-out lines as she keeps trying to come up with one worthy of her reputation.

Instead she goes with her gut and appropriates a recent best seller that insists that first instincts are best and that second guessing is counterproductive.

It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

She ties the metaphorical meaning of gut with the word diet to mention PBJ sandwiches, Dubya’s favorite food. By doing so, she infantilizes Bush and makes him seem like a petulant school kid, which many other kiss-and-tell tomes have done as well.

The faint praise that Dowd throws McClellan’s way is that he finally did the right thing for the most petty of reasons.

We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

Dowd then compares him to Colin Powell and George Tenant, two other insiders turned pariah for the crime of leaving the administration inner circle. She claims that they didn’t jump off the Bush bandwagon out of any ideological or philosophical awakening, but because they caught on that they were being manipulated and used. McClellan’s camel straw was that Bush knew that Scooter Libby had dissembled about Victoria Plame and didn’t care.

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

Clearly, Dowd doesn't think highly of McClellan's skills. And the last Dowdversion® of the day is the most damning:

[Bush] was always wrong, but always very clear.

And that is clearly how Scottie the Press Secretary got duped for so long. He never quite knew what was so wrong about what he did. And he clearly never realized in his gut that he was being used and discarded like a bit player who thinks that the world has grown honest.

Crashing Into The Bushes

Soft Shoe in Hard Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd, after four months of nearly exclusive focus on the Clinton campaign, raises her head like a groundhog that has overslept and notices that the economy has gone into the dumper. Not that she claims you would know by listening to George W. Bush:

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

Gene Kelly is the low-hanging fruit in this pop culture parade (the widow Kelly has already protested any insinuation that W could possibly hold a candle to Gene’s footwork), but The Most Happy Fella is the more intriguing call-out. This is an obscure Frank Loesser musical comedy most notable for its operatic musical structure.

The plot about a shlubby guy hitting on a waitress has little to do with the Bush administration, but back in January, Patt Morrison at the Huffington Post called Dick Cheney the “Most Happy Fella”. Who knew so many pundits writing about the Dubya crew were showtune fans?

Whether or not Dowd was inspired by Morrison or not is not for me to figure out, but another passage sounded very familiar. It seems that Maureen reads a lot of Dowd. Take this comment in the Sunday column:

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy.

Boy George was a Rude Name® in Dowd's mind since before 9/11. But W has wrecked the family station wagon before. That car crash metaphor sounds just like the one she used in her December 5, 2007 column (DowdReported here):

When W.’s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager crashing the family station wagon into his father’s three most cherished spots — diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf.

And before that on July 11, 2007 in a column called “History As An Alibi”:

Watching the warring tribes in Iraq grow more violent has caused the beginning of a reconciliation among the warring tribes in Washington, as they realize they have to get the car keys away from the careening president who has crashed into the globe.

That’s a whole lot of crashing going on. Mostly of metaphors into each other.

How Not To Succeed

Red, White and Blue Tag Sale
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 20, 2008

'Mediocrity is not a mortal sin.'

'I know blood is thicker than water, but Bud Frump is thicker than anything.'

-How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying

Maureen Dowd’s flu-filled trip with George Bush emboldened her to step on the toes of both Paul Krugman and book-leave absentee Thomas Friedman by delving into international finance and she is shocked, shocked to find foreigners at a firesale for financial institutions.

When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.

Or he came to what was left of home.

A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”

Today's Movie With Maureen® is about J. Pierrepont Finch, a window washer, climbing the corporate ladder. Finch’s rival is a toady who got his position through nepotism. On the international scene, Dowd sees W playing the lackey.

Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.

In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”

The double use of the “e-word” recalls the apocryphal Bushism that the problem with the French is that they have no word for ‘entrepreneur.’

She also touches on the current international financial crisis brought out by the free fall of the dollar against the euro.

Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.

Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.

China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.

This echoes another old joke that goes like this: “I hear the Japanese are buying up America. I didn’t even know the Arabs were selling.” Not only are the Arabs not selling, they are doubling down and the Chinese are at the checkout line as well.

She quotes billionaire investor Warren Buffett about the long term consequences.

As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.

Interestingly, one of Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings is Cort, so Warren can rent us some furniture when we have sold it all off overseas.

In the contractual obligatory jab at Hillary, she has this to say about Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and current Hillary advisor:

(While the great sage Bob Rubin was advising Hillary Clinton on sound fiscal policy, he seemed to be asleep at the Citigroup switch.)

Rubin engineered a bailout of Mexico when its currency was bordering on collapse. It’s interesting to see him on the other side of the loan counter. But echoing a new book about Dubya’s Daddy Issues, Dowd wonder’s if Bush 43’s problems aren’t from his contrarian orneriness.

It is striking that the Bush scion, who has tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office.

Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction.

You have a tag sale by slashing prices and we are financing our adventurism in the Middle East by selling off the family jewels.