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.

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.

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.

Out Of Fashion

What is amazing about Maureen Dowd is that she instills such strong passion even when she doesn’t have a current column. Lapata in Chapati Mystery takes on the entire New York Times stable of columnists, but singles out Maureen Dowd in particular.

I am willing to cede the point that numerous op-ed writers for that newspaper of record often appear to lack even the most basic skills needed in making a logical argument. In the case of Maureen Dowd, of course, logical argument is not, it is hoped, even a goal. In her column, the formula of pegging every political figure and situation to a corresponding character in a widely viewed prime-time hit television show does not require logical argument, but only a fit of insinuating pique.

What brought on his pique? It seems he is rather smitten with the prose of one Guy Trebay, the NYT fashion columnist.

Guy Trebay would never be invited to write an op-ed column in the Times, nor would his byline grace the columns of the first section of any newspaper. Guy Trebay would never call the world flat, or compare prime ministers of foreign nations fictional mafia dons or devote whole columns to baby names.

Lapata, of course, is calling out Flat Earth Friedman, and the baby names column by David Brooks is pretty silly, but of all the poisoned paragraphs by the Dowdster, what does he pick on? A five-month old item titled “A Tale of Two Tonys, Exiting Tormented”. Let’s have a look:

They’re both going out, not with a bang, but with a bing.

As they go dark, the two Tonys are bitter, paranoid and worn down by their enemies and scheming erstwhile allies. They both live in a bleak universe of half-truths, compromises and betrayals, a world changed utterly by the violence they set in motion. They were both brought low by high-stakes mistakes.

Tony Blair fears the feral beast. Tony Soprano is the feral beast.

The two Tonys found that their skin was never thick enough. And they stumbled into trouble with their Juniors, Junior Bush and Junior Soprano. Before he steps down in two weeks, Tony Blair decided to let loose with one of those self-pitying Tony Soprano-style rants that drove Dr. Melfi to terminate him. Call it No. 10 Downer Street.

It may not be Coward, or even Parker, but it’s fresh, clever, and topical (at least at the time). I would have never come up with the Blair in the Bada Bing Club allusion, but Dowd makes it work. As always, she stretches a metaphor a little further than it should go, like here:

I worry more about the press when it’s reverent rather than irreverent, when it’s a tame lapdog, as it was in the buildup to Iraq, than when it’s a feral beast. And I worry about politicians like W. and Blair being black and white rather than gray, as they were in building their hysterical, phony case against Saddam. We would have been well-served back then if Mr. Blair had explained to the jejune Junior that there’s some good, some bad, and some gray in the world, and that sometimes it’s smarter to squeeze tyrants, rather than Shock-and-Awe them.

It may not have the flowery flourishes of a Guy Trebay who can milk four paragraphs out of leering at supermodels at the tail end of a pout about hirsute hipsters, but I would rather spend an afternoon just staring at a Maureen Dowd column than read purple prose about underfed fashionistas.

Kos-acks Attack Dowd

Back when I checked out the Free Republic reaction to Maureen Dowd’s attacks on Cheney, I found a lot of rabid DowdBashing. Now that she has turned her sites on Hillary, it would be interesting to see how the reliably liberal Kos-acks at Daily Kos react to Nevada Dems take (see yesterday's post for those highlights).

Dowd has a very bad reputation among the heartiest of liberal partisans with long memories. An awful lot of people are still bitter over perceived sabotage of the Gore campaign.

Buzzer says (and 21 others agree):

I'm not a Hillary supporter but Maureen Dowd is worthless. She (as well as Frank Rich) were MAJOR perpetrators of dishonest, sickeningly superficial coverage of Al Gore in 2000.
There are plenty of smart people making strong cases against Hillary Clinton. Mo Dowd isn't one of them.

Happy Days semi-defended Dowd:

Maureen Dowd is witty and funny but has always been very hostile to both Clintons.

But Travis Bickle adds:

She's been very to hostile to a lot of people including Al Gore and John Kerry. U can thank her for the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" sniping in 2000, she gave a lot of that media BS legs in a major American publication. I ignore her and her condescension.

Chumley concurs:

Maureen Dowd is an awful writer. Remember, she will savage ANYONE with her Mean Girls style. Especially Democratic candidates. She's long on snotty b.s., short on substance.
She was one of the worst in going after Al Gore back in 2000. Just shameless.

Peagreen is about the only one that understands the point Dowd was trying to make:

no fan of dowd BUT

She can be righteous while playing brass-knuckle politics. She will cozy up to former enemies she can use, like Matt Drudge and David Brock, and back W.’s bellicosity if it helps banish her old image as anti-military.
There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.

I would not care who wrote this. I agree with it. And the emphasis is mine.

Do Tell agrees:

This paragraph really sums up Hillary, no matter how much I dislike Dowd. She hits the nail on the head and explains much about her current campaign, her votes, statements, and her doubletalk.
She will do anything, say anything, as long as it gets her the nomination.

Shane Hensinger takes a more balanced but personal view of Dowd's attacks:

Maureen Dowd has never met a public figure that she doesn't enjoy raking over the coals and humiliating in her little twice-a-week "gotcha" column. She's loyal to no ideology or party, only to her own self-serving interests.

Dowd is the ultimate Beltway insider, the kind who thinks she knows more than the little people, and she flaunts her connections like they're prize jewels. She's a chronic Botox addict who doesn't like anyone, especially other women, doing better than she's done. She loves to find fault with the wives of elected politicians because they constantly remind her that she's never been able to have a successful relationship.

She's a loveless, childless, bitter menopausal woman with nothing more to look forward to than more echo-chamber parties in Georgetown and the Upper West Side where everyone assures her of how relevant and important she is.

To Happy Days, the quality of Dowd’s columns depends on whose Al is getting Gored, so to speak:

Frankly, I enjoy her Bush and Cheney columns because she does have a very funny and caustic wit. But when it comes to writing about Hillary (or Bill for that matter) she's as viscious (sic) or more so than she is with Shrub and Darth--but in the case of the Clintons she takes the most superficial and un-representative things and engages in satirical cheap shots.

And that pretty much sums it up. Your view of Dowd depends on where you stand. And since she doesn’t play favorites, she takes plenty of shots from all directions.

Faux Mo

Mark Hemingway of National Review Online is not impressed with the fall of Times Select. He took one for the team and went back and read every MoDo column from the past year got into a rage.

But the biggest change has been the return of the most “colorful” writer in the Times’s stable, Maureen Dowd, whose biweekly hell-broth of tortured comparisons and pop culture references always entertain, if not illuminate.

He took every column and mixed them up into a blender and here is part of the pastiche:

They take affairs, illegitimate children, and tumultuous marriages in stride. But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. (3) It almost made Bill and Hillary seem like a model of normalcy. Almost. (4)

He says he’s not particularly fond of Celine Dion, whose “You and I” is Hillary’s insipid jingle. (10) It was an acid flashback to the cultural wasteland of Bill Clinton’s reign, when instead of Pablo Casals, we got Kenny G. (11)

In the footnotes he links back to the original articles. I may have to use them to linkback to learn what raises the hackles of a NRO columnist. I'd say pretty much anything Dowd writes.

Blog Watch: TEAM Report

Say what you want about MoDo, people have firm opinions about here. How about a round up of recent calm rational assessments of her talent:

Geoffrey Kruse-Safford calls her “the ridiculously vapid Maureen Dowd”

Chuckling offers the more nuanced assessment:

Although it’s true that so many of [Dowd's] columns are superficial and harmful to progressive politics, she is a sharp, funny writer and her quips, like the one above, can be quite entertaining and sometimes illustrate the truth of the matter.

Jennifer Hunter of the Chicago Sun-Times has an opinion more to our liking:

Dowd trashes every one, Democrat or Republican, with acuity and enviable style.

Finally, Guy Rundle, of Uppsala, Sweden, in a letter to the International Herald Tribune (the European arm of the NYT empire) takes her to task for occupational prejudice:

Maureen Dowd did such a good job excoriating both Mahmoud Ahmedinajad's record and his self-defeating critics on the right that one could almost forgive her for the elitist slight that the Iranian president has a Ph.D. in "traffic studies."

Well, what of it? Quite aside from the fact that political leadership is open to anyone, why should the well-established profession of traffic engineer be such a ridiculous profession? Given that it focuses on the management of complex public systems, it is just possible that it might make someone a better candidate for higher office than, say, a New York-based freelance writer?

I predict the formation of a group called TEAM – Traffic Engineers Against MoDo.