Why I'm Single - Part XLVIII

An Ideal Husband
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 6, 2008

It never ends.

-Kay Corleone

The Godfather: Part III

So  that she can have the long weekend off, Maureen Dowd brushes off some unpublished notes from Are Men Necessary? and adds the following news peg to make it seem timely:

There’s the Christie Brinkley/Peter Cook fireworks on Long Island and the Madonna/Guy Ritchie/A-Rod Roman candle in New York.

Nothing like a few bad Fourth Of July puns to keep it topical. She then turns over the column to a Catholic marriage expert she describes thusly:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss.

A full thirteen paragraphs of the column are direct quotes from the good father, which sure gives both Maureen and us textual scholars at Dowd Central little to do this week.

She even subs out the Movies With Maureen® to him:

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. Kay made a monstrous mistake marrying Michael Corleone! Is there a history of divorce in the family?

In other words, don't marry a mobster. Good advice, padre.

But the last quote is the money shot because it provides the rationalization that Dowd needs to realize that despite the fact that millions of couples do meet and marry successfully, she can feel she has dodges a bullet:

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”

Life is unfair. The rest of us have to take a precious vacation day to get extra time off. Maureen Dowd gets to literally phone it in with her priest.

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.

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.