The Colbert Retort

A Mock Columnist, Amok
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007

The phrase “running amok (or amuck)” comes the Malay word “Amuco” and has come to mean any sort of violent senseless rampage. Amok Time would be a good name for a Fox News Network talk show.

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

George Will wrote a column this week on how tough it is to be a billionaire in "today’s plutonomy". Will may have been writing tongue-in-cheek, but as with MoDo, sometimes it can be tough to tell since so much of his opining already verges on self-parody.

Stephen Colbert is a character on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report played by Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert the character is a caricature of an over-the-top right-wing commenter. Stephen Colbert the comedian is a hopeless commie pinko.

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Stephen Colbert’s new book is non-sequiturly titled I Am America (And So Can You!). For the second week in a row, Dowd has gotten her inspiration from the New Releases table at BigBoxOfBooks™. Dowd then channels the Stephen Colbert character for the rest of her column:

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito.

James Bond super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld always had a fluffy white cat. Sarah Jessica Parker’s vapid self-centered Sex and The City character drank lots of fancy alcoholic drinks while extolling the travails of living in upper-class Manhattan. The mental image of Marueen Dowd as a slutty, drunk, evil despot probably appeals to a lot of people. I know it does to me.

Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Frank Rich is a fellow New York Times columnist who is more predictable and reliably liberal than even Maureen Dowd, except with a narrower range of hot-button topics.

I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

This sort of left-handed compliment is Colbert’s stock in trade, most famously exhibited when Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Association dinner and called George Bush an idiot in so many words to his face.

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Or Clarence Thomas.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

MaureenColbert has a very salient point here. While all the Republican candidates are white, male, and nominally Christian, some evangelical groups have sent up smoke signals threatening to support a third party candidate if the Republican nominee is insufficiently theocratic.

And there is the rub with ouroburosian attempts at satire. Many people are incapable of discerning the difference and it becomes tough to see the humor. At what point does a liberal columnist imitating a fake right wing pundit come out of the other end of the rabbit hole as an unironic Rush Limbaugh clone?

Blog Watch: OJ Al

Updated 10/8/07 9:20 P.M.

There are basically two reactions to Sunday’s column where Dowd channels Clarence Thomas as OJ Simpson as political po-mo piece of theater. The first reaction is to blanch at the gall of Dowd passing the blame on Gore’s defeat on to Thomas when conventional wisdom is that she single-handedly scuttled Internet Al by endlessly criticizing his wardrobe and choice of college roommates. Wonkette (where yours truly has been known to be found) sees it as MoDo confessing:

It has been a while since we actually read MoDo regularly, so maybe our grasp of her grasp of irony is a bit rusty, but the whole thing is kinda funny considering how Dowd herself is nearly as responsible for Al’s political destruction as one vilified member of the court that sold him out!

It wasn’t until we were 9 paragraphs in that we even realized it was a hilarious Anita Hill joke and not just a belated admission of guilt on Dowd’s actual behalf.

The other level of umbrage was to take aim at the rather casual racism of equating a Supreme Court Justice with a Heismann Trophy winning running back. After all, football stars are respected members of society. Mike Wacker at the Cornell Daily Sun thinks the metaphor got taken a little too far:

Dowd even goes so far as to accuse Thomas of lynching Al Gore, which makes absolutely no sense not only because Bush v. Gore had nothing to do with race, but also because the victim of the lynching, Gore, is white. Honestly, Dowd needs to get off her holier-than-thou podium and discover what real lynchings were like before she ever makes such an idiotic and insensitive comparison again.

No More Mister Nice Blog objects to the minstrelization of poor Clarence:

Ripple and Marvin Gaye. That's part of what MoDo wants you to laugh at regarding Clarence Thomas -- the image of him listening to black-guy music while drinking cheap black-guy wine. It's not her only line of attack, but why is it in there at all?

Finally, Scott Lemieux succinctly just objects to the whole roleplaying aspect of the column:

Please never try to write satire in another voice ever again.

Ironically, the fake inner monologue was used by MoDo several years ago on none other than Al Gore himself. Perhaps she has gone to that well once too many times.

The Real Killer

SPOILER WARNING:
This post reveals the M. Night Shyamalan style secret twist ending in the October 7, 2007 Maureen Dowd New York Times article.

I Did Do It
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 7, 2007

O. J. Simpson wrote a book called If I Did It describing the hypothetical scenario that would explain the death of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Many people assume it is a thinly veiled confession. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has written an autobiography titled My Grandfather's Son. Dowd has mashed up her review copies. Today’s column is written in the first person as the alleged voice of Clarence Thomas confessing to a crime.

Fine. I did it. Everything A. said — let’s just use the initial because it’s still hard for me to speak the name of my victim and tormentor — was true.

I did what I had to do and I didn’t care if it ruined A.’s life. I didn’t even care if people thought it was obscene.

We of course assume that “A.” is Anita Hill who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment and exposing her to obscene material. More details about his disdain for A. follows:

Not the sort of person I’d like to tailgate with, listen to Marvin Gaye with, share Ripple or a Scotch and Drambuie or a blackberry brandy with — if I were still drinking.

Marvin Gaye is mentioned in Thomas’s biography as someone he admired when he went through a phase of Black radicalism. Marvin Gaye was also a famous soul singer whose smooth vocal stylings are often used to set a romantic seductive mood.

Ripple was a very cheap fortified wine associated with winos and lower class African-Americans from its many references on the 70s sitcom Sanford and Son. Judge Thomas confesses to excessive drinking in his book:

"His terrible words still burned in my memory a decade and a half later. Had Daddy been right after all?" Thomas wrote, the anguish evident in his words. "I poured myself a large glass of scotch and Drambuie over ice and downed it greedily, alone with my thoughts and afraid of what lay ahead."

The book details his decision to never drink again. Armstrong Williams in an NPR interview says he never saw Thomas drink alcohol. Dubya has also abstained from alcohol without ever entering a formal recovery program.

They’ve even shown the lighter side of Clarence. My new friend, ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg, called me one of “the most complex, compelling, maligned and misunderstood figures in modern history.” And thank you, Steve Kroft. I never thought “60 Minutes” could be so sweet.

Greenburg wrote an eight part Sparks Notes synopsis of Thomas’s book for ABCNews.com. Dowd should be thanking Greenburg for not making her read the whole thing. Many of the details mentioned in Dowd’s column are also covered in a long 60 Minutes profile by Steve Kroft. Portions of it are available on the official CBS website, but longer excerpts are linked to from the Mirror On America blog.

Then we get all literary:

From the time I was a kid, when my white classmates made fun of me as “ABC” — “America’s Blackest Child” — the beast of rage against The Man has gnawed at my soul.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy discussion of war:

"It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden-the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain, the beast of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on." (Brothers Karamazov, ii.V.4, "Rebellion")

It is unclear whether this passage is alluded to in Thomas’s book or MoDo’s imagination.

And this is the surprise twist ending:

So I voted to shut down the vote-counting in Florida by A. — oh, I’ll just say it: Al — because if he’d kept going he might have won. I helped swing the court in case No. 00-949, Bush v. Gore, to narrowly achieve the Bush restoration.

I know it wasn’t what my hero Atticus Finch would have done. But having the power to carjack the presidency and control the fate of the country did give me that old X-rated tingle.

Atticus Finch is the hero of high school English class staple To Kill a Mockingbird, a book Clarence Thomas relates to in his autobiography (via Harpers):

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have been thinking of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man on trial for the rape of a white woman.

Thomas’s current wife is white.

One of the accusations Anita Hill made was that Thomas was an aficionado of x-rated movies including the African-American pornstar Long Dong Silver.

Dowd’s wishful-thinking version of Thomas sums up:

It’s a relief to finally admit it: I’m proud to have hastened Al’s premature political death, hanging by hanging chads. It was, you might say, a low-tech lynching.

Maureen Dowd is often accused of aiding George W. Bush get elected by frequently criticizing Al Gore. Finally we now know the truth. It was Clarence Thomas avenging grudges and repaying old debts that did in Al Gore. In a twist worthy of a Scott Turrow novel, MoDo is off the hook because the real killer has confessed.