Chuckie K Says That Dowd Is Off Her Meds

For those of you without reliable video capability, here is what Charles Krauthammer said:

As for Maureen Dowd imagining a word that wasn't said, well, in my previous profession [psychiatry] I saw a lot of people who also heard words that weren't said. They were called patients. Many of them were actually helped with medication.

The word that was heard but not said refers to this line from her Sunday column:

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Please insert your own pot-calling-kettle-black remark about describing people as delusional.

Southern Avenger Objects To Being Called A Malcontent

Jack Hunter, a conservative South Carolinian columnist who goes by the nom de web of Southern Avenger has put up a YouTube rant commentary titled "Whites Are People Too" directed largely at Maureen Dowd and to a lesser extent Paul Krugman



His objection seems to be to her column titled Toilet Paper Barricades (which we here at Dowd Report neglected while on our summer sabbatical). In particular, SA is offended to be called a malcontent, reading some racial slight into the word as Dowd used it:

Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something.

I really can't follow the politely racist point Hunter makes, but it has something to do with black mobs protesting injustice not being called malcontents as well. If that is the level of grievance we are down to in this country, we have made great strides, but it seems we still have far to go.

The Two Willies

Mud Pies for ‘That One’
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 7, 2008

In the latest turns in the election, Maureen Dowd is seeing echoes of a previous campaign.

Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.

But Dowd sees McCain as being partly to blame.

But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.

While the Alliteration Alert® level is down to yellow, she does slip a few in, especially when discussing reptilian Republicans.

[McCain] been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock).

Maureen uses a Dowdversion® based on "common" to show the inherent hypocrisy of Atwater-style attacks.

Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man.

Then she draws the bigger parallel.

Willie Horton In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges: The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.

William Ayers Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He’s now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base. He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side.

Sound familiar?

And while Dowd does not use the "R-word", the racial undertones of the Wille Ayers/Rev. Wright association does not go unnoticed.

Atwater gleefully tried to paint Willie Horton as Dukakis’s running mate. With a black man running, it’s even easier for Atwater’s disciple running McCain’s campaign to warn that white Americans should not open the door to the dangerous Other, or “That One,” as McCain referred to Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. (A cross between “The One” and “That Woman.”)

Maureen may be stretching by trying create "That One" as a portmanteau between The Messiah and Monica Lewinsky, but there is a ring of truth there.

And by using Palin as the pitbull, McCain is making her do the dirty work.

The woman is sounding more Cheney than Cheney.
{snip}
Maybe that’s why McCain didn’t bring up Ayers or Wright during the debate, instead leaving it to Sarah Barracuda.

Our only Movies With Maureen® moment comes from a brief queen bee aside with it's own alliterative aspects.

Asked if she thought Senator Obama was dishonest, McCain’s Mean Girl meandered:

“I’m not saying he’s dishonest, but in terms of judgment, in terms of being able to answer a question forthrightly, it has two different parts to this. The judgment and the truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, is there still — has there been an association continued since ’02 or ’05, I know I’ve read a couple different stories. I think it’s relevant.”

Of course she does.

And by that, Maureen means that it is both irrelevant and that Palin only says it is because that is what the slithering consultants handing the candidates mud pies told her to believe. And to aim some smears at That One.

Eight Ball Barry

Eight ball: A quantity of cocaine or crystal that weighs an eighth of an ounce, hence an "eight ball", which is equivalent to 3.5 grams. –Urban Dictionary

Raspberry for Barry
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 14, 2008

As the Clinton campaign runs out of steam, so does Maureen Dowd’s ability to come up with alliterative Rude Names®:

Obama is acting the diffident debutante, pretending not to care that he was given a raspberry by a state he will need in the fall.

We first saw “Diffident Debutante” back on February 3rd when Hillary was still the Debate Dominatrix. And tell me she didn’t just make a raspberry/Barry Obama pun? Please. Or is it a Prince "Raspberry Beret" shout-out? I'm not sure which would be worse.

And speaking of not believing my eyes, is “eight ball” a drug crack (so to speak) or is Maureen just that clueless about coke lingo:

Fast Barry shot some pool Monday afternoon at Schultzie’s Billiards in South Charleston, including prophetically sinking an eight-ball in the pocket…

I think not. After all, she managed to fit twenty drug slang terms into this column.

The cleverest line in the column was this one about Hillary exploiting class antagonism:

Mining that antipathy, the New York senator has been working hard to get the hard-working white voters of hardscrabble Appalachia so she can show that a black man can’t yet be elected president.

And that vein of antipathy (see, antipathy sounds like anthracite, which is a type of coal, get it?) includes some not so subtle racism which Maureen is glad to chronicle:

Two in 10 white voters said race was important in how they voted, and more than 8 of 10 of these went for Hillary. This echoes an article in The Washington Post on Tuesday that chronicled the racism that some Obama volunteers found in Indiana and Pennsylvania.

The story quoted Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, who could take only one night on an Obama phone bank in the nearly all-white Susquehanna County, Pa.: “One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: ‘Hang that darky from a tree!’ ”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about complaints of racism after a bar in Marietta, Ga., began selling an Obama 2008 T-shirt with a picture of Curious George peeling a banana.

(Click here for a Boston Herald story with a picture of said shirt if you are that curious.)

Dowd first spotted the “won’t vote for a well-educated charismatic black guy” trend in her Pennsylvania wrap-up, but as Obama becomes the nominee apparent expect the race-baiting to become more explicit. If we can elect a Catholic president, we can elect a Black president, even if he can’t carry West Virginia. And the mention of JFK is just enough to send Maureen to mutter nostalgically into her Bumillers for the rest of the column:

J.F.K. bought affection in West Virginia. “The boss of Logan County said 35,” Peters recalled. “He meant $3,500, but Kennedy thought it was $35,000, so he gave him $35,000. They put out all this money and they carried the precincts.” (Hillary has been using street money more than Obama, though it is unclear how much it has helped.)

And really, that is enough of that. Once we start eulogizing dead Democratic presidents it’s time for last call.