Meet The Clinton Bashers

Maureen Dowd on Sunday joined the panel of Bash The Clintons Meet The Press where she was asked about the Caroline Kennedy endorsement of Barack Obama in the New York Times. Presumably she was the most qualified to answer the question because a) she’s a New York Times employee, and b) she got Caroline’s autograph on a bunch of Christmas presents.

MR. RUSSERT: Another event overnight, Maureen Dowd, in your paper, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the 35th president, John Kennedy, wrote an op/ed piece in The Times endorsing Barack Obama. And this is what she said: "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president--not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." Barack Obama. Are we going to see Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, town hall? How significant is this?

MS. MAUREEN DOWD: Well, I think this is huge. The Hillary people were obviously trying to get Caroline Kennedy's endorsement, and the fact that she gave it to Obama is very much like the moment that Bill Clinton pushed when he shook JFK's hand at Boy's Nation. Now, JFK probably didn't remember that at all, but the Clinton campaign made that the Arthurian moment, where Galahad took the sword out of the stone. And now Caroline has done that for Obama. But it's a real moment because she is saying, "You are like my father," after decades of politicians pretending to be like, like JFK, and Gary Hart chopping his hand, and, you know, Dan Quayle trying to act like he was JFK. She is giving him the imprimatur, and it's--I think it's huge.

Her next turn at bat let her cut loose with a greatest hits compilation of Billary bashing. She got in the Big Dog allusion and even mentioned an Onion article as a reference on Bill’s behavior.

MS. DOWD: Well, it was an astonishing spectacle of seeing a so-called first black president trying to destroy a would-be first black president. I mean, we've never seen anything like this, and it was very personal between Obama and Clinton. And I think that, in the end, Hillary gave up a good narrative for her, which is that she had carved out her own identity and that it wasn't going to be the Bickersons back in the White House, and you just saw the Clintons. And, and Mitt Romney was right, you, you visualized her in the Oval, him in the East Wing rambling around looking for mischief. And it was, you know, it was a very seamy--Phil Gaily, who's the editorial page editor of the St. Petersburg Times, said watching Clinton in South Carolina is like watching a mad dog slobber. It was about him. And, you know, as The Onion said, you know, The Onion headline was, "Screw It, I'm Running for President by Bill Clinton."

Since she was taking it easy on Bill, Tim lobbed her another softball so she could get in more digs:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen, you wrote on Wednesday, "It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."

MS. DOWD: I know. We're seeing all these astonishing things in this race, and it worked in Nevada and New Hampshire for--I think Bill Clinton helped her there. But, in this case, I just think it raised the deja vu of the Clintons will drag anyone down to their own level and trash anyone to make up for what is missing in them or what they have done wrong. During impeachment, you know, they were trashing the founding fathers. Bill Clinton's lawyers actually filed a brief saying, "Well, Alexander Hamilton had a tawdry affair, and he wasn't kicked out of office." So it's a very debilitating dynamic, you know, to drag everyone down to their level, especially when you have this alternative of optimism and hope. And they were willing to put a dagger in the heart of hope. I mean, Obama should just beat them over the head every day with the idea that Bill Clinton said he represented false hope. Because the only way they can beat him is to beat down hope and inspiration and bringing young voters and expanding the party, and they want to kill all that. And that is not a good, you know, situation for them.

After giving Obama campaign advice, she goes on to burnish his reputation as a historic watershed figure:

MS. DOWD: Tim, one of the most striking images of South Carolina--Jeff Zeleny wrote about today--was the Confederate flag flying near the capital and Obama workers holding up Obama placards. And it's, you know, an amazing historic image.

Russert also sets up a straw man in the name of Rudy for Maureen to take a few swings at. She mostly rehashes her column for the day:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, the indictment of Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner, who he proposed to be secretary of Homeland Security, stories about his New York City police detail being used to guard his then-girlfriend, now-wife Judith Nathan, did those issues just take a toll on Rudy Giuliani?

MS. DOWD: Oh, of course, you know. And, you know, he's got to stop talking about 9/11 and call 911 because he's in real trouble there. And I was expecting more of a--from a man who loves opera, more of an operatic finale, one way or the other, to save himself or to self-immolate. I mean, some Maria Callas death scene. But he's so mundane. And actually yesterday he switched his message to hope. So that's not going to work for Rudy Giuliani.
…
MS. DOWD: And he was able to jump on the headlines of the day and say something provocative, and he just seems to be sleepwalking.

MR. RUSSERT: Is he recognizing that he's not going to win and sort of protecting his next career?

MS. DOWD: I think so, and saving, and saving, you know, protecting Giuliani Partners.

Moving on to McCain, Chuck Todd and Dowd exchange a little inside baseball concerning the chumminess of fellow senators McCain and Hillary.

MS. DOWD: Well, I asked McCain about that in the green room, doing reporting, and he was saying not to think--I know he really does like Hillary Clinton--I've talked to him about that--and thinks she's really fun to travel with. But he said to expect fireworks. He's not going to lay off of her. He's already talking about how she's waving the white flag of surrender on Iraq.

MR. TODD: They enjoy the vodka shots, right?

MS. DOWD: Oh, yeah, they did in Estonia, yes.

The Indiana Jones style vodka shooter contest happened back in 2006 according the Times.
In her final say of the day, Maureen manages to put Obama on an even higher pedestal than her earlier sloppy wet-kisses:

MS. DOWD: Well, I think, you know, it's very interesting to me because I think that in, in Iowa, Obama learned how to connect with his electricity. Usually you have someone being the daddy figure, and he's like the blessed child, you know, he's learning as he goes. And we're watching him learn and get personally upset in real time, which we, we saw with McCain in South Carolina in 2000, now we're seeing with Obama. And the question is, did this give him his spine? You know, he's been struggling. Is he on the pedestal like Adlai Stevenson, or is he JFK and RFK, who knows how to fight back? And I think he's got a false choice. He doesn't have to be Tonya Harding to fight back; he could be like Reagan and just flick them away and use wit. But he's learning on the job, and he, you know, he--his speech, his victory speech last night was angry. You know, he is angry at the Clintons for what he sees as underhanded tactics, and they were underhanded. So it, it depends, is he going to get back on the pedestal or is he going to figure out some way that he's comfortable with not to do cage fight, fighting.

She had declared Obama “The Golden Child” back in December and now she want to see him double axel his way to the nomination.

The Fat Gray Lady Sings

It’s Not Giuliani Time in Florida
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 27, 2008

"Giuliani Time" makes the case that Mr. Giuliani's true ideological identity is conservative, and makes this case in a way that is sure to appall liberals who felt queasy about him in the first place (or guilty when they voted for him). But of course Mr. Giuliani, if he does run for president, will want to make the same case to Republicans, and in some ways "Giuliani Time" might work to his advantage, since it never mentions, say, his support for gay rights or his endorsement of Mario M. Cuomo in the 1994 governor's race. Mr. Giuliani was always a hybrid and, in some ways, a paradox: something both he and this movie might prefer that we forget.

Movie Review
Giuliani Time (2005)
"Confronting a Mayor's Legacy in 'Giuliani Time'"
New York Times, May 12, 2006

Rather than the jugular, Maureen Dowd goes straight for the testicular in turning 9/11 Mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani into a castrato:

I simply expected that Rudy would rise to greater heights as he fell behind, that he would self-immolate in a dramatic way befitting a man who loves opera and the “Godfather” movies. I longed for the Manhattan diva to reprise Maria Callas doing one of her famous Donizetti mad scenes that he loved so much.

Rudy does like the ladies singing in breastplates. The opera in question here is Lucia di Lammermoor, and the metaphor between it and Rudy was made by John Tierney in the Times within a month of the World Trade Center attack:

You could call it post-traumatic infatuation syndrome, a condition that Mr. Giuliani himself can recognize from his study of opera. The textbook case is in "Lucia di Lammermoor," the Donizetti opera set in 17th-century Scotland.

Lucia, grief-stricken by her mother's recent death, is walking to her mother's grave when a bull charges her. She's rescued by Edgardo, with whom she promptly falls in love. Lucia overlooks his flaws, the chief one being that his family and hers are sworn enemies. The results of her infatuation are not pretty. By the end of the opera, Lucia, Edgardo and a bystander are all dead.

Dowd also calls Rudy out, complete with more references to high notes in Italian, for not be aggressive enough in not going on the attack when the Gray Lady used a McCain endorsement to launch an anti-Rudy tirade :

I missed his showman’s appreciation for pouncing on the news of the day and grabbing headlines with some outrageous, provocative aria. Surely, The New York Times’s McCain endorsement — harshly branding America’s Mayor “a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man” who spurred racial polarization and exploited 9/11 for his business and political purposes — gave Rudy the lyrics for an operatic rant against The Times that could have replaced his milquetoast stump speech and delighted conservative audiences.

Dowd picks up the opera metaphor a little later in the article. There seems to be a Valkyrie in a pigtails warming up her vocal cords:

Could it be over before the fat lady sings? If early-bird voters don’t save him and he comes in third here, will he get out of the race so he doesn’t suffer the indignity of losing New York, a scene so melodramatically implausible that even Verdi wouldn’t try to pull it off?

The early bird voters are the dinner special seeking seasonal elderly residents of Florida aka “snowbirds” that seem to be Rudy’s natural base, but are actually avoiding him in droves.

At a Rudy rally in Boca on Thursday, there were snowbirds and transplanted New Yorkers. Some, naturally, loved Rudy and some, naturally, loathed him.

And it wouldn’t be a campaign related column without some random gratuitous Billary bashing:

And how could he pass up the chance to mock his old nemesis Hillary, the feminist icon who is totally dependent on her husband to do the heavy lifting?

It was Mitt Romney who scored the best Hillary line at the Boca debate. When Tim Russert asked him, “How would you run against Hillary and Bill Clinton in November,” Mitt replied: “I frankly can’t wait, because the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can’t imagine. I can’t imagine the American people can imagine.”

Mo and Mitt can imagine just fine and just in case she spells it out:

The audience laughed and Russert tried to pin down Mitt to see if he was implying any East Wing shenanigans. It does conjure up a disquieting image of Hillary in the Oval and Bill rambling around next door in the study right near that pantry.

But Bill’s intern-al transgressions pale next to Rudy’s sexual shenanigans while he was in office, divorcing one wife while squiring around the next one on city funds.

“He’s Bernie Kerik’s partner,” he said. “And family values? He makes Bill Clinton look like a young upstart.”

In fact. the tales of lust, corruption, and vindictive revenge that marked the Rudy regime would make a particularly tragic libretto. Tancrudi, anyone?

Freeper Report

Maureen Dowd’s Rudy Rampage got linked to at Free Republic, the ultra-conservative portal. Part of the problem is that a highly developed sense of ironic sarcasm goes wasted on some parties. The first comment seemed to be ready to get in line behind Rudy when the brown shirts start marching:

“Rudy would probably only take the hand of an Arab leader to throw him down a ravine, or a wadi”

LOL, so true!

But for most Freepers, the mere mention of the Red Headed One induces a Pavlovian reaction:

Ugh...Maureen Dowd.

And

I couldn’t bother to follow the link once I saw the author’s name. Detestable wench.

While some are nostalgic for Times Select:

Oh how I wish for the wonderful days of Times Select, and the near total absence of this blubbering idiot from the online political opinion and newsjunky world.

But even in the heavily Red State air, one had to admit:

Maureen Dowd's not my favorite New York Times columnist but she captured the spirit of the Jewish Republican Coalition debate very well.

And the closest thing to a compliment was:

Nice choice of words for Fred: "phlegmatic", and he's "plummeting in the polls". As usual, Mo's slip is showing again.

It's okay Freepers, you don't have to agree with everything Dowd says. And besides if she was gone, who would you have left to hate, Bob Herbert?

If you want a better feel for where Rudy is getting his geopolitics from, read/watch this very detailed analysis (hat tip to Ed Strong).

Rudy And The Ragheads

Rudy Roughs Up Arabs
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 17, 2007

Rough Rudy doesn’t quite have the same edge as Ringtone Rudy, but the alliteration will do in a pinch.

As the phlegmatic Fred Thompson plummeted in the polls and made a lackluster appearance at the forum, a juiced Mr. Giuliani preened in front of an audience that loved him.

As a epithet, “phlegmatic” will never be as good as “laconic” in describing Thompson, but it does let Dowd make an alliteration triple play going for juiced Giuliani as well as poll plummeting.

He went through his greatest hits: The time he yanked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. “The thing that really bothered me was, he didn’t have a ticket,” Rudy recalled. “He was a freeloader!”

The incident in question happened in 1995 during the Clinton Administration. According to the New York Times report, Arafat did have a ticket, but nobody owns up to giving him one. Not sure what makes Rudy the usher at the Lincoln Center. Maybe he likes dressing up in the uniform.

But Rudy seems out of the Republican mainstream on even giving lip-service to Palestinian aspirations. He has no patience for buttering up the Arabs, or the Republican men’s club attitude represented by Saudi-loving Bush senior and James Baker that has always favored a more “even-handed” policy in the Middle East.

The connections of Bush I, Baker and Bandar are legendary in conspiracy theory circles. Michael Moore is one of the more reliable sources that has reported on the close relationship between the Saudi royal family and The Carlyle Group among others.

Rudy would probably only take the hand of an Arab leader to throw him down a ravine, or a wadi.

A wadi is a dry river bed prone to flash flooding. One of Borat's bits is getting unsuspecting rednecks to sing "Throw The Jew Down The Well". Ravine Rudy would rather be throwing the wogs in the wadi.

(Bush senior and Dick Cheney were very tight with Saudi Prince Bandar. At a party at the vice president’s mansion once, I watched Bandar greet waiters like old friends.)

Nice name-drop, Mo. Were you a member of the Energy Policy Council? Something tells me Dowd isn't getting invited to too many Red Room Receptions during the Giuliani Administration.

Flintstone Fred Vs Ringtone Rudy

Uxorious or Spurious?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 23, 2007

Uxorious: 1) Excessively submissive or devoted to one's wife.(FreeDictionary) 2) A perverted affection that has strayed to one’s own wife. (Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce)

MoDo uses the NRA convention to illustrate the difference between Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson. She sets up the convention speeches as a Wild West shoot-out.

…there was only one other ingredient needed for Flintstone Fred’s testosterone cocktail: a sexy blonde. Introducing his wife, Jeri, he drawled, “I think she’d make a much better first lady than Bill Clinton.”

The call-out to the animated caveman conjures a certain level of Neanderthalness in both appearance and political outlook.



Then there is a long discussion of the possibly pre-arranged bit where Rudy Giuliani takes a call from his wife. MoDo calls bullshit.

This suggests either that Friday’s call was staged to humanize the dictatorial former mayor, or that Rudy is afraid of Judi’s digital wrath, or that the candidate is still struggling with how to integrate his third wife into his campaign, after her puppy-killing, husband-hiding, cabinet-sitting rough start.

In six hyphenated words Dowd dredges up Judi Giuliani’s former career with a company that used animals to demonstrate surgical products, her previously undisclosed first (of three) husbands, and some overly generous offers of unappointed political power.

Mitt Romney’s camp…found video of the first cellus interruptus and sent reporters links to YouTube clips of both calls.

Coitus interruptus changed to cellus drives home that Rudy may be both pistol-whipped and pussy-whipped.

Ginger or Mary Anne?

Will Rudy Let Her Rudy-Up?
by Maureen Dowd
September 16, 2007

“Rudy-up” is a variation on the street slang phrase “man-up”, meaning to take something like a man and to be tough and daring.

For months, Hillary’s comely male rivals for the Democratic nomination have tiptoed around her, letting their wives take shots at the front-runner.

By calling John Edwards and Barack Obama "comely" and accusing them of using their wives to make attacks, she is questioning their masculinity.

Enter Rudy. He may wear skirts, but he’s not afraid to take down a skirt.

Rudy Giuliani once wore a dress in a skit with Donald Trump. Some people think he enjoyed it just a little too much.

Obama has been trying to make this point for quite a while, but so gingerly that every time he sneaks up on it, Hillary surges ahead.

Rudy doesn’t do ginger.

The irony is that if you could loosen up Hillary with a few Jack and gingers, she would probably be closer to her reinvention than to his caricature.

We have at least two meanings of ginger here. “Gingerly” means gently and is an another subtle accusation of effeminateness. Additionally, the phrase “doesn’t do ginger” could be a reference to Ginger Rogers who can do everything Fred Astaire can but backwards and in heels. “Jack and ginger” means Jack Daniels and ginger ale, implying that if you got a few drinks into Hillary, she would be as tough or tougher than Rudy. I’m surprised MoDo didn’t manage a Gilligan’s Island call out.

Essentially, Dowd is calling Obama, John, and Rudy pussies and claiming that Hillary is the only man in the bunch. She’s just saying it ever so gingerly.