In what is the signature line of Maureen Dowd's column today, she actually took a stand and called for action. Many bloggers were taken aback by her rare advocacy of an actual position. But it seems Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made the same demand almost word for word on Thursday:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.Maureen's version (with the differences in bold):
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.And the current online version:
Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”Note that the handy little explanatory 'the Bush crowd' is now gone.
josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.So her defense is that she stole from a friend rather than from a blog. So in her mind, she's only a second hand plagiarist. Either that or she is from the Doris Kearns Goodwin School of Sloppy Notekeeping. I'd easier believe that she is incompetent than a thief.
i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
Cheney, Master of Pain
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 16, 2009
Dick Cheney is so comprehensively evil that Maureen Dowd has run out of villains to compare him to and has resorted to Hannah-Barbara cartoons of the 1970s.
Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.And like the Snidlely Whiplash knock-off, Dick Dastardly Cheney has picked Nancy Pelosi to be his Penelope Pitstop. And like the lip-stick obsessed ingenue, Nancy engages in stereotypical female hopelessness.
Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time.And we get a truly dastardly Alliteration Alert™ out of it.
That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.And in a deeply veiled allusion we get our Movies With Maureen® Moment from the Harry Potter villains that doubles as a Dowdversion®.
The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.And while Maureen is often slighted as being the dimmest bulb on the Times's Op-Ed Murderer's Row, she has clearly and unequivocally cut to the quick on what all this torture was about.
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.Torture was never about saving American lives. It was about justifying Cheney's delusional paranoia. And that is truly dastardly.
Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.Rogue Diva of Doom
The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up.And the Crossword Clue© Of The Week means lacking maturity or childish.
Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.And in a major metaphor shift, Dubya has been accused at least three times of wrecking a symbolic car into either the globe, the global economy or diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf. Now we find that those weren't his hands on the wheel.
But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.And let's get this sneering face phantom off of his road show and back into his coffin.
Slouching Towards Oblivion
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 25, 2009
Maureen Dowd continues her California vacation hunting for the perfect metaphor for the end of the newspaper industry. Being a fan of old movies, it only makes sense that she would stumble upon Sunset Boulevard, the classic Gloria Swanson movie about an aging star unwilling to adjust to the reality of a changing marketplace.
That paraphrase of the classic line gets hammered into metaphor one more time.Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.
Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.
...old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.With the Movies With Maureen® reference out of the way, she goes for the distance record for a Dowdversion™ compare/contrast. She starts with...
Journalists are still hot in Hollywood.And an entire paragraph later sums up with...
But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill.And to get that walking past the graveyard feeling she takes a newsroom tour with her Celebrity Quote of the week, Phil Bronstein, whose claim to fame is that his celebrity ex-wife tried to feed him to a reptile.
“This is called the Komodo Dragon Room, for obvious reasons,” he said dryly, referring to the time his ex-wife, Sharon Stone, gave him a meet-and-greet session with a Komodo dragon, who mistook his foot for a snack.And what better metaphor could you ask for than for a denizen of the newsroom to be devoured by a dinosaur.
While Dowd Central has been shuttered for Spring Break, Maureen Dowd has taken to traveling the highways and byways of this great nation hobnobbing with the common people like Silicon Valley billionaires to get her hand on the pulse of the nation, among other places. Let's catch up on the tour and see where she's been.
Striking It Poor
JAMESTOWN, Calif. (April 8)
Single Sentence Synopsis: Panning for gold is harder than digging for quotes.
Classic Dowdism: A Movies With Maureen® Moment as she goes all Fred C. Dobbs.
I’d seen “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the 1948 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. (“Badges? ... I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”) That movie was the best meditation on prospecting for gold, and falling prey to greed, ever done — until the Bernie Madoff story.Cocktail Reference: Ramos gin fizzes and a lemon drop martini
Now it’s flyover country that’s starting high-flying trends.Celebrity Source: Max Mutchnick, the co-creator of “Will and Grace"
Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.Celebrity Source: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
[Alice Waters] says wryly: “I’m just put into that arugulance place..."
Celebrity Source: George Lucas (explaining that Dick Cheney is too evil to be Darth Vader, he's really the Emperor)ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?Celebrity Source: Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter.
BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?
No More Hummer Nation
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 31, 2009
Maureen Dowd has stumbled on a cute little portmanteau of a Crossword Clue complete with a definition she lifts straight from Wikipedia.
As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”Somehow this ties into Obama's Sunday night massacre of the former GM president. Rick Wagoner was clearly in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation.
The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.And later in the column:
Wagoner showed no foresight or willingness to curb an unhealthy appetite for the big. He failed to eliminate brands and launched the Hummer line in 2001.So that they could sit around unsold when gas prices drop again. Anyone else see the fallacy here?
{snip}
Wagoner stuck to gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.’s long after it was clear that higher gas prices meant he should vary the fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles.
I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.And the mention of anything French sends Maureen's reptilian brain free-associating to her longstanding crush for Carla Bruni.
How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?How many rhetorical questions can you fit in one column? At least two more.
How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?
How do you fill eight hundred words when your only news pegs are a trip to the G20 summit and a fired executive? You do a fashion report.But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.At least next week we will have Michelle's inappropriate hugging of the Queen to discuss.
