Real Gone

I'm American made but I like Chevrolet
My momma taught me wrong from right.

I was born in the South
Sometimes I have a big mouth
When I see something that I don't like
I gotta say it.

Well, we've been driving this road for a mighty long time
Paying no mind to the signs
Well, this neighborhood's changed
It's all been rearranged
We left that team somewhere behind.

-Sheryl Crow "Real Gone"

I Ponied Up for Sheryl Crow?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 24, 2009

Maureen Dowd is Howard Beale mad-as-hell still at financial institutions flouting their fiscal prolificacy. This time it is at Northern Trust of Chicago which earns itself a couple of Rude Names™, a rare honor for a non-politician.

Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.

Not only are they wasting taxpayers' money, they are doing it on bad AOR has-beens. And Maureen could have used the entire lyrics of 'Real Gone' (Crow's hit from the Pixar movie Cars) to emphasize the irony instead of just the verse she picked.

“Slow down, you’re gonna crash,
Baby, you’re a-screaming it’s a blast, blast, blast
Look out babe, you’ve got your blinders on ...
But there’s a new cat in town
He’s got high payin’ friends
Thinks he’s gonna change history.”

And it's not one of Dowd's now infamous rants without a BlingList®:

The entertainment Web site TMZ broke the story Tuesday that Northern Trust of Chicago, which got $1.5 billion in bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags.

The second RudeName™ is tipped with a swizzle stick of sarcasm.

Northern Untrustworthy even offered junketeers the chance to attend a seminar on the credit crunch where they could no doubt learn that the U.S. government is just the latest way to finance your deals and keep your office swathed in $87,000 area rugs.

All this wild spending is summed up in a rather harsh Dowdversion®.

The bank cloaks itself in a philanthropic glow while wasting our money, acting like the American Cancer Society when in fact it’s a cancer on American society.

And she ends with a long rolling rile of a Alliteration Alert™ along with another Wolfe-ian aside.

[Andrew Cuomo] gets incensed about how ingrained, indoctrinated and insensitive the ex-masters of the universe are. “They think of themselves as kings and queens,” he said. And they’re not ready to abdicate.

Normally a Royal Reference™ is a good thing in a Dowd column, but lately she is fighting mad at those who act to the manor borne. And that is how revolutions begin. Perhaps another Sheryl Crow song sums it up: "A Change Would Do You Good."

Dowd Disengaged

From Rich Cameron's Rich's Musing blog we get a first person account of a recent public appearance by Maureen Dowd. She, along with Mike Murphy and Donna Brazile, was part of the American Jewish University’s 2009 speaker series. Fellow copper-headed pundit Arianna Huffington moderated, proving once and for all she and Maureen are not the same person. The Dowdcentric portion of the post follows:

NY Times columnist Dowd seemed detached from the discussion all evening. She is bright and articulate and had interesting answers whenever Huffington drew her in to the conversation, but she seemed otherwise unengaged. In fact, she spent most of the evening with her body slightly turned away from the rest of the group. While others were sure what they wanted to say, she had to spend moments deciding what she wanted to stay.

In retrospect, this should not be too surprising. In podcasts I’ve listen to of other lectures she has given, this is her speaking style. She’s a great writer, but less-than-enthusiastic speaker.

Her most memorable moments of the evening were when

• Huffington cornered her in to sharing a dinner-table admission that she had twice placed notes in Jerusalem’s West Wall, while on assignment, asking for a Jewish husband. She’s come to the conclusion that God probably doesn’t think pairing a Jewish man with a Black Irish Catholic woman is a good idea; and
• She revealed that after Obama’s almost embarrassing acceptance on his European trip after securing the Democratic nomination that she asked him if he “needed a cigarette” after the experience, implying that the treatment he got was almost like having sex.

Rich also notes that Donna Brazile got most of the speaking time and carried on a running gag about offering to let Mike Murphy fondle her ample bosom.

Oklabama!

Dark Dark Dark
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 21, 2009

Our economic woes continue to bedevil Maureen Dowd. In her special way of making the anecdotal evidential, here are just some of the sacrifices going on in the salons of Georgetown.

We dutifully cut back on Starbucks macchiatos, designer water and even Girl Scout cookies, but we keep hurtling down.

Yes, the economy is even hurting the girls in green. And where are we hurtling to? Hint, it's a trip more traditionally taken in a handbasket.

As the country takes a bullet train to bankruptcy, the last Democratic president urged the current one to “embody” that old American spunk.

That bullet train sure sounds just as alliterative as the proverbial handbasket and much faster. Much faster than the surrey with the fringe on top from our Movies With Maureen® moment.

That spirit of — as they sing in “Oklahoma” — “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY!”

And to put the brakes on it, Bill Clinton is urging a more upbeat attitude, which seems to go against Barack's 'tell it like it is' nature. Maureen admits that Obama doesn't have the clever insights that were Clinton's trademark which leads to her Crossword Clue Of The Week™.

President Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton’s talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus.

Instead, Barack is a wonky explainer. But Maureen is telling Bill to keep his hands off her Hopey.

It’s rich. The Man from Hope whose Missus castigated Candidate Obama for raising “false hopes” is now criticizing President Obama for not peddling more gauzy hope.

And speaking of Rich, Maureen thinks Eric Holder is reopening old wounds.

Eric Holder, who showed precious little bravery in standing up to Clinton on a pardon for the scoundrel Marc Rich, is wrong. We have just inaugurated a black president who installed a black attorney general.

Here are Holder's remarks that set her off.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.

And Maureen will not cotton to being lectured to, especially about race. She has a cute black mailman and everything.

We need leaders to help us through our crises, not provide us with crude evaluations of our character. And we don’t need sermons from liberal virtuecrats, anymore than from conservative virtuecrats.

What we need, it seems, if for heads to roll and the irresponsible to bear their punishment.

[CNBC reporter Rick Santelli] spoke for those who want a pound of flesh. With the Wall Street bailout, Mr. Obama at least gave bankers a bit of the belt, and capped their pay. But homebuyers who wanted more than they could afford seem to be getting a free ride.

And the mention of a free ride, brings right back to our metaphorical ride in a handbasket/bullet train/fringe-topped surrey. We can at least enjoy the trip.

The Goat, Or Who Is Cheney?

Cheney and the Goat Devil
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 17, 2009

Maureen Dowd loves a show and this weekend she rode the Megabus up to New York for an afternoon at Will Farrell's hit one-man valedictory to our recently departed Texan tinpot.

The audience for the Sunday matinee of “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush” howled in delight.

Everybody loves to psychoanalyze our most dysfunctional and incompetent president of the 21st century and Maureen lets one of the show's writers, expound on the Arrested Development Theory.

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,” [Adam] McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie” who was “just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

“He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld.”

Maureen Dowd prefers the Oedipal Rebellion Theory, which is not entirely in conflict with the ADT.

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

And that is the crux of Dubya Administration: What did the President know and when did Dick Cheney tell him?

Cheney as evil overlord and puppet master is such a popular meme that a Google Image search for "Cheney evil" brings up pages of the former Veep photoshopped as various villains or satanic figures. Here is my humble contribution to the genre.

The Will Farrell show also makes that connection:

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

“He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just ran.”

‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ as far as I can tell is just pidgen-Lovecraft used out of fear of using an actual invocation out of the Necronomicon and summoning Chtulhu or one of the other Ancient Ones now that Cheney has released them from their bidding.

In Maureen's one concession that Dubya may have grown a spine sometime during his reign of error, she uses the rather minor incident of Scooter Libby's (and just having the nickname 'Scooter' should be a criminal offense) pardon, or the lack thereof.

By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But Maureen doesn't go as far as attributing the Dumb-Ass Dauphin with moral clarity as much as pre-adolescent stubborness.

But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.

Let's just hope Joe Biden can clear the Naval Observatory from the lingering sulfurous stench of burn-out brimstone.

The Oddball Couple

Oval Newlywed Game
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 14, 2009

Maureen Dowd has been hitting the cable box pretty hard this week. The title of the column comes from the Gameshow Network with Bill Convey's classic double entendre-laden The Newlywed Game which was designed to make couples reveal embarrassing things about each other. Dowd detects a bit of mocking bitterness in Obama's reaction to a Biden gaffe.

And yet, the minute the president began to laugh and answer Garrett, I feared Joe would be the butt.

“I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to,” said Mr. Obama, who couldn’t resist adding, “not surprisingly.”

On the real Newlywed Game, that would get the partner slapped with the answer card.

But then she flips the channel to Nick At Nite where Barack is Felix Ungar to Joe Biden's Oscar Madison.

It can’t be easy for someone with a highly defined superego to be bound to the wacky Biden id, for one so disciplined to be tied to one so undisciplined, for a man so coolly unsentimental to be paired with someone so exuberantly sentimental.

Joe is nothing if not loyal. And the president should return that quality, and not leave his lieutenant vulnerable to “Odd Couple” parodies.

And Maureen loves the late night sketch comedy.

On a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit, Jason Sudeikis’s Biden leaned over Fred Armisen’s Obama, to tell Americans: “Look, I know $819 billion sounds like a lot of money. But it’s just a tip of the iceberg.”

Armisen’s clenched Obama murmurs: “Couldn’t pick Hillary. I just couldn’t.”

But for the main Movies With Maureen® moment, she heads over to Masterpiece Theater territory for her second Jane Austen analogy in the past year (the first time Barack was the haughty Mr. Darcy) to compare Obama with Emma.

Still, the president should brush up on his Jane Austen. When Emma Woodhouse belittles Miss Bates, an older and poorer friend, at a picnic, Mr. Knightly pulls her aside to remonstrate. “How could you be so insolent in your wit?” he chides, reminding her that it is unfeeling to humble someone less fortunate in front of others who will be guided by the way she behaves.

And when you live in the big fancy house, it's only proper to be kind to the hired help no matter how embarrassing they are. Maureen is just trying to inspire some noblesse oblige.

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There...

Trillion Dollar Baby
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 10, 2009
According to Maureen Dowd, The One is no longer walking on water.

So much for the savior-based economy.

While not quite a Rude Name®, for the second time the Treasury Secretary has been called "laconic", an adjective previously used on the iconic bionic Barack.

Tim Geithner, the learned and laconic civil servant and financial engineer, did not sweep in and infuse our shaky psyches with confidence.

And I'm not quite sure what to make of "shaky psyche". It's not quite a full Alliteration Alert® like "learned and laconic", but sure tries to be one. And she practically accuses Geithner of not quite making it past puberty.

For starters, the 47-year-old’s voice kept cracking.

But perhaps inspired by Joseph Lowery's Inauguration invocation, she raps rhyming with:

Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure.

Which leads to Dowd's current favorite whipping boys, clueless billionaires. She whips out a Crossword Clue™ that hasn't been part of her vocabulary since the Clintons had just vacated the White House:

Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whinge about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.

The nuance of "complaining fretfully" just nails the weary whining of the increasingly defensive banks. And Maureen sees Treasury Tim as one of the insiders protecting the Wall Street wailers.

Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.

The Maureen Dowd Anti-Banker Crusade continues. Today she makes more luxury item metaphors.

The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.

She renews her call for heads to roll.

And these impervious, imperial suits who squander taxpayers’ money after dragging the country over the cliff should all be fired...

That is after they take a pay cut.

The pay of all the employees in bailed-out banks, not just top executives, should be capped.

The right wingers and the finance industry apologists will tut-tut that Maureen just doesn't understand the compensation packages of the privileged class. Perhaps. But she knows a populist parade when she leads one.

Prince Charming Bungles The Rescue

Potomac’s Postpartisan Depression
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 7, 2009

Maureen Dowd has been reading fairy tales again and she always loves a Royalty Metaphor™.

Once upon a time, America thought Prince Charming would glide in and kiss her, reviving her from a coma induced by a poison apple of greed, deceit, carelessness, recklessness and overreaching.

The problem is that post-modern Prince Charmings are no longer what they are cracked up to be. In the Shrek movies Prince Charming is a vacuous villain. In Disney’s Enchanted, he is, while still quite charming, not quite up to the transition from 2-D to 3-D. In Maureen Dowd’s version of the tale, he’s also a bit of bumbler.

But then the prince got distracted, seeing Lincoln in the mirror, and instead gave the kiss of life to a bunch of flat-lining Republican tax-cut fetishists.

According to Dowd, Obama is getting run roughshod by the House Republicans.

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.

Rep. Cantor (R-VA) is the House Whip, a job with a metaphorical title that Dowd feels Obama should be employing.

The president and his aides seemed a bit snow-blinded by the White House, overwhelmed and slow to understand that they were losing the high ground and the whip hand.

Her other favorite leadership metaphor is the carrot and stick (discussed at length here).

But the carrot-stick ratio was way out of whack.

She feels the stick should be used to whack a mole, or perhaps a groundhog.

Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

Which is the first of a couple of Dowdversions® used to describe this shift in the power structure.

In his first weeks padding around a White House that still has nails on the walls waiting for new pictures, and phone and e-mail kinks, Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.

She points to the bungled Daschle nomination as where Obama lost his mojo with this zenlike observation.

They wanted him because he was the ultimate insider and they lost him because he was the ultimate insider. Now Daschle’s punishment for getting too rich with special interests will be to get richer with special interests.

Maureen’s advice was to be just a little less ambitious in rescuing the damsal and be a little more of a schlemiel.

Mr. Obama should have written up a kosher (as in pork-free) bill that Americans could trust — and Republicans couldn’t as easily mock — and jammed it through.

So after all this whipping and whacking and bullying and jamming, where does that leave Obama? All alone.

President Obama doesn’t need to leave his new home to be isolated. That’s the specialty of the White House.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, no matter how charming the prince is.