Posted on 09/24/2004 12:43:25 AM PDT by kattracks
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, probably the ditziest Pulitzer Prize winner ever, has just come out with her first book: Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk, a collection of her columns about the President. When I first heard about Bushworld, I remembered when Dowd returned from a long vacation earlier this year with a column that swung from Bush to lesbians and back again and left many readers scratching their heads even more than usual.Dowd hooked that return column - which had something to do with the paradox of George W. Bush's popularity even as lesbians are no longer considered outre - around the premiere of Showtime's new TV series The L Word. The connection was just too deliciously amusing for the wordplay-loving Dowd, because, you see, "L" is a letter, and "W" is a letter, and therefore, Dowd concluded: "It's hard to figure, but America seems ready to embrace W. and the L word at the same time."
Get it? Not everyone did, judging from the confused reaction I saw in online weblogs, where she is regularly referred to as Moron Dud and Stupid Pan Dowdy. Apparently not everyone remembered, by the time Dowd had meandered down to her finish line, that the "L" in The L Word stands for lesbians. She'd explained it just a few graphs before, but there's something about a Dowd column that makes the mind wander. Attention, class!
But even those with a vested interest missed Dowd's point, if she did have one. As it happens, the day after Dowd's Bush/lesbians/whatever piece ran, Showtime presented its midseason programming to reporters in Hollywood. "You know something must be happening when Maureen Dowd mentions George W. Bush and 'The L Word' in the same sentence - both favorably, I might add," a Showtime exec announced.
Of course, Dowd hadn't mentioned Bush favorably - she never does - but The L Word people hadn't understood that, and obviously it didn't matter. As the Showtime exec chattered happily on, I realized that this was something of a watershed Maureen Dowd moment. Now it was (sort of) official: No one reads Maureen Dowd anymore for analysis, or insight, or even simple sense. They just read her because she's there, in the New York Times, like the weather report.
You hear a lot of talk in election years about the polarized American public, but few politicians are as polarizing as Maureen Dowd. Esquire included her in its "Women We Love" feature in the early '90s, and she's still something of a sacred cow in Washington and at the New York Times. But to many outside her Inside-the-Beltway/media glamour circuit, Dowd has become the Woman You Love to Hate.
Critics have called her style catty, or at least kittenish. But this isn't really apt anymore. Cats scratch, and Dowd no longer draws blood. An effective criticism of Bush and his policies has to involve more than just chirping "Rummy" and "Boy Emperor" or dreaming up whimsical dialogues. Dowd is now more pixyish than kittenish, which is part of what makes her so annoying. Who wants to deal with Tinker Bell flitting around when you're trying to read the op-ed pages?
Here's a line from a column she wrote about Bush becoming "chummy" with Russian president Vladimir Putin: "The Russian president said he was looking forward to riding horses with the American president. Mr. Bush had to explain he doesn't ride. He prefers to saddle up his jeep or his golf cart, Gator, around the ranch."
And this meant...what, exactly? Nothing. But in a Maureen Dowd column, meaning has become unnecessary. It was just another schoolgirl spitball lobbed at Bush: Screw you and the horse you didn't ride in on.
Dowd's enemies aren't all on the right, by the way. When she began her Times column in 1995, Susan Faludi took Dowd to task in the Nation for not being a serious feminist like her predecessor Anna Quindlen. Although I rarely agree with Quindlen (who now writes a column for Newsweek), at least she respects readers enough to bother laying out an intellectual argument, complete with examples to back up her points. Reading Quindlen is rarely a waste of time; reading Dowd usually is.
And yet Dowd still has enough true believer fans for Bushworld to have spent the last three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. This struck me when I read, in the New York Observer's profile of the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz a few months ago, a quote from one of Rabinowitz's Greenwich Village neighbors describing her disapprovingly as "the person who doesn't like Maureen Dowd."
What a cloying, insular world that conjures - like the scent of an entire rose garden in one small bottle of attar. So for the benefit of people like that neighbor, perhaps an explanation is in order.
Dowd's relentless shallowness and silliness are her most obvious crimes against readers. And because she's the only woman with a plum twice-a-week spot on the New York Times op-page, the tacit and insulting message is that female political thinkers can't be expected to actually think. Sometimes when she's skittering around, like a water beetle on a pond's surface, Dowd happens upon a notion she likes a lot. But rather than develop it into an actual argument, she just repeats it endlessly, like an eight-year-old with a knock-knock joke.
Take the column that inspired the title of Bushworld. After its opening line ("It's their reality. We just live and die in it.") the column consists entirely of 25, mostly one-sentence aphorisms. Examples: "In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying..." "In Bushworld, we're making progress on the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists." "In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America." And so on.
Set aside for a moment that these "Bushworld" statements are awfully easy to parody: "In Maureen World, soldiers would never die in battle." "In Maureen World, we can assume that before the war on terror, terrorists weren't a problem." "In Maureen World, comparisons between a President who believes in God and people who think women should be stoned to death for religious reasons can be made with a straight face." And so on.
The big reason a person might not like Maureen Dowd is that beneath all the cutesiness lurks thinking that is ignorant, hysterical and unoriginal. There's never anything in a Dowd column that you haven't heard a hundred times before at any upscale cocktail party.
A few months ago, Dowd began a column by continuing her cheerleading for the 9/11 Commission but concluded it with what really seems to be bothering her: President Bush's religious ideas.
His statement that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world" led her to worry that, "given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops... we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war."
Maybe not. But it makes you wonder how Dowd would have responded to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address hope "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Probably she would have pointed out that this might further offend the Confederate Army, who after all thought God was on their side too.
In Maureen World, anything can happen. Except an idea.
It's amazing that Maureen Dowd has anywhere near the notability that she does. Same goes for Namoi 'Puffinstuff' Wolf.
I saw her thoroughly awful performance on O'R Factor tonight and I am certain she arrives at tv studios with a special camera lens by Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm, designed to make her look 115lbs (but the technology isn't quite 'there' yet.
Chrissy Matthews and his ilk think Dowd is just the hip new thing. She comes off as someone who's too hip to do research, and like that annoying drunk girl who sits there laughing at you while you're trying to have a simple conversation so her "cute" "drunk" act doesn't bore you to death.
I don't wat O'R regularly but he was on while I ate dinner, and I felt sorry for the guy having to go through that ordeal. Her point--that W's team manipulates women to get across a false pro-woman front--was simply, and simply wrong, so she had to dress it up with all kinds of inane chat. When O'Reilly challenged her, she basically said "I don't have FACTS to prove this, you just KNOW it's true."
Even O'R wasn't as mean to her as he could have been. He seemed more like he was humoring her rather than trying to have a debate.
Each time he pressed her for specifics, she brushed back her hair, tilted her head, did her half giggle and deflected with 'you're too smart for that, Bill!' She went to that well about 3 times in 90 seconds when O'R just cut it out and dismissed her faint praise.
For a 'feminist thinker' it really is unintentionally funny for her to transparently use what's left of her sagging sex appeal to try and wiggle out of a jam (and the thought of Naomi wiggling is pretty grotesque, I am sorry i brought that up). You've come a long way, baby. ;-)
You've got Dowd's act down - she is a college bar giggler who has cruised past 40, unaware that she is 20 years past her time (or is it prime?). She just comes across as too pleased with herself but not very well informed or cogent.
To be fair, WF Buckley alwats came across as very pleased with himself, though he was very well informed and articulate.
More proof that pot kills brain cells.
Even back in the day she wasn't nearly as hot as she thought she was. She looked too much like the girls in high school who thought that just because they WEREN'T dazzlingly pretty, then they MUST have brains, right? Her observations were the same old feminist blather with a layer of "but I like sex with men" sleaze to make her seem like she wasn't a manhater. She's not; she's also yet another of these chatters who take accepted wisdom and trot it out like it's some amazing thing they alone discovered.
Man, being stuck in a corner of the room with her at a party, having to listen to that blather while she tosses her head like she thinks every guy in the room is looking at her.... I've never seen such a "feminist" who was so hungry for male attention.
You're giving Dowd way too much credit - she works her gimmick and her stuff is like what passes for witty observations at a High School newspaper. Her problem, I think, is that she took all that shallow praise to heart, and at no time since then has anyone bothered to tell her to work on her writing and style.
She is a classic liberal thinker with a podiunm - 1/2 baked but with a wonderful sense of self worth and self esteem.
I'll say this for OR--he cannot hide his boredom with a bad guest.
It's the Art Buchwald syndrome. It isn't that anyone actually reads her, it's just that liberals don't want to admit to each other they don't find her funny or insightful. The New York Times is falling into the same category.
I just realized where Kerry got his new Bush lives in a fantasy world" foreign policy, from Maureen Dowd!
You're right. Part of 'Puffinstuff's' gimmick all along was that she was something a babe, and the dirty non-secret was that she never really was.
Seeing her 'work it' now is unintentional comedy. You hit the nail on the head - she is certainly not ugly but certainly not a prom queen, she fell into the paradigm that 'she must' be smart, followed by 'she must' be witty and insightful. As you say, she is none of the above.
Her points are hackneyed and tired, and on O'R tonight clearly not very well thought out. It was an embarassing wasted 6 minute segments (Bill would do better to cart out a porn actress or former high class prostitute, as he is prone to doing about once a month).
Any you are right again about imagining a scene with her at a party. You know the type: very alone, talks too much, ostebsibly 'successful' mostly be her own standards, her rap is that she is smart and insightful, but really she is trying painfully to 'work' that glimmer of sex appeal she once had in her 21st Century 165lb frame. She was doing it clear as a bell on O'R.
She truly is the feminist most hungry for some kind of validation from men (sexual and otherwise). Whacked out.
And whenever any woman giggles "Oh, you're so smart" at me I always respond with "Actually, I'm not." Nice way to shut them down.
In Naomi's case, I think lately she has found herself standing at a 2nd avenue bar 25 minutes after last call, all alone, yet thoroughly convinced that every guy was so into her and that they were just 'afraid' to approach her.
To which I have to say, "TAXI!!!!" ;-)
Haha! Well Dowdie has at least one reader who takes her seriously!!!
BWHAHAHAHAHA
Now thats funny and believable!!
I watched poor Naomi last night, too. After a minute my astute daughter asked, "Who's that stupid woman?"
"When O'Riley challenged her, she basically said, 'I don't have FACTS to prove this, you just KNOW it's true.'"
A better one sentance summary of the Liberal mindset for the last 35 years would be hard to find.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.