Free Republic

JENKINS: You can hear your fans yelling for you. Did you think it was going to get this big, that this movement was going to have the impact that it has had? PALIN: Absolutely. We know the impact is going to be greater come November 3rd because people then will be focused on the 2012 election and the need then for a more aggressive movement to stop what President Obama is doing to this country when it comes to killing jobs with all the policies that he is so engaged in that make absolutely no sense for America. What I'm...

- Catholic Exchange - http://catholicexchange.com - Time to move on, MaureenPosted By Genevieve S. Kineke On October 17, 2010 @ 11:02 am In Feminine Genius Blog | 1 Comment Maureen Dowd [1] has brought her cattiness to new heghts (depths?) by snarking away at the women who have succeeded in connecting with a wide swath of American voters. No matter what one’s political stripe, one must acknowledge that there is a down-home connection for many who are weary of high taxes, politicisation of the classroom, and constant barriers thrown in the path of average families. For them, tea party-type candidates...

I used to enjoy reading Maureen Dowd. I think she has a way with words and at times she even promotes thinking outside of conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, those columns are few and far between. Reading her column in the Sunday New York Times irritated me. I guess that’s her specialty — irritation. I remember once after I’d left the White House I mentioned one of her columns to a friend and the friend said, “You know, you don’t have to read that stuff any more . . . you graduated.” But I’m a news junkie; I can’t help myself. Kind...

Maureen Dowd's pen strikes again. The woman who has made a fortune out of cocktail-party cattiness has decided, this week, to aim her eternally-adolescent barbs at attractive Republican women -- the ones making mincemeat out of their feminized Democrat-male opponents. Reading her latest self-revealing scream, I couldn't help feeling sorry for little Maureen, still tormented after all these decades. Likening "mean girl" Republican women -- "Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine" -- to those who picked on her in high school as "grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend,...

Imagine a movie: Maureen Dowd is seen thrashing around on her bed, clearly in the grips of a gruesome nightmare. When she awakes, it is not to relief but to the horrifying discovery that reality is worse than anything her fevered brain had conjured. That is the sense of hopelessness, desperation and depression in which Dowd drowns in her New York Times column of today. The piece is one long lament, as Dowd decries the Dems' fate. Not only are they on the brink of losing--they are losing to opponents who are not merely wrong but "the worst" and "insane."...

At the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, the sojourning President Obama bought a few books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. It was for his daughter, but it may have also conjured a sweet memory for the beleaguered president. Only a couple of years ago, when he was campaigning, Obama inspired comparisons with the noble lawyer Atticus Finch. Now, after flipping about on some hot-button issues, most recently the plan for an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero, he’s more likely to be painted by disillusioned supporters as Atticus Flinch. The bookstore gave the...

It’s not a good narrative arc: The man who walked on water is now ensnared by a crisis under water. One little hole a mile down on the ocean floor, so deep it seems like hell spewing up its sulfurous smoke, has turned the thrilling saga of “The One” into the gurgling horror of “The Abyss.” (Thank goodness James Cameron, the director of “The Abyss,” came to Washington Tuesday to help the administration figure out how to cap the BP well. What’s next? Sending down the Transformers and Megan Fox?) With as much as 34 million gallons of oil inking...

Sex and the single Kagan. That's what the nomination of Elena Kagan is all about for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who just this past week offered her take on the controversy surrounding the nomination of the elite leftist from Princeton and Harvard to the Supreme Court. Kagan is single and a woman, and men -- especially those who are conservative and occupy the nation's less financially blessed zip codes -- "are threatened by more successful women." And again, the spinning spinster of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, headquarters of the Times and ground zero for the media elite,...

From: Joe Biden [info@barackobama.com] Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 9:38 AM To: Obama supporters Subject: A reason to smile. Folks — This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe. Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’s a girl’s girl. Just try dragging...

I don't write about Maureen Dowd simply because she rarely offers anything worthy of serious, intellectual discussion. I don't claim any sort of high intellect for myself, of course, and don't necessarily claim to be able to thoroughly judge the work of the deepest of thinkers but Dowd's work is like the old saying about pornography in as much as when it comes to stupid prattle I know it when I see it. Breaking my own no-Mo-Dowd rule, though, her April 10 column must be singled out as a prime example of just how silly, inconsequential, and, well, stupid Mo...

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women. I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders. How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination? I was puzzling over that one when it hit...

holding the New York Times accountable   By Phil Lawler | March 31, 2010 11:46 AM "It doesn't seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin," writes Maureen Dowd, in another of her toxic columns for the New York Times.Well, Maureen, the Church wouldn't be answering charges this week if irresponsible journalists weren't making unsupported claims, and writing vile columns based on smirks and cheap shots. It's not "spin" when you try to clear the record after newspaper reports have muddied it. "Spin" is when you churn out opinions without basing them...

I was tempted to turn my abaya into a black masquerade cloak and sneak into Mecca, just hop over the Tropic of Cancer to the Red Sea and crash the ultimate heaven’s gate. Sir Richard Burton, the 19th-century British adventurer, translator of “The Arabian Nights” and the “Kama Sutra” and self-described “amateur barbarian,” was an illicit pilgrim to the sacred black granite cube. He wore Arab garb and infiltrated the holiest place in Islam, the Kaaba, the “center of the Earth,” as he called it, in the Saudi city where the Prophet Muhammad was born. But in the end, it...

It has been quite a journey for Ted Olson. He’s gone from being the conservative lawyer who helped crown W. by winning the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, to being a lesbian. “Maureen,” he told me in his gravelly voice, “one of the biggest lesbian groups in this country told me I’m already an honorary lesbian.” (snip) Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn’t realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable....

In her op-ed piece today, entitled Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool, Maureen Down simply eviscerates President Obama for his cluelessness in handling the panty bomber fiasco. Here’s how it starts: Our president came down from the mountaintop. He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew. We are under attack. There is evil in the world. Yemen is a...

As my brother Kevin headed off to Christmas Eve Mass in the Maryland suburbs, I asked him how he thought the first year of Barack Obama had gone. He didn’t have to pray long over that one. “Fine,” he replied, “if you like unmitigated disasters like the Hindenburg and the Redskins season.” If it’s Christmas, it must be time for my conservative brother to take over my column and turn it a blazing shade of red. So without further ado, here is Kevin unplugged, offering a perspective from “the real America,” as one of his favorite Republican philosophers, Sarah Palin,...

WASHINGTON The Maverick’s buck stops here. John McCain is no longer the media’s delight and his party’s burr, bucking convention with infectious relish. The man used to be such a constructive independent that some of his Republican Senate colleagues called him a traitor. Now he’s such a predictable obstructionist that he’s in the just-say-no vanguard with the same conservatives who used to despise him. On Tuesday afternoon on the floor, Senator Mitch McConnell, who contemptuously fought McCain’s campaign finance reform bill all the way to the Supreme Court, oozed admiration toward his Arizona colleague, as McCain did yet another grandstanding...

At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his team. Sipping a glass of water, the president offered special gratitude to the woman on his right. “I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.” The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled. In the back of the room, back where they were parched,...

While one can agree or disagree with Maureen Dowd's portrayal of Goldman Sachs and other bankers (column, Nov. 11), her statement that "the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple" potentially raises one of the classic themes of anti-Semitism linking Jews and abhorrent money-lending practices. However unintentional, Ms. Dowd's invoking the New Testament story to illustrate our current financial mess conjures up old prejudices against Jews.

Timothy Dolan came to town with a hammer in his hand. Of course, it wasn’t really much of hammer: just a little tappity-tap kind of thing, a tack hammer with a bright blue head, which he used it to rap on the door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of the traditional ceremony for the installation of a new archbishop in New York. That was back on April 15, the Wednesday before Easter. In the six months since, Archbishop Dolan has done hardly any public hammering — until now. On Oct. 29 he used the archdiocese’s website to publish a...