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Maureen Dowd meets anti-Semitism charge By DYLAN BYERS | 9/16/12 6:42 PM EDT New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd set the Jewish political community on fire today with a column about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals that, according to her critics, peddled anti-Semitic imagery. Dowd fairly observed that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy, but asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a "neocon puppet master" who was leading the neocon effort to "slither back" into power. Such language, to say nothing of the questionable legitimacy of her claims, struck experts on...

MESSAGE: They care. Republicans care deeply. They really do. They care deeply about making us think that they care deeply. That’s why they knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax.

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained...

Full title: Judicial Watch Obtains ‘4 to 5 inch Stack’ of ‘Overlooked’ CIA Records Detailing Meetings with bin Laden Filmmakers Obama Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications: Obama White House ‘trying to have visibility into the UBL (Usama bin Laden) projects.’ (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DOD) regarding meetings and communications between government agencies and Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy Award-winning director of The Hurt Locker, and screenwriter Mark Boal in preparation for their film Zero Dark Thirty, which details the capture...

WASHINGTON If you thought it would be hard for TV to top the Summer of the Insatiable Sharks, Ravenous Bears, Killer Bees and Stampeding Lizzie Grubman, you were wrong. Two networks are racing to air prime-time specials this fall featuring mediums interviewing dead celebrities. As Lisa de Moraes reported in The Washington Post, NBC and ABC are both doing such shows for fall sweeps. "The November of the Chatting Dead," she dryly calls it. In a culture so besotted with celebrity, we were bound to run out of upright luminaries to interview. I may tune in if the mediums manage ...

Maureen Dowd really, really dislikes Paul Ryan, resenting even the man's moderate demeanor for hiding what she is sure is "full-tilt virulence." Her Sunday column for the New York Times, "Beware a Beautiful Calm," not only extensively quotes that well-known political commentator Tom Morello (of the left-wing rock band Rage Against the Machine, which hasn't released a studio album since the year 2000), but diagnosed Ryan as psychologically "hysterical." What happens when you realize you are the machine you’re raging against? Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions...

It’s hard to say what is weirder: A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.” Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon.com’s best-seller list six years after it was published. Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns — and all Catholic women — back into moldy subservience. Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. “Just Love: a Framework for...

ON Friday night, the nation’s capital was under a tornado watch. And that was the best thing that happened to the White House all week. As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security. A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,”...

Last week, two prominent Catholic women -- Kathleen Sebelius in an address to the graduates of Georgetown University's public policy school, and Maureen Dowd in a column published in the New York Times -- delivered strong statements about the Church's role in civil society. Dowd's column was more or less a screed, while Sebelius's address was relatively measured in tone. Yet both were marked by some pretty fundamental misunderstandings, which have, sadly, become widespread. Echoing an army of commentators from the last fifty years, Dowd exults in James Joyce's characterization of the Catholic Church (drawn, it appears, from the pages...

Your parents spill a few secrets as they get older. One night at dinner with my mom, I ventured that the rhythm method had worked well for her, given that there were six years between my sister Peggy and my brother Kevin, and six more between Kevin and me. She arched an eyebrow. "Well, sometimes your father used something," she said. My parents were the most devout Catholics I've ever known. But my dad came from a family of 16 in County Clare in Ireland, and my mom's mother came from a family of 13 in County Mayo. So they...

I don't even know why I bother doing this, but here I go again: The New York Times has once again distinguished itself with perfectly idiotic staff commentary about the controversy between the Vatican and radical American nuns. Honestly, Maureen Dowd writing about anything having to do with religion is about like me writing about the storm and stress of the PGA Tour. In her column, she recycles every tired cliche about the Mean Old Men of the Vatican picking on the Poor, Defenseless Church Ladies. Even though the Vatican report is publicly available information, Dowd never once mentions the...

Maureen Dowd is a woman of many talents. She is, of course, a New York Times featured columnist, a Pulitzer Prize winning commentator, and the liberals acknowledged Queen of Snark. Ms. Dowd has also completely blown a gasket, if her column of last week (April 5th) is any indication of her psychological-emotional state. In her column of last week entitled, Men In Black, Maureen employs language and phraseology that her fellow liberals would quickly label “hate speech” if it were uttered by their foes. Ms. Dowd assails the Supreme Court in the most personal and vitriolic terms for their...

WASHINGTON — How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming the one of the most divisive in modern U.S. history. It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes....

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough today suggested that Maureen Dowd's new column about the Supreme Court -- which, she argues, "is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history" -- was an attempt by the New York Times to 'play' Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and influence his ruling on the health care law. "It's over the top, so much so that you sense [the New York Times] is playing Anthony Kennedy... because they know Anthony Kennedy is scared to death of the New York Times editorial page." "It's amazing that you would have a...

TRUST Mitt Romney to be on top of the latest trend of the superrich: the trophy basement. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the new fashion to look low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence — carving out subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters, skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers. The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a 7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of finished underground space. It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two...

We have the starchy guy — tall, handsome, intelligent and rich, with a baronial estate — who’s hard to warm up to. And we have the spontaneous guy, who’s charming and easy to warm up to — until it turns out that he has an unsavory pattern with young women and a suspect relationship with facts. It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick. It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade...

Maureen Dowd, channelling a new liberal narrative, argues that at least Romney is not an anti-intellectual dunce like Rick Perry, and to prove her point, she returns to Perry’s college transcripts. To the coastal elite, college grades are always proof of intelligence and legitimacy: “Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,” said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force. “His other D’s,” Richard Oppel wrote in The Times, “included courses in the principles of...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.” On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game. The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is...

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.... Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”: I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat, Won’t know exactly what I mean by that. I mean so altruistically moral I never take my own side in a quarrel.