Free Republic

During the 2012 campaign, the president and his top advisers liked to make the argument that if he was re-elected, the “fever” would break. Washington would no longer be the graveyard of progress, the crypt of consensus. Once dystopian Republicans accepted that Obama was not running again, they would start cooperating with him. .... Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership. He still thinks...

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.” Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging. On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year....

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...

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected. “I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on. The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up. Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah,...

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...

Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood. Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world. “We are choosing hope over fear,” Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses. But fear has garroted hope, as America reels from the...

Catherine Zeta-Jones got some flack when she was caught smoking while her husband Michael Douglas was fighting throat cancer, but now that Michael’s won his battle, Catherine’s trying to quit smoking with electronic cigarettes — even if her hubby hasn’t given up the bad habit himself. The Academy Award winner has been using the Smokestik electronic cigarettes for three months and a rep for the company tells OK! she was gifted them by the brand to support her quitting the bad habit. How can you tell that Catherine is using her electronic cigs and not going back to the unhealthy...

SO I was chatting with Chris Coons, the new Democratic senator from Delaware who had a rare win over the Tea Party when he beat loony Christine “I’ve Dabbled in Witchcraft but I Am Not a Witch” O’Donnell in the midterms.... [Lots more garbage] Money quote: Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health...

Anti-Catholicism is arguably the oldest bias in the history of the American people. Or so Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. — who had no dog in the fight — once told the dean of U.S. Catholic historians, Fr. John Tracy Ellis. Over the centuries, however, anti-Catholicism in America has taken on several forms. In its classic New England iteration, anti-Catholicism was shaped by Protestant and, later, Enlightenment-rationalist assumptions. Both were neatly summarized in a letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, written during the First Continental Congress after Mr. Adams had undertaken an anthropological expedition through the streets of Philadelphia:This...

The remake of "Charlie's Angels" that ABC is adding to its fall TV lineup is a masterpiece of subtlety. It takes at least 15 minutes before the three girls get wet. The "Playboy Club" pilot on NBC's schedule is also a stirring moment in feminism. Set in mobbed-up Chicago in the '60s, the script glories in "chasing Bunny tail" and opens panting: "The Door Bunny at the entrance to the Playboy Club. The ears. The tail. The satin. The breasts." Bunny Janie's "cleavage could pick up a salt shaker." Our leading lady, Maureen, a Cigarette Bunny in corset, fishnets and...

He can’t handle the truth. At least not while he’s facing the brig. Lt. Col. Terry Lakin of the Army had a motley crew of frustrated Birthers at his court-martial here on Tuesday. The decorated Pentagon doctor from Colorado became the movement’s hero when he went on YouTube in March to brazenly urge President Obama to show “honesty and integrity” by releasing his “original signed birth certificate, if you have one.” He vowed to disobey what he called “illegal orders” to deploy to Afghanistan because he did not regard Obama as a legitimate commander in chief.

You know you’re in trouble when you need Henry Kissinger to vouch for you. But there was the one formerly known as “The One” sitting at a table with a bunch of old, white, Republican dudes, choosing the most abstruse issue on the agenda for his moment to Man Up. With Republicans treating the president like a dirt sandwich and Democrats begging the president to throw a knuckle sandwich, Obama drew his line in the sand on telemetry. The Start arms treaty used to be a chance for American presidents to stare down the Russians. Now it’s a chance for...

Barack Obama became president by brilliantly telling his own story. To stay president, he will need to show he can understand our story. At first it was exciting that Obama was the sort of brainy, cultivated Democrat who would be at home in a “West Wing” episode. But now he acts like he really thinks he’s on “West Wing,” gliding through an imaginary, amber-lit set where his righteous self-regard is bound to be rewarded by the end of the hour. Hey, dude, you’re a politician. Act like one.

As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery. There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River. As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state. We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up...

How did the first president of color become so colorless? The president is everywhere, trying to get more aggressive and recapture some of his “Yes we can” mojo in an effort to fend off the rebuke that’s barreling toward him from voters this fall. One of the independent voters Obama will be trying to charm over the next two years is my sister, Peggy, a formerly ardent Obamican (a Republican who changed spots to vote for Obama). Despite being a Washington native, Peggy believed that the dazzling young newcomer could change Washington. But she has lost a lot of faith...

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...

Maureen Dowd Hysterically Claims MSNBC Is Tearing Down Obama By Noel Sheppard Created 08/15/2010 - 10:35 New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said Sunday MSNBC is tearing down President Obama. More amazing than that, she was actually serious. In her "No Love From The Lefties [1]," Dowd bashed "progressives" for not staying on the President's bandwagon. This includes MSNBC who she hysterically claimed "is trying to make its reputation by tearing down [Obama]": One of the most disgusting things about Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, and now the former maverick John McCain, is that they are happy to be co-opted...

Her critics used to paint her as a scary Marxist. Now they cast her as a spoiled princess. During the campaign, she was caricatured on the cover of The New Yorker as a fist-bumping, gun-toting Black Panther. Now she’s mocked by a New York Daily News blogger as a jet-setting, free-spending Marie Antoinette. Michelle Obama is the most popular figure in the administration, but last week she had her first brush with getting brushed back in the press. In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House...

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,...

T. S. Eliot wrote about when memory mixes with desire. Politicians get in trouble when desire nixes memory. They know they are misrepresenting an experience, but can’t help themselves. Their desire to be the person they describe is too overpowering. Politicians are actors trapped in the same part, and some occasionally feel the need to punch up the script. They are salesmen engaged in the hard sell, and some occasionally get carried away.... Consider Richard Blumenthal.... Blumenthal added a filigree here and there, not because he needed them to win, but perhaps because those more heroic actions fed his innermost...

When does a woman go from being single to unmarried? As my friend Carol Lee, a Politico reporter, observes: “It seems like a cruel distinction and terrifying crossover.” Single carries a connotation of eligibility and possibility, while unmarried has that dreaded over-the-hill, out-of-luck, you-are-finished, no-chance implication. An aroma of mothballs and perpetual aunt. Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages. But often, for women, once you’re 40 or 50, or simply beyond childbearing age, you’re no longer single. You’re unmarried — meaning it isn’t your choice to be alone. There are post-50...

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...

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin. She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls. The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax. “And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive...

Angry. Bitter. Desperately trying to avoid irrelevance. Clinging to past glories. The average American, the beleaguered taxpayer in the age of Obama? No, welcome to the world of Maureen Dowd. Dowd is the signature columnist for The New York Times and Cardinal Richelieu to the King Moe (a dynastic line that includes Larry and Curly) of its publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. Dowd faces a new information age in which readers continue to turn their backs on her and her employer of 26 years, leaving a shrinking readership of aging elites from academia, politics and media. Her readers are disappearing...

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska. But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties. Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions. So Newt took it upon himself...

You're Maureen Dowd, and you're scared. The self-doubt, the "Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas," the whole Robert Frost thing --you know, "The Road Not Taken" -- relentlessly nibbles at the edge of your consciousness. You're Maureen Dowd and you're scared -- Sarah Palin scared. Others -- like columnists Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker -- are jealous. But you are scared. You're celebrated, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, famed and feared, known as the "Queen of Snots" for eviscerating prose largely directed at conservatives and middle America, which begins at the Hudson River and ends just east of zip code 90210...

Karl Rove takes on Maureen Dowd.

It isn’t so much that Dick and Rummy are back. It’s that they never left. They had no intention of turning America’s national security over to the Boy Wonder. The two best infighters in Washington history weren’t yielding turf to a bunch of peach-fuzz pinkos who side with terrorists. Let W. work out at the S.M.U. gym in Dallas, waiting for history to redeem him; Dick and Rummy are leaning forward into history, as they always do. Cheney is tawny with TV makeup; there’s no point taking it off. The gigs are nonstop, and he has a big Obama-bashing speech...

NEW YORK — New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

How quaint. The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances. The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress... (snip) Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.” This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign...

Last Friday the New York Times sent out a memo telling staffers it's cracking down on expenses across the board. Sunday it published Maureen Dowd's (expensed) account of three days at Canyon Ranch resort. Huh: MoDo is in top, infuriating, faux-self-loathing form. She spends the first several paragraphs wondering rhetorically whether anyone could justify spending thousands of dollars at a pricey luxury spa in Miami Beach during these hard times. Then she goes ahead and does. With the NYT picking up the tab, and paying her for her precious insight as well, we have to assume. My mom always warned...

THE MAVERICK WEARS PRADA Screenplay by Maureen Dowd Revised third draft © Oct. 29, 2008 (snip) NICOLLE Think like a diva. Where would you go rogue? TRACEY Sean Hannity’s pocket. Could he pant over her more? Or maybe she’s hiding in Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s dressing room at “The View.”

MoDo's off the plane Howard Kurtz hangs out in the press tent at Oxford, Miss., and learns that one famous columnist will not be flying on Straight Talk Air. Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC's Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane.) http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0908/MoDos_off_the_plane.html Maureen Dowd Reacts To Being Tossed From McCain Plane http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/01/maureen-dowd-reacts-to-be_n_130863.html Earlier this week, we learned that the McCain campaign...

The New York Times and John McCain really don't seem to like each other all that well and it appears the disagreement may have spilled over into a campaign plane ban for Times columnist Maureen Dowd. McCain Campaign chief Steve Schmidt scalded the New York Times just last week in a conference call where he ripped the paper and screamed bias. "Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization," Schmidt said. "This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for...

I’ve been in Alaska only a week, but I’m already feeling ever so much smarter about Russia. I can’t quite see it from my hotel window, but, hey, I know it’s out there somewhere, beyond all the stuffed bears and cruise ships and glaciers and oil derricks. The proximity of the country from which William Seward bartered to buy Alaska for $7 million — Seward’s icebox — is so illuminating that I suddenly realize that we would commit a grave error by overestimating Russia’s economic strength. After all, it represents only 2.8 percent of the world’s G.D.P., even though its...

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin.

DENVER I’ve been to a lot of conventions, and there’s always something gratifyingly weird that happens. Dan Quayle acting like a Dancing Hamster. Teresa Heinz Kerry reprising Blanche DuBois. Dick Morris getting nabbed triangulating between a hooker and toes. But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru. “What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him. “Submerged hate,” he promptly replied. There were a lot of bitter...

a clandestine meeting takes place between two senators with one goal. “Our toast to The One,” they say in unison, “is that he’s toast.” “Obama should have picked you, Hillary,” John McCain tells her. “It isn’t fair, my friend. But it just makes it easier for me to whup him.” Hillary replies. “I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.” “He’s a bright young man, but he got ahead of himself,” McCain says. “He needs to be taught a lesson, and we’re the ones to do...

...Dowd may have unwittingly summed up her conundrum in a July piece, in which she remarked to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, "It seems a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys." (For the record, Stewart scoffed at her notion, asking, "Are you kidding me?") Sorry, but Dowd's references to Obama as Beanpole Guy, Barry and No-Drama Obama seem to be forced attempts at humor... For her part, Dowd can occasionally appear to cross the line from sarcasm to meanness. She recently wrote about McCain: "John looks in the mirror and sees his face marred...

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention. You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama. Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism...

"In her column last Wednesday, Maureen Dowd wrote that a Democratic lawmaker privately asked Gen. David Petraeus why there weren’t more Democrats in the military, and he replied, “There are more than you think.”

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton. After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place. Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana...

If this is truly the Decline and Fall of the Clinton Empire, it is marked by one freaky stroke of bad luck and one striking historical irony. How likely is it that a woman who finally unfetters herself from one superstar then finds herself eclipsed by another? And when historians trace how her inevitability dissolved, they will surely note this paradox: The first serious female candidate for president was rejected by voters drawn to the more feminine management style of her male rival. The bullying and bellicosity of the Bush administration have left many Americans exhausted and yearning for a...

Suddenly, everyone was in the mood for love. Would the scream team turn into the dream team? After Thursday’s Democratic debate, CNN’s Carol Costello said there were “heart palpitations” and “ripples of joy” in the glittery Kodak Theater audience at the idea of a Hillary-Obama or Obama-Hillary ticket, after he was gallant with her and she laughed gaily with him. How could Hollywood not fall in love with Hollywood’s favorite plot? After lots of sparking and sparring, the couple falls into each other’s arms in the last scene. The would-be matchmakers didn’t seem to know that in Hollywood, couples who...

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes. A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?” Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t...

It’s an odd cultural inversion. The French first lady, the one in a role where wives traditionally ignored and overlooked their husbands’ peccadilloes for the greater gain of keeping their marriages intact and running the Élysée Palace, has fled her gilded perch, acting all-American and brimming over with feelings and feminist impulses. The former American first lady, the one who’s supposed to be brimming over with feminist impulses, has ignored and overlooked her husband’s peccadilloes for the greater gain of keeping her marriage intact, as she tries to return to the gilded perch and run the White House... Few are...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it -- George Satayana. Well and good. But being a prisoner of the past presents dangers, too. Stay tuned for an example of how reliance on a corollary of Satayana's rule went horribly wrong for the U.S. Maureen Dowd's column of this morning "W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D." is the latest example of what passes for MSM wisdom on Iran. In a nutshell, the argument goes: we attacked Iraq over ill-founded concerns about WMD and got bogged down. So perish the thought of using force to prevent Iran from acquiring a...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman. The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the Web site's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. The...