What? No barf alert?
Optional for Dowd columns, as her name alone is fair warning. However, pix of Catherine Zeta Jones are mandatory.
Posted on 06/23/2002 5:06:26 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
WASHINGTON - On Air Force One on Friday, Ari Fleischer gave reporters a preview of the president's schedule, including a pitch for fitness in Orlando, a Republican fund-raiser in Florida, a T-ball game on the South Lawn, a Presidential 3 Mile Run in Washington, the White House Fitness Expo and another fund-raiser at the Washington Convention Center. For W., time well spent making soft money and hard bodies. The press secretary then brought forward John Bridgeland, the director of USA Freedom Corps, who briefed the press on the commencement speech Bush was about to make at Ohio State on the culture of public service. "He's building on notions of duty and charity, human fulfillment and love of country; ideas anchored in great religious teachings and the thinking of the ancient Greeks and Romans and in the principles of the founding fathers," Bridgeland solemnly explained. He said the president "derived" his ideas from the teachings of -- now follow along -- de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, "the world's major religions," Aristotle, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Pope John Paul II, Cicero, Abraham Lincoln and the founding fathers Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The reporters were saucer-eyed, realizing they had so misjudged the president intellectually. They were surprised to discover the relative inconsequentiality of Plato, Locke and Hegel for his thinking. (Maybe their influence will be apparent in the homeland security policy.) They had never expected to hear the words "George Eliot" and "George Bush" in the same sentence. Did the latter George know that he differed from the former in a fundamental way? Who would have guessed that a man responsible for immortal locutions like last week's gem about immigration -- "We need to know who's coming in and why they're not going out" -- was in fact relying upon the Tusculan Disputations and the Nicomachean Ethics? W. has come a long, long way. His main cultural reference point used to be "Cats." What is going on? When Bush is channeling the belle of Amherst, Mrs. Bush is carrying her literacy program too far. The reporters were skeptical. "About Tocqueville," asked The New York Times' David Sanger, "has the president read any sections of that?" "He has," Bridgeland replied. "And we've actually discussed Nicomachean Ethics together, de Tocqueville. Yesterday he was talking in the Oval Office about how Lincoln had completed or addressed the concern that the founding fathers had when -- Madison in particular -- when he rejected Patrick Henry's request to include a declaration of rights in addition, because of the concern that future generations would not remember that there are duties associated with protecting the country we love so much. He made that very case yesterday in the Oval Office." Are they kidding? Maybe Bridgeland misheard. Maybe the president was expounding upon the Nickelodeon Ethics. After the briefing about how much the president had imbibed from the work of Tocquey Boy, Jorge Eliot and Billy Bob Wordsworth, Bush didn't actually quote any of them in his rather pedestrian speech in the Ohio State football stadium. His intellectual modesty is striking. The idea of helping your neighbors doesn't need support from a highbrow pantheon of philosophers and poets. It's a staple of Kiwanis Clubs and 4-H centers. JFK did it in a sentence: "Ask not ..." W. won the presidency by never pretending he was someone he wasn't. His appeal was that he seemed to recognize his limits, scaling down the office to suit his simplicity. But post-9/11, he wants to do a lot of grand things. And maybe his aides think his grand deeds require conferring upon him a grand aura. On the recent Moscow trip, Condi Rice told reporters she had given the president "Crime and Punishment" to read. Reporters wondered if he thought it was a spin-off of "Law & Order." Bush advisers are not satisfied with puffing him up merely as president anymore. Now they want to portray him as philosopher-president. Knock it off. If we want a pedant, we can get the real deal. Al Gore is polysyllablically waiting in the wings. Maureen Dowd
Those who can..do and those who can't... write worthless articles trying to look like they can.
Enough said.
In contrast to the sighing, patronizing Al Gore.......or the same.
You can weigh the gravitas of a candidate or any person by the people he surrounds himself with and places in positions of authority.
Clinton's Cabinet at first glance resembled a freak or circus sideshow of midgets, giants, sexual-identity challenged, etc. Excluding one or two genuinely talented appointments, Clinton's Cabinet members were as intellectually vacant as they were visually curious.
Al Gore stood by Clinton, calling him a "great president", at the height of the impeachment process of 1998. Al Gore believed that Clinton, and his party were more important than the welfare of the country.
On the other hand, George W. Bush promoted Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice just to name four.
Whose judgment would you prefer? Clinton and Gore.........or Bush and Cheney??
What? No barf alert?
Optional for Dowd columns, as her name alone is fair warning. However, pix of Catherine Zeta Jones are mandatory.
It's too bad Ann Landers died. |
For all I know or care, she's the nastiest woman alive. What's important is that she drove Dowd over the edge.
OK, and she's not unpleasant to look at.
True, but she has colored most of the pictures and was able to stay inside the lines on at least 26% of the occasions!
The best part is that Dowd thought she was writing a column of substance!!!
Dowd's own words show her to be a "surfacey" person who doesn't value depth (aka, gravitas).
If Dowd had better sense, she'd be embarrassed by her own words.
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I guess it is Maureen Dowd's fate to be the bitter old woman sitting in the corner, muttering to herself about what might have been... carping to no one in particular about the dress and demeanor of all those around.