[Pokey78]

Catherine Zeta-Jones
2003 Academy Award Winner
Best Supporting Actress

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From Oxblog:

IMMUTABLE LAWS OF DOWD

1. Ashcroft never deserves credit.

2. Offering constructive solutions to problems, instead of whining endlessly about them, is a sign of weakness.

3. The People Magazine principle: all political phenomena can be explained with reference solely to caricatures of the personalities involved ("Dubya" is stupid; "Poppy" is an aristocrat; Cheney is macho-man; etc.). Any reference to the common good or even to old-fashioned politicking is, like, so passe.

4. It is much better to be cute than coherent.

5. Maureen knows best. Her long years as a columnist (doing basically what your great-aunt Tillie does in the nursing home bull sessions, but getting paid for it) have given her deep insight into foreign relations, politics, welfare, the Constitution, and all other topics. To disagree with Maureen in any way is not only a sign of being wrong, it's a hallmark of pure evil...or at least membership in the NRA, which is pretty much the same thing.

6. It is usually possible and always desirable to name-drop and name-call in the same sentence.

7. The particulars of my consumer-driven, shamefully self-involved life reveal universal truths.

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Explanation of the Dowd/Douglas connection: by Miss Marple- 2/11/03

Ms. Dowd was escorted around New York and DC for many months by one Michael Douglas of Hollywood fame and fortune. She got to go to all the best parties, was photographed for the tabloids, and was picking out a gown to wear at the Oscars. Of course, Michael had become interested in her during Clinton's impeachment, when she had written some very anti-Clinton columns. After a few weeks of the Michael treatment, she began to write anti-Starr, ant-Newt columns, ignoring Clinton.

Then Clinton was acquitted by the Senate. In an amazing coincidence, Michael Douglas dropped Ms. Dowd like a hot potato, and instead picked up a hot tomato, Catherin Zeta-Jones, who subsequently bore him a son and they were married.

Ms. Dowd cannot get over her tragic loss. Her columns are increasingly anti-Bush, in the hope of impressing her lost love, Michael.

In addition, we think she has a secret crush on the President and is trying to get him to pay attention to her. Ha!

[JZoback]

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were determined to lead America out of its post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu queasiness with force and casualties, to change the culture to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world.

Can she really be that clueless? In a word. Yes

Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.

She should be bitch slapped for writing that. What a pig.

[The Hon. Galahad Threepwood]

If Bush intends to keep his promise to strike the terrorist regimes, the Administration really needs to start an intensive campaign to explain the particular dangers of state sponsorship of terrorism, and why terrorists will be much less dangerous is their state sponsors are overthrown.

Dowd still won't get it, but Dowd is particularly dim. The problem is that I don't think the American people get it, and I think it's largely Bush's fault for not ramming it down their throats.

[Cicero]

Someone really has to feed that woman her meds.

[dighton]

[CFC__VRWC]

Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.

Or perhaps it's simply owed to the fact that many of us who don't live on the Upper West Side haven't forgotten the pain we felt on Sept. 11, 2001, when 3,000 of our fellow Americans were massacred by the trash we're starting to take out with this war.

Mo needs to go gargle with another fifth of bourbon.

[UncleSamUSA]

Once again the living Barf Machine, Maureen Dowd has totally botched a great movie in a feckless attempt to make some sort of liberal-weenie point.

The memorable scene about Lawrence's character comes at the very beginning when Lawrence does a trick for his soldier comrades in Cairo. He lights a match and then moves his fingers up the lighted match slowly until they finally put out the flame in a small puff of smoke.

"You'll do that once too often, you're only flesh and blood!" protests one soldier.

A bit later, as he is about to leave a second soldier tries the match trick that Lawrence had done, and as he glides his fingers up the match he screams in pain and throws the match down.

"Ouch.. it bloody well hurts."

"Of course it does" says Lawrence.

"Well, what's the trick then?" says the soldier.

"The trick, William Potter, is NOT MINDING that it hurts."

And that, sports fans, is a far better metaphor for what is happening now in Iraq than Dowd's quote, which actually highlights the personal moral ambivalence (as well as the later sexual ambivalence) of Lawrence himself.

For the fact is that no one is accusing President Bush, or Secy Rumsfeld or even Wolfowitz of being bloodthirsty or enjoying violence for its own sake, or for being morally ambivalent in any way. Or at least no one with even the smallest semblance of a brain is. Which undoubtedly leaves Miss Dowd out.

[BerniesFriend]

OMG!!!!!!!!!...I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair..I expected some kind of CZJ pics..but to have her Oscar pic upfront with her big and pregnant..with another one of doofy dowd's columns...made my night..

[AsYouAre]

Prediction: As hard as it is to believe, Maureen Dowd will get more shrill and even the NYT will get fed up with Maureen and fire her. You heard it hear, first!

[sydbas]

Has to be the first time Ms. Dowd has ever mentioned Georgia, or any other state south of the Mason Dixon Line, more than once in anything she has written.

[Kenno]

Reading Maureen Dowd, you actually start to understand where paleoconservatives get so bitter. She represents the epitome of American decadence. Look at her snideness toward Lawrence of Arabia, a greater man than any of her limp-wristed Manhattan associates. To her way of thinking, anybody who doesn't sit around talking in a high-pitched voice about his or her girlfriend or boyfriend (not necessarily respectively) and drinking latte is someone to be insulted. Of course, where the paleos are wrong is in thinking that she represents the dominant trend in American society today. Understandably, paleos look at Euroamericantrash like Maureen Dowd and say, "If this is the future, I'll take the past," and try to isolate themselves in a synthetic past. We traditional conservatives (not neocons) look at her and her ilk, decide we took a wrong turn somewhere, and try to find the correct off-ramp that will take us into a future of American greatness instead of Maureen Dowdiness.

[L`enn]

There remains the unfinished business of Osama bin Laden.

She does not get it. This is all woven together, bin Laden, Iraq, Syria, are all different chapters in the same book.

[laz17]

Yawn. The latest installment of The Days and Nights of Maureen Dowd. It feels like just another rerun.

[Saundra Duffy]

Maureen is a bitter, dried-up has-been. GO AWAY ALREADY!

[montag813]

The Times's David Sanger reported that when a Bush aide stepped into the Oval Office to tell the president recently that his hard-boiled defense secretary had been shaking a fist at Syria, Mr. Bush smiled and said one word: "Good."

This (if true) is the best part of the piece. Let us hope the word is backed by force when our job in Iraq is done.

[Russell Scott]

The Upper East Side's original useless idiot.

[driftless]

Ha ha if only that were true. No I think Mighty Mo has the typical upper-class disdain for Dubya that I'm sure is rife in the rich enclaves of Manhattan's upper-West Side. Bush simply isn't one of them...thank God! The irony of it all is that one hundred years ago the likes of Mo would have been shunned by the snobs as being gutter-Irish with pretensions of rising in the Wasp-dominated society of that time. And of course the further irony is that George, being a descendant from Wasp elites, is much more one of the boys from the wrong side of the tracks in his thinking than these would-be social climbers like Dowd. George wants to destroy our enemies...the likes of Dowd want to talk them to death.

[benjaminthomas]

You didn't paste the entire text of the original article. In the version on the NYT website, she includes the following passage after "The administration already sounds as triumphalist as Lawrence at his giddiest."

Today's satirical Onion headline reads: "Bush Subconsciously Sizes Up Spain for Invasion."

I think it's telling that Dowd is reduced to actually quoting The Onion (!) in the New York Times. More to the point, since all her (and her colleagues') dire predictions about Bush and this war have been emphatically contradicted by actual events, she now has to chide the administration about things she thinks will occur. It's her version of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". She can't bring herself to "join 'em", so she is now going with "if you can't beat 'em, criticize something they haven't done yet, and set the bar so high they will never be able to succeed again."

If you check out Tom Friedman's column on the same website, you will see the same phenomenon. It basically says that, while we have won a stunning victory, and liberated Iraq from unbearable misery, there are still some hungry people there -- we better fix that quick or we will have failed.

I suppose there is some satisfaction in having even their grudging, or more accurately, hidden, acknowledgement of our success. It is still frustrating to see the utter hypocrisy in their stances now as compared to when Billy-boy was at the helm.

[Fury]

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were determined to lead America out of its post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu queasiness with force and casualties, to change the culture to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world.

This is what I love about the zany writings of this woman. She writes as though she has an inside scoop on what Rumsfeld and Cheney think - as if she had interviewed them or gone to a dinner party. She has no such sources, she is not connected. She is barren.

The delicious fact is that she makes up this tripe in her mind - I'll call it Dowdland. In Dowdland, you always have the trendy or "nuanced" answers because you don't need to apply critical thinking to your premises. "Proofs of logic" become "poofs of logic". In Dowdland, Cheney and Rumsfeld can say and think anythying you want them to. Her columns become mainly what makes her feel good about the world and society instead of having a shred of rationality in regards to the issues of the day. In Dowdland, feelings really do triumph over facts, logic and reasoning.

Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.

This is just a disgusting statement, not worthy of a more detailed response.

And so it goes in Dowdland.

[jriemer]

Do you get the feeling that Maureen Dowd's continued yappings are becoming as shrill and unintelligible as the creatures from "Mars Attacks!"?

Bitterness is like acid...

And there's a growing resemblance.

[Fury]

Victor Davis Hanson has responded to Dowd's comments:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/889860/posts?page=1