Wow, this is really total poppycock (
drivel having already been taken). Ellen Goodman seems to have taken up the east-coach franchaise of Maureen Dowd-ism; her M.O. is really just the same: re-state reality through a filter of absurdly exaggerated irony. If she can get the reader to see the world through her excrement-colored glasses, she's really in the catbird seat: she can ridicule anything she wants and sound witty, letting her readers share in her bogus sense of superiority, the blind conning the blind.
When you're pathetic and don't know you're pathetic, than you're really pathetic.
(steely)