Free Republic

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...