It’s slightly different.  With male politicians, first she had to call them bitches and then say bitches ain’t shit.  With female politicians, she can skip the first step.

This is what I think is going to be absolutely fascinating about this election.  For decades, the right wing has been able to smear white male politicians by associating them with femininity and The Great Dark Hordes Coming To Rape Your Women.

Now they don’t have even that thin veneer of pretense left.  Obama IS part of the Great Dark Horde, not just someone you can slyly label as a n*gger-lover and pretend it’s his other policies you find troubling.  Clinton is an actual woman, so smearing her for being feminine exposed that line for what it is.

It’s all going to come spilling out in public and it’s going to be very, very ugly.  I’d like to think it will be ugly like having an infected wound lanced so there’s a chance of getting on the road to recovery, but I’m not optimistic.

Dowd is a lightweight. Always has been, always will be.

Dowd is a lightweight.

I’d call her a bullshit artist. One of the best ones in the media today.

Dowd is famous for insulting men by feminizing them.  The manager of the NY Mets just referred to one his players as “she” to the press, apparently in an attempt to humiliate him.  There is a Sponge Bob episode where Sponge Bob is training Gary for the big snail race.  He says, “All right, ladies, let’s get to work. I called you a lady to humiliate you. It’s a motivational tactic we coaches use.”

I thought the idea of currying favor with the in-crowd by pissing on your own group (or people you could claim were secretly so) went out in 1945.

You will be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that Ann Althouse disagrees you and believes Hoyt lacks “the balls” to say Dowd is right.

No kidding….

She’s a prude at heart, rigidly enforcing her idea of sex roles though ridicule.

I couldn’t disagree more. I thought Hoyt entirely dropped the ball on this one because of his misuse of the phrase “politically incorrect.” There is nothing “politically incorrect” about Dowd’s writing, and never has been. Her campaign to make fun of politicians and to degrade them and their policies by sexualizing, feminizing and attacking them through coded homphobic slurs is absolutely in line with the political intersts and style of one party—the republicans. So its always been politically correct, even submissive, to republican party interests.  Even though her explanation was embarrassingly stupid he still gave her the last word, and the benefit of the doubt.

aimai

On that particular note, I detest how the term “politically correct” has been hijacked by the right and spun as this weak, liberal way of speaking about minority groups.  I swear, every time I hear a white man boast that he’s “not P.C.” (and it’s nearly always a white man) it’s always the equivalent of him saying, “I call a spade a spade: a gay person a fagg*t, a person of colour a n***** and a woman a goddamn piece of whore pussy.”  Ugh, that term does not mean what you think it means, you bigotted assholes.

I’m afraid Mnemosyne is exactly right.  This is going to be very very ugly.  The fully panoply of racism and sexism will flower into it’s most smelly expression between now and November (and for the next 4 or 8 years if Obama wins).

Maybe it’s necessary to let this pus from our society (I’m not smart enough to know), but I had hoped not.  Right now, I’m doing my best to see if I can afford living in my mother-in-law’s little house on the Montenegro coast until after November.  While I’m there, I can see what happens to countries where bigotry and racism are allowed to flourish.  But at least I won’t have to hear people I normally care something about express their inner demons proudly.

I sure wish Maureen Dowd would shut the hell up.

Is it that she likes to play with gender stereotypes, or just that she enjoys calling men “faggots” as much as calling women “bitchez?”

I’m with Idlemind: Dowd’s columns are all about the enforcement of 1960’s gender roles through good ol’ fashioned public humiliation.  Nothing more.

Actually Dowd is the epitome of ‘politically correct’.  All her articles are full of attempts to reenforce the most loathsome cliches out there, namely that liberals are all a bunch of women—except for the liberal women who are all a bunch of calculating butch bitchez.

The NYT must be pretty embarrassed about the quality of their op-ed page.  With a history of well-regarded, thoughtful intellectuals like Anthony Lewis, Anna Quindlen and Russell Baker, now they host the Dowd-Kristol-Brooks clusterf—k of mendacity, who can’t be relied on to fact-check their work with a simple google search. 

Put them all in a room with Krugman- he’d be the lone survivor.

Bushworld

What you don’t like about Dowd is her vulgarity and that she treats people you consider leaders with disrespect.  But leaders deserve our disrespect.  The Clinton’s are awful.  Gore mediocre. Anyone remember Ricky Ray Rector and “the end of welfare as we know it”?  Obama is a little better but not much.  On Israel?  On Iran? Terrible, but then so are you.  There’s no discussion of Gaza in the American “reality based” community.  Where’s the discussion of Iraqi nationalism and attempts to build a unified opposition, even if it’s a violent opposition.  Hezbollah is somewhat less of a boogeyman to you then they are to republicans; but there’s not enough of a difference to be of any comfort to non-American observers of US policy.
I voted for Clinton and I’ll vote for Obama, but I wouldn’t be proud to be in a photo shoot with either of them.  Your class, your race, your status as Americans all go unacknowledged, except cursorily. 

And read the transcript of HRC’s crying speech. It was disgusting political theater. Dowd caught that, but you didn’t.
Dowd has the biases of her background. and so do you.  But you’re oblivious.

Well, if the trolls are anything to go on, Mnemosyne is definitely correct…

There is something about the intense resentment in Dowd’s writing that
strongly suggests she is incapable of orgasm.

seth edenbaum -

If Maureen Dowd has policy disagreements with Al Gore, then she can discuss his policies and why she disagrees.

The answer isn’t for her to start a column imagining Al Gore looking at a mirror and singing “I Feel Pretty” in his head, as Maureen Dowd did in a column published two days before the 2000 election:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh062308.shtml

Nikto - got it in one.

“Obama IS part of the Great Dark Horde”

Obama is running as Tiger Woods and that’s how he’ll win.

More for you to read Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama
He folded on FISA and he’s come out for an “undivided Jerusalem”  which is a change in US policy. etc etc. And I’ll still vote for him.

I’m not interested in fucking Maureen Dowd. I only read her when she’s attacked by moralizing slackers, just to see what the fuss is about.  All she’s good for is pop psychology. But since all psychology is off limits to the self-absorbed I’ll take what I can get. Someday one of you is going to spend some time studying how HRC ran a campaign on based on resentments of race and gender -with the support of old guard civil rights leadership [Andrew Young: “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”]  while Obama ran as a biracial everyman, accent on “man.” HRC for whatever reason, and Dowd has a lead on this, was not willing or able to run a campaign on the theme of gender neutrality.  She’s from a generation of women who started out feminist and copped out. She sacrificed her career for her husband’s.  She shouldn’t have done it but there it is.  And her husband’s desperation in try to pay her back was painful to watch. They’re a political couple and it’s not a politics I like.  Clinton is the poster-boy for American neoliberalism.
As Newt Gingrich pointed out he won by stealing the republicans’ ideas.

It’s not that Dowd is particularly interesting, though she was better on the war than some of the leaders of the “reality based community” who were pro war at the start. But Dowd doesn’t write from the pretension of enlightened reason, she writes her not entirely uneducated opinion. She writes from bias more than ideology. American intellectuals (and that’s what you are right?) love enlightened reason if only because they so often claim to represent it.  Most of you would be members of the center right in western Europe. And American exceptionalism is still your model. “We are the world.” No you’re not.  And whatever her many flaws I trust Dowd to know that more than you.

I used to be a fan of Dowd’s writing.  I thought it was irreverent and sharp.  As a younger person, I admired someone’s ability to be cool in a social crowd, not their ability to be thoughtful and accurate when discussing ideas and people.  Dowd was cool then, but I’m a little older and wiser. 

  From one snotty sentence to the next, Dowd’s essays do little to inform and challenge the reader.  The abundance of name-calling and the tendency to play pop-psychologist have been a real let-down.

Geez Seth…. I sort of agree with you about American liberals being the equivalent of center-right in Western Europe—this is a country, after all, where many would characterize Bill Clinton as a man of the “left”—but that doesn’t make Maureen Dowd right. She’s been working from the same sorry-ass, shopworn trope for the past 20 years; it’s beyond old at this point—older than dirt. And the fact that it depends on the perpetuation of humiliating stereotypes makes it inexcusable.

Read the transcript of HRC’s goddamned crying speech. Dowd caught it. Almost no one else did, certainly no one in the “reality based” community. She’s popular and vulgar, and she mocks people you take seriously. That pisses you off. “Support the troops!!”  And HRC and Obama are your generals.  Why the fuck should a Palestinian mother take you more seriously than Dowd?
No reason at all.

“And for the record (don’t post this), Yglesias as an individual has a great, self-aware sense of humor
and is much more starkly honest (if also unapologetic) about his own elitism
than most liberals. Take him out for a beer and I think you’d find that.”

Yglesias was pro war. So was Josh Marshall, and he named his son for the man who drew up the maps for the territories of the 67 war.  Krugman is a free trader and Bill Clinton a republican. And you mock Dowd? And you have science and “reason” on your side?  You might as well be Born Again Christians for all you take on faith about yourselves and what you stand for.  Knowledge begins with self-knowledge, and self awareness is not narcissism.  Patting yourself on the back -all you do by attacking Dowd, who’s after all a voting democrat- is not careful observation of the world.
She’s no genius but she saw through bullshit when you bought into it.  She earns her pay. She’s annoying but claims to clarity and reason given the context are little more than claims from authority.  Between her mediocrity and your own the major differences are snobbery and a sense of irony. You have one, she has the other.  I’d like more, but if I had to choose…

One of the best things I can say about Dowd is that when she was featured in an article for Rolling Stone (Oct. 6, 2004).

You see, in that one, she appeared in a big photo for the article barefoot and many commentators said she had Hobbit feet.

Maureen was LIVID.  I laughed my ass off for weeks on that one.

We should all e-mail her the picture and ask her about her Uncle Bilbo.

Ouch! I guess this thread is no longer about MD.

Seth, if you’re going to write so many paragraphs, you might want to try having maybe one of them make some sense?

Just a thought.

Seth is obviously projecting his own issues and insecurities into this.

What we’re talking about doesn’t have anything to do with taking Hillary, or other politicians for that matter “seriously.” Many of us don’t even like Hillary, so I don’t know where the hell you’re getting any of that.

Our leaders are deserving of all sorts of criticism—some major, some minor. But all Maureen Dowd EVER FUCKING DOES is call them little girls. That’s where it begins and ends with her.

It would be nice though if people like Maureen Dowd took things like politics and the outcomes of elections more seriously. But why bother when it’s SOOOOOO much more sophisticated to come across as if you’re somehow above it all? Caring, after all, is for girls. Little sissy girls. Whiny bitches, if you will. MoDo is above that. And Seth is showing his own political sophistication by “getting” it.

What Dowd does is wrong not only because it’s sexist, but because it plays a major part in perpetuating the notion that politics in America is nothing but a cute little game meant to keep people like her amused, and that there are no real consequences. 

That’s a BIG FUCKING PART of the reason why thousands of American soldiers, and HUNDREDS of thousands of Iraqis are dead.

Crap! See, I did it again. I’m acting like a whiny little girl. I’ll stop now.

No, you just sound like an angry teenage punk, to Dowd’s catty teenage brat.

Seth, what the hell are you talking about?

You mean in general, or just the little quote from an old colleague of Yglesias at Tapped?- from an email exchange where my correspondent wasn’t quick enough to understand my point.
I’ve been tossing that in recently, just for the hell it of.
Other than that I’ve been quite clear: statements of fact and a couple of links.
Dowd on Clinton is mostly on target.  The fact that Clinton’s defenders can’t be bothered to read the transcript of what she actually said is kind of sad. Somerby is a useful pedant but pointing out the obvious to him was like force-feeding a dog.
Hillary Clinton, choking back tears:

“It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know… I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political it’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game, they think it’s like who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ futures, and it’s really about all of us together. You know, some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds, and we do it, each one of us because we care about our country but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven’t thought that through enough.”

She’s worried that we won’t let her help us. SHE’S CRYING OUT OF FEAR FOR THE COUNTRY IF SHE DOESN’T BECOME PRESIDENT.  I almost threw my chair through the fucking TV watching that.  The level of narcissism is beyond creepy. It’s bizarre. More bizarre than anything Maureen Dowd has ever written. You pay more attention to your own assumptions than to anything else.

Hey Seth

You broke down and posted Clinton’s ‘crying’ speech in its entirety.  So what?

I’m not a Clinton defender or follower.  You posting a speech by her does nothing to lessen the fact that Dowd is a really useless, juvenile fool who betrays the post she has. Her projection of her own psychoses into her writings got so out of line this year that her paper’s ombudsman had to step in.

The point is that Dowd is a bad, trivializing, purposelessly snide writer who brings nothing to the table but a display of how insulated and gossip-oriented Washington insiders are.  Yeah, she attacks Dems and Repubs, men and women. 

The Dems are all limp-wristed sissies (even Kerry the war hero) - unless they’re women,of course, then they’re emasculating ball-busters. 

The Repubs are crooks, doofuses etc. - but they’re always real men, if a bit rough around the edges.

Guess what image people are more drawn to in a leader?  Right.  The manly men.

Dowd’s real mission is to re-inforce gender stereotypes and make sure anyone who diverges from them is punished. There’s a harsh schoolmarmish (Nun-ish?) tone to her work as she takes the pols to task for the unforgivable sin of not conforming to rigid sexual roles.

No policy, of course.  Nothing about the real problems facing the country.  That would be too wimpish, too effete.

But one thing you can count on: the real men’s men, for all their faults and foibles, lies and trickery, will always be upheld - if the troops arein Iraq piling up casualties for a million years, simply for the sake of Halliburton’s stockholders - well, the manly men who put them there can be forgiven if they give a boyish hand-in-the-cookie-jar grin.  Maureen will respond with a prim expression of disapproval which melts into an adoring smile.

After all the real battle has already been won - the fags, sissies and bitches have been put in their place.

Maureen Dowd may claim to be a Democrat, but for years she has been taking “clever” potshots at Democratic candidates and legislators.  Her motto must be “never spoil a good joke for the sake of the truth”.  Celebrity seems to have gone to her head.  If only her jokes were trivial, it wouldn’t matter, but the problem is that her jokes feed into the stereotypes of the right wing.  If she were working for Fox News, at least everyone would know her bias, but working for the Times it is possible that a lot of people think her unbiased.  For years I’ve wanted to say:  “Shame on you, Ms. Dowd. You aren’t funny any more, you’re just opinionated and pompous.”

Dowd is a popular author with a base readership of solid democratic voters, if not of 20 something slackers hard-wired into the web.  She expresses the frustration of those older readers with a democratic leadership that perpetually sends them earnest harvard educated dimwits as their candidates, while at the same time she’s willing to give an honest response to the charming sleazebag who actually led her party to power. She’s not an intellectual, nor does she pretend to be. You do.

You pride party loyalty over honesty, I don’t.  I don’t, even if that honesty is the honest expression of silliness.  You can learn something from Dowd, about the politics of her readers, and about those who excoriate her. I’ve learned this: that the latter are angry because they want to assume that politics is reasoned discussion. The most bitter are actually defenders of the politics of “rational action.”  [What else does Bob Somerby stand for?]  And they want to know how there can be rational action when people like Dowd are so stupid and shallow.  But politics is not rational action any more than economics is.

Atrios responds to Dowd’s comments on HRC’s tears:
“Because only boys are allowed to cry. Or something. These people are all broken. Complete monsters.”
But Dowd was right and Duncan Black was wrong. He couldn’t even bring himself to read the words. He knew he was right. As you do.

There’s a brouhaha when a white girl who calls herself a feminist goes on a pilgrimage with friends to Harlem to meet The Sleazebag, also known as “the First Black President,” -who later played to racial fears in service to his wife’s ambition (and to ease his guilt after all she’s done for him)- and she gets upset when some people laugh after she uses a photo-op to show off her hourglass figure.
This is progressivism? This is feminism?

If you spend so much time defending yourself you lose track of what you’re defending. Atrios used to call Clinton “Big Dog.”  But Clinton was always a republican and a pig, though at least a smart one and a good politician.

I’m not a democrat, I’m a socialist.  I voted for Clinton, Gore and Kerry -not once for Nader- but I’m not going to lie about my contempt for all of them,  and for you and your suburban-American white-teenage dreams, and behavior and politics that make any card carrying socialist Scandinavian office worker cringe in embarrassment.  But it’s not your politics per se that’s the problem, it’s the pretense of reason.  You’re spoiled Americans, but it’s not the fact that you’re spoiled that’s the problem, it’s that you don’t realize it.

The theory of rational action is a right wing economic talking point and taken up by liberal technocrats it’s at the heart of neoliberalism.
The experts are special “We know.”  No, you don’t.

You pride party loyalty over honesty, I don’t.

You think Dowd’s ‘Breck Girl’ bullshit is ‘honesty’? Seriously?

The theory of rational action is a right wing economic talking point and taken up by liberal technocrats it’s at the heart of neoliberalism.
The experts are special “We know.” No, you don’t.
if not of 20 something slackers hard-wired into the web.

What? Do you know where you are posting?

There’s a brouhaha when a white girl who calls herself a feminist goes on a pilgrimage with friends to Harlem to meet The Sleazebag and she gets upset when some people laugh after she uses a photo-op to show off her hourglass figure.
This is progressivism? This is feminism?

I considered making a reasoned response to this sub-commentary, but I think “Fuck You” is more appropriate.

“What? Do you know where you are posting?”

Yes.