MAUREEN DOWD---The biggest Media Whore on the Planet!

[trumad]

The below snip from her newest piece is Mo Dowd in a nutshell. Anyone who followed her during the 2000 race will see the very same pattern of writing except its Obama, not Gore.---Oh and the Bush line made me LOL out loud.

<snip>
The big difference, the one that will probably decide this presidential race, is this: Barack Obama is able to convey an impression of likability to voters. Given how private he is, an enigma even to some who are close to him, it’s an incredible performance.

That likability slips through your hands at closer range[. The president survived a “raised by wolves” upbringing, as Michelle has called it. He retained the monastic skills that sustained him through the solitude of his years in New York. His “winning smile,” as Jonathan Alter wrote in “The Promise,” “obscured a layer of self-protective ice.” His staffers respect him, but he doesn’t inspire the kind of adoration that the Bush presidents got. And the pillow-plumping romance with the press is over.

The Times’s Amy Chozick wrote that the president “has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion.”

He can be thin-skinned and insecure at times, but he radiates self-sufficiency, such a clean, simple aesthetic that he could have been designed by Steve Jobs — Siri without the warmth.

(A poll by Purple Strategies asked which candidate seemed more like Apple, and it was, naturally, Obama.)

Yet voters see something genuine, and that is why Obama seems to be surviving the stalled economy and his own chuckleheaded remark: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/dowd-likability-index.html?_r=1&hp

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. She's an overrated twit who writes as some sort of pissed off

sorority type. One doesn't have to like or dislike Barack Obama. But be fucking honest at least.

[cali]

2. nah, only second biggest

I believe that prize now goes to Jennifer Rubin of the WaPo.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021076879

[BeyondGeography]

3. I can say with confidence that she doesn't understand the first thing about him

To take just one of a lifetime of examples, watch his health care speech in Colorado this week when he talked about his mother and nearly brought everyone to tears, including himself. He has a deep sense of love and loss, understands what life gives and takes from you, the brutality of time and the possibilities and limits of this country, which are often tragic. If that makes him seem remote to a comparative nitwit like MoDo, too bad. It also gives him the ability to move people in ways that go right over her head.

[watrwefitinfor]

4. MoDo?

MooDoo is more fitting.

[trumad]

5. She creates these false narratives and gives the impression she's on the inside.

She parroted the Right Wing meme about Gore over and over back in 2000.

Her last couple of pieces have been preety much the same about Obama... He's disconnected... not that loved in the back office, etc.

She's horrible---flat out horrible.

[BeyondGeography]

7. I suspect what she likes least about Obama is she can't touch him

Think of Gore...what fun for her. She could prod him and he'd react! Not only that, it would show up in the polls! How relevant she must have felt.

[PCIntern]

6. Man-hater...

Sorry, I don't often play that card, but given her book and her disparaging of males in general, I feel this way.

[zazen]

8. I LOVE how the Internet has destabilized these lightweights' authority

How is she a columnist for one of the most read publications on the planet? How and why is she an expert at anything?

I was in J school eons ago, until I couldn't take their unwarranted arrogance, their anti-intellectualism, and their anti-feminism any longer. Who gave them the authority to determine that political essays must be written at an 8th grade level, and that paragraphs can consist of one sentence? They celebrate the vague, meandering, disjointed, simplistic writing of a Dowd as "hard-hitting."

Before the evolution of the Net, these bombastic, smug fools got to screen what most of the rest of the world read in the "media." Ironically, their silly standards functioned as "prior restraint." Intellectuals as well as anyone who questioned the neoliberal world view were screened out.

I hope we can have more models like ProPublica, where we pay into a fund to hire journalists to do relevant investigative pieces.

[trumad]

9. Excellent post

Yes---the nets have exposed these nitiwits very well....and will continue to do so.

[spanone]

10. chuckleheaded remark...fuck you dowd...that's not what he said and you fucking know it