Maureen Dowd tries to assassinate Beto campaign before it gets off the ground.

[RandySF]

We have The One again, a New One — another lanky, bookish, handsome man with an attractive young family, a thin résumé, an exotic name, a hip affect, a rock star aura, an enticing smile, a liberal press corps ready to fluff his pillows and a frothing Fox News.

Let Elizabeth Warren knock herself out with policy proposals. Let Kamala Harris be the adult in the room. Let Bernie Sanders bellow away.

The magical man-boy, Beto O’Rourke, has come back from his 40 days in the desert — vlogging, contemplating, floating in and out of a funk — to share his gifts......


To many, Beto’s appeal is his persona as a quasi-rebellious ’90s suburban teenager, a skateboarding punk rocker who seems to have modeled his campaign logo on the spicy ketchup logo at Whataburger.

But others are less charmed. A satirical video on Twitter by skaters mocked “bad-skater Beto” as the kind of middle-school poser who “went to Zumiez and spent $27 on stickers.”

In a new Reuters story, Joseph Menn reveals that while O’Rourke was still a teenager, he was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a stealthy hacking group named after an old Texas slaughterhouse. A kind of Neo-lite, he used the handle “Psychedelic Warlord,” looking for free video games. (Socialist alert!)

A hacker might be refreshing after a president who refers to Tim Cook as Tim Apple. Still, Menn writes, “it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/beto-orourke-2020.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytopinion

[Gidney N Cloyd]

1. "Maureen Dowd hates everyone. Today it's Beto O'Rourke." (as Bartcop might have said)

[DemoTex]

3. God, I miss Bartcop!

[Gidney N Cloyd]

8. +1

[BumRushDaShow]

14. Thanks for the reminder about Bartcop

That was one of the places I used to lurk before discovering DU!

[NastyRiffraff]

21. She particularly hated Hillary Clinton

and earlier, Al Gore. Now Beto is her latest target.

:Yawn:

[lapucelle]

2. The "Spin-Stir" Dowd is a Biden partisan. MoDo's poison pen antics helped elect Trump.

I'll never forget how she used the recently deceased Beau Biden to attack Hillary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-joe-biden-in-2016-what-would-beau-do.html?_r=0

O’Donnell asked about the melodramatic “deathbed” story which got its start in an unsourced, highly novelistic column by Maureen Dowd.

In the story, Biden’s dying son, with his last few nouns, begs Biden to try to keep the Clintons out of the White House. The Clinton-hating melodrama was ugly and over the top even by the standards established by Dowd down through these many long years.

Last night, O’Donnell asked Biden about this widely-repeated story. “Nothing like that ever, ever happened,” Biden said.

Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler (liberal watchdog of the "liberal" press) covered the disgraceful episode in depth.

https://bit.ly/2Y6Nhiv

https://bit.ly/2CoCjeF

[agingdem]

4. she loved Bush 1...

hated the Clintons...Obama was a qualified just ok...her cutesy snark isn't amusing.. it's flat and boring with shades of Trump-like playground bully...Maureen is way past her sell-by date...time for her to go...

[Tipperary]

5. Is it true he voted to raise the age for Social Security?

First time I have seen this, and my googling seems to say it is true.

[Eric J in MN]

16. Not a vote, but Beto O'Rourke said

...that we may need to raise the age for getting Social Security:
https://m.

[Trumpocalypse]

6. Her columns

read like a spoiled teenager’s slam book. Why does the NYT still employ her?

[comradebillyboy]

13. Because the owner of the NYT likes her. The Times should never be

mistaken for a liberal leaning publication. At best they are Rockefeller republicans.

[dalton99a]

7. Miserable hateful self-important vile woman

Boring and tedious

[peggysue2]

9. This is the reason I stopped reading . . .

Ms Dour and her literary pretensions. The spleen is endless and her literary allusions are boring nonsense. That being said Kathleen Parker did an equal hatchet job on O'Rourke, he of the skateboard and other teenage penchants.

Infantilizing Beto O'Rourke appears to be the weapon of choice, even though he's a 46-year old man. You can imagine if this was done to a female candidate.

Which leaves me to believe that there a lot of people worried and antsy about O'Rourke's run for POTUS.

Wonder why that is?

Though I'm not convinced about O'Rourke, I can already see the framing his critics are pushing against: He's different and new to the scene, he's energetic and attractive, he's likable and speaks about appealing to our better angels and a common cause.

He's demonstrated an ability to speak to large groups--to move them--even though the specifics aren't there yet. His resume is thinner than the rest of the field.

What other candidate does this remind you of or why would Mike Huckabee warn his fellow Republicans not to dismiss O'Rourke as a light weight. Because the Democratic Party has run candidates like this before and delivered a massive blow.

Promise and hope.

Btw, there's been nonstop coverage of O'Rourke on the cable news shows this afternoon.

Hummmmm.

[brooklynite]

10. Yawn...

“Assasinate”....”hit job”....”bashing”

The tendency of people to tar any story they don’t like about their preferred candidate as an intentional attack is tiring.

[kcr]

15. He didn't invite you to dinner?

[Cha]

17. What's "tiring" is MoDo's

poison pen

[Renew Deal]

19. Did you read that?

It’s actuallt pretty trashy. No insight. Just a negative regurgitation of known facts.

[brooklynite]

20. I did. It's snarky; like everything Dowd writes.

WHAT she is writing about (snarky or not), is a valid story: a candidate with limited political or policy experience suddenly being seen by a segment of the electorate as a political savior, and fawning over his every action (including his dental appointment) absent any actual supporting evidence.

What it is NOT is an intentional "hit job" and certainly not an "assassination".

[Legrant]

11. The media will follow her lead

They hate Beto.

[Awsi Dooger]

12. She reminds me of a lazy sports columnist

No insight whatsoever, or any intention to head to the locker room for actual quotes, not when you can merely chow down in the press box and apply your typical smart ass formula to whatever game it was you supposedly just watched.

[Renew Deal]

18. Dowd got paid to write that?

That’s internet grade trash. She can do better.