Is Maureen Dowd cracking up?

[marmar]

via AlterNet's PEEK:



Maureen Dowd Embarrasses Herself with Clinton/Palin Piece

Posted by Molly Ivors, Whiskey Fire at 3:51 PM on September 8, 2008.

MoDo brings more from the land of make believe journalism, and (as usual) the results aren't pretty.



Well, after the tongue-bath Joe Biden gave McCain's wrinkled ass the other day, I have no qualms about saying what I think has been obvious to a lot of people: I believe it really would have been better for the party and the country if Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton for VP. Aside from thumbing your nose at 18 million voters—the vast majority of whom will vote for you anyway, but less enthusiastically—I was assured that the Biden pick was great because he had foreign policy experience and was a pit bull who would face down any and all negative campaigning. But he took the first week of Palin-mania to cuddle up to McCain. As I understand it, that's what pit bulls do to their owners, not those who pose threats to their owners. Whatever. How are all those bankruptcies going?

More dismayingly, it has freed Maureen Dowd to invent another in her line of patented Bullshit Scenarios™ between Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, in an imaginary 2012 where these voracious women have dispatched the men who helped them get into office and are now head-to-head. She dubs them "the gun-toting hockey mom and the shot-swilling Warrior Queen of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits" (the comparative number of adjectives tells you where her oatmeal-sharp wit really wants to sink its blade, of course). Dowd can't give up the idea that she and she alone recognizes the dark underside of the junior Senator from New York, and she tries hard not to reveal that, despite the fact that Palin is certifiably insane about science, a retrograde cultural throwback, proudly ignorant red meat for the christianist base, and violent and heavily armed in the bargain, she "gets" it. And for that, MoDo reluctantly admires her:

PALIN: I've got a little news flash for you, Hillary. Your night-shift, blue-collar-waitress, boilermaker routine didn't fool me. It's in your polls but it's in my D.N.A. I've actually been up at 3 a.m. — gutting moose. While you got to go to your snooty Wellesley, I had to switch colleges six times in six years. While you got to go to Yale Law, I had to enter beauty contests and turn my back to judges in a bathing suit to get scholarship money.

CLINTON: I've got a little news flash for you, Annie Oakley. Dinosaurs disappeared a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. I admit you've had a profound influence on America, and I'm not just talking about all the women wearing up-dos and rimless titanium $375 Kazuo Kawasaki designer frames. You and John are now at war with four countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden has opened a storefront in a strip mall in Pakistan to make TV ads.

PALIN: Those wars are tasks from God.

CLINTON: You said you wanted to help women, but you've only hurt them with your silly mantra that women can have it all if they just work harder and pray harder. You put Medicare on eBay. You cut funding for special-needs children. The Dobson Supreme Court has outlawed abortion, evolution and gun control. With sex education banned, baby bumps in high schools are rampant. And the head of your Abstinence Outreach Program, Levi Johnston, has failed to force any other teenage fathers to marry their prom dates.

PALIN: Life is always welcome. Unless it's on four legs.

Maureen knows, deep in her heart, that Clinton is smarter, sharper, and more in tune with reality. But Our Mo is shallow to the core, and so the Attack of the Eye Creatures hair and the glasses (honestly, it never occurred to me to look them up) impress her. She isn't quite so far removed from reality to think that Palin has any, you know, qualifications, but her hatred of all things Clinton is so ingrained that she really can't help herself, I think. And make no mistake, that's bad for all of us.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/98037/maureen_dowd_embarrasses_herself_with_clinton_palin_piece/

[Cerridwen]

1. Cracked, I think. Past tense.

She's been gone for a while.

She spews whatever gets her the most attention. I've not noticed that to have changed over the years.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. Yeah, she really ragged on Al Gore for sighing

and wearing "earth tone" clothes back before the 2000 election. Screw her and the rancid elephant she rode in on.

[Cerridwen]

7. Yep, she's hailed when she says something we agree with.

She's vilified when she goes after one of ours.

I get whiplash trying to keep up with the love/hate.

She's a pundit. She says what will get her columns read and quoted. Nothing more.

She and her type make me miss Molly that much more.

[Art_from_Ark]

8. You won't see any love-hate with me

especially not after she trashed Al Gore for purely bullshit reasons and let Le Dauphin escape unscathed.

[Cerridwen]

9. My whiplash thanks you.

:D

[Windy]

2. If Obama would have picked Clinton, McCain wouldn't have needed Palin...

The only reason palin is on the ticket is because Hillary is not.

McCain would have used the same reasons if Hillary would have won and would have picked Michael Steele to get all the disenfranchised Obama voters.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Sorry, I Love MoDo

She also wrote this:

"Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?"

She deflates everyone, regardless of political outlook. That's her job.

[TexasObserver]

4. I remember when she wasn't crazy.

Some people age well.

MODO is not one of them.

[GoesTo11]

6. I've seen far better parodies and rants than hers right here on DU

What's she doing with a national opinion column? Guess we could say that about a lot of them.