For the Record: Miscellany

 

Called a "Tomahawk" because it can be used as a weapon. No longer on the menu at Trump's BLT Prime in Washington, where the largest steak is now the 36-ounce Porterhouse at $102 and advertised as shareable.

Can't understand why this nutty algorithm keeps delivering your coke-addled video rants to my TL. Most incompetent censorship I've ever seen. pic.twitter.com/d3xIwQf6JK

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) February 20, 2021

Then there was the Times gangbang salute on the passing of Rush Limbaugh, inspiring double-edged idiocy from Frank Bruni and Ben Shapiro:

Dowd and Dirty

"Barack and Prejudice", from The Dowd Report, August 2008.

OK, so Dowd has now fully joined the Heighten-the-Contradictions Leninists for Trump brigade, or something like it, because Hillary Clinton is "The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee":

They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

Because nothing says "Republican" like adding a 4% income tax surcharge on incomes of $5 million and up, bringing the estate tax back up to 2009 levels, and implementing the Buffet rule (nobody can pay a lower tax rate than their secretary), and other measures to make the tax system more progressive than it's been for decades, or expanding disability rights, or restoring collective bargaining rights, or guaranteeing paid family and medical leave, or standing up for animal rights and wildlife, or using executive orders to install half a billion solar panels and reduce oil consumption by a third over the next four years.

Mo Do Row Your Boat, Ceaselessly into the Past

Tatttoo design by Judith Whitener.

Teaser copy in the contents page for Maureen Dowd's column, "The Clinton Contamination":

They were careless people, Bill and Hillary, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness. 

Dowd didn't write that, of course, nor did the waggish subeditor who presumably submitted it, substituting "Bill and Hillary" for "Tom and Daisy"—F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the sentence in its original form—but Dowd does compare our Clintons to Fitzgerald's Buchanans today, for what turns out to be the sixth time since 1995: the fact that Hillary Clinton is getting endorsed by Barack Obama for the presidency instead of getting fired from the State Department is

the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive. 

She first used the analogy in August 1995, taking it from Newsweek's Joe Klein, who had been outraged to hear that Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had incurred $140,000 in legal bills when she testified before Congress in the Whitewater matter. Klein wrote,

I smell a rat. Do you smell a ship?

Does this Rattus rattus creeping down the guy rope have a hint of red hair? (Can't get a good credit for the image.)

So Dowd's reconsidering her relationship, or whatever it is, with the Trump:

HE won’t pivot. So I have to.

Time was, she was certain Trump wasn't the apotheosis of evil:

Having seen Donald Trump as a braggadocious but benign celebrity in New York for decades, I did not regard him as the apotheosis of evil.

That's right, benign. Now she's not so sure. Maybe he is the apotheosis of evil. We just don't know. Who can say? Maureen's never been wrong before.

I certainly never would have predicted that the Trump name would be uttered in the same breath as Hitler, Mussolini and scary menace, even on such pop culture staples as “The Bachelorette.”

The Bachelorette brouhaha also involved a sweet potato. And George Bush. Dan told Chad hanging out with him (Chad) would be dangerous for his (Dan's) reputation, in the same way as hanging out with Hitler, Mussolini, Trump, or Bush.

My president went to Latin America, and all I got was this lousy figure of speech

Gaeta. From the Italian blog "La Solitudine Verticale—'Stay hungry, stay foolish'"

Dowd apparently got to travel with the entourage to Havana and Buenos Aires, and she must have had a fairly good time, because she's in a fairly benign mood toward Obama, and lays off the presidential candidates altogether, and doesn't have a truly harsh word for anybody but George W. Bush—even Raúl Castro comes off more as cute—and I don't feel like fisking through the whole thing, because what for, but I was very startled for literary reasons by her opening:

WASHINGTON — BARACK OBAMA is tangoing into history, and there’s something perfect about that.

The tango has been described as vertical solitude. And this president is all about vertical solitude.

Really? It doesn't take two? And where did you pick up this cliché-destroying observation?

Cheap shots: We know where you work, Maureen. No, wait, we don't.

One of the special tics that make Maureen Dowd so unique as a bad writer is the way she sprinkles her prose with hints of her savviness, rich with things that are too scandalous and privileged to tell us about so she just alludes to them. It's that the purpose of the column isn't to argue an opinion, or inform readers on some issue of public significance, or even make the reader laugh, but just to clue the reader in, with subtle indirection, into what an extraordinarily sly and with-it person she is. But these random allusions keep raising questions that are so much more interesting than anything she intends to write, and then her failure to answer or even address them leaves you just puzzled and annoyed.

For example today, in yet another Trump interview, where her main anxiety is to slip the "little hands" allegation past his attention, she drops a remarkably strange assertion about the place she's working in:

All over town, even in the building where I’m writing this column, freaked-out Republicans are plotting how to rip the nomination from Trump’s hot little hands.

But doesn't follow it up.

Jesus, Maureen, I know you'll just tell me it's irrelevant, but what building are you talking about?

Photo by Declan McCullach of the New York Times Washington bureau, February 2003. Do you suppose freaked-out Ross Douthat and the Brooks Brothers, David and Arthur (no relation), took advantage of the intense privacy for a secret confabulation coordinating their #NeverTrump efforts and by pure bad luck Maureen happened to be there churning out a column at the same time?

The Perils of Feminism

Gloria Swanson in Clarence Badger's Teddy at the Throttle (1917). Image via Bangor Daily News.

The Camille Paglia of the Washington establishment:

Maureen Dowd, January 23 2016:

Sarah Palin Saves Feminism

Maureen Dowd, February 14 2016:

When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism

Happy Valentine's Day, Red! I guess she must have done the dirty deed just in the last couple of weeks, huh? Because it was OK when Palin last saw it.

Well, maybe she was just being sarcastic on that:

What kind of animal is Maureen Dowd?

Crouching wolverine, via National Geographic Kids (an outfit that you'd think might know how to provide a photo credit, but never mind).

So Sister Maureen Dowd has gone beyond worrying about what gender Hillary Clinton is to what kind of animal:

Since we cannot know if a woman is going to overcompensate on machismo — as Hillary did on the unjustified Iraq invasion — we may want to look at it a different way.

It may be more relevant to ask if someone is a cat or a dog.

Or, in Shorter form:

She writes beyond parody

Panorama of crowd and stadium here in Mobile. #trump. pic.twitter.com/rLDMDzIrKo

— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 22, 2015

Maureeen Dowd, in her fourth column devoted to Donald Trump since August 8 (i.e., every column she's written since August 8 plus one spillover piece last week when she had too much material to fit in):

He lives beyond parody....

There is nothing that excites Trump the candidate more than crowing that he has a great big crowd and Jeb has a teeny weeny crowd. He sounded orgasmic as he described to the New Hampshire town hall that his Alabama event this weekend had to be moved from a room that held 1,000 to a room that held 2,000 to a convention center to a stadium.

So overwhelmed with the thought of the

Lectiones

Julian Bond (1940-2015) organizing sometime in the early 1960s, via Georgia Encylopedia.

R.I.P. Julian Bond. NPR had a beautiful interview on the civil rights titan with his dear friend and sometime political opponent Congressman John Lewis.

Syria

Also important on NPR this morning, two pieces on the European refugee crisis, one heartbreaking interview with a Médecins Sans Frontières emergency rescue coordinator, one breakdown of the numbers and what they mean. The latter was drier, but more shocking as you consider what they represent, the extraordinary callousness of the international community: in Calais, there are 3000 refugees mostly from Syria trying to make their way into the UK, to howls of aggrieved protest from Prime Minister Cameron and the nativist British right, but the rest of Europe is holding 250,000 refugees—Britain really can't help out with approximately 1% of the total? And then Europe moans over its 250,000, but comparatively impoverished Turkey is taking care of two million all by itself, or four times the total for the world's richest continent.

Then again, in Syria itself there are now, according to the latest USAID report, 7.6 million internally displaced persons, almost a third of the population (of course the population would be larger if not for the four million refugees outside the country). The US is the largest single donor of cash assistance, having spent $4,110,566,565 since the conflict began in March 2011, but had actually taken in fewer than 1000 refugees by last May (compared to 6000 in Brazil), because why? Because we're too scared, as explained by

Careful, Joe

From the 2012 vice presidential debates. Times reporter Amy Chozick says he's "by no means a virtuoso campaigner", isn't it funny how different people can have totally different memories of the same thing?

So I have no reason to think Joe Biden would be a bad president, or indeed anything other than a rather good president.

He has immense experience, and he's almost always in a position on policy matters that is both compassionate and smart. He knows Congress in a way neither Obama nor Clinton possibly could, from working within it for 45 years. He's the most "likable" candidate since Ulysses S. Grant, he's notably in touch with the feelings of modestly educated white men without the usual corollary view that nobody else really exists, and yet at the same time he was intellectually the best-qualified candidate on foreign affairs in 2008 and would certainly be the same again, even though his main rival recently spent four years as secretary of state (she knows a great deal, but carefully avoids giving any sign she's done any thinking about the subject since she got in trouble for doing that in 1999—she talks to us on the subject like a secretary of state, pretty much the same way she might talk to the president of Turkey, in pure officially sanctioned boilerplate). He's pretty damn old, but our concepts of old have been changing rapidly, now that we Baby Boomers are all refusing to retire because we can't afford to.

So what's making me cringe as this little push gets underway to get him in the race?

Who'll let the dogs out?

Image via nogarlicnoonions, Lebanon.

Verbatim Maureen Dowd, "Call Off the Dogs", New York Times, February 15 2015:

I’LL pay for this column.

The Rottweilers will be unleashed.

When I saw the first line my first thought was, hey, you mean you're not asking the Times to pay, you're doing this one for free? No, she means she'll pay in victimhood, hounded by the ruthless enemies whose crimes she plans to unveil: she thinks she's Anna Politkovskaya, courageously fighting the diabolical menace of, um,

Pretty state of things

Image from Hastings on Nonviolence.

Maureen Dowd didn't like the reporter Judith Miller much. Or rather, she liked Miller a lot, but in a special Dowdy sort of way:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Sometimes I wonder if Dowd isn't a fictional character invented by Clare Booth Luce to preserve the worst early 20th-century stereotypes of the independent woman as uncontrollably catty misogynist. Anyhow, what she didn't seem to think at all was that Miller's jailing for contempt of court in the summer of 2005 was a case of "strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers". Au contraire!

Dowd pitches

Inspired by Maureen Dowd:

1. Tragedy

You wouldn't think a spunky gal reporter of Irish ancestry would give two pins about Greek tragedy, but when I was going out with Bobby Kennedy (always a perfect gentleman, by the way, and never laid a finger on me, realizing I was too young), he often quoted his favorite poet, Aeschylus, author of the Agamemnon and countless other great dramas. Euripides, too, was a great Greek tragedian, and in his Medea he portrays a woman destroyed by jealousy of her faithless husband, madly killing her own children in order to get back at him, which immediately brings Hillary Clinton to mind...

Jenö Gyárfás, The Tragedy of Man, ca. 1880. Wikimedia Commons.

Reefer Dowdness

Dowd, on her bad THC chocolate trip in a Denver hotel room:

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more....

Cheap shots and balls in the air

The Amiga Juggler, via Jason Scott.

Maureen Dowd on Condoleezza Rice (whom she naturally calls "Condi"):

But, as Russell Baker once noted, she was trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, spinning her wheels in the second term trying to undo the disasters of the first.

She has nothing particularly surprising or even wrong to say on the subject; what really interested me is that she managed to find Russell Baker, of all people, using two desperate clichés in one brief sentence, as remarkable a feat in its way as finding rhinestones in a pearl oyster.

Actually (thanks as ever, Dr. Google!), what Baker said in his great 2008 New York Review article is so refreshing as a kind of palate cleanser after a few Dowd paragraphs that it's worth quoting at length:

Maureen sorrow than anger

Shorter Maureen Dowd, "Is Barry Whiffing?" New York Times, April 30 2012:

So remember when we were in like eighth grade and you were cool and I like wrote "Mrs. Barry Obama" in my economics notebook with all those little hearts and I would have totally done you I mean all the way and I'm not even fucking kidding? And now you're in math club? I'm like don't even try to speak to me you herb.

Image via Graphics18.

Bad writing

Quintessential Dowd:

It was a sequel idea proposed by Tony Scott, who directed the blockbuster “Top Gun,” before he committed suicide in 2012.

Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced the 1986 movie, which he once described as “‘Star Wars’ on earth,” recently revealed to The Huffington Post that he and Cruise are getting “closer and closer” to a deal to make “Top Gun 2.”

It was actually quite a long time before 2012, as the following paragraph makes clear: a good 26 years. Whereas her sentence makes it sound as if he offed himself while the movie was in post-production. Or I'm misreading that comma, and the idea is that he proposed the sequel just before doing himself in, as if it were the idea itself that drove him to despair.

Either way, it has no possible relevance to the subject at hand. If she wanted to make it clear that Scott is not involved in the sequel, she could have said "the late Tony Scott", like any normal writer. But because suicide is a sort of "edgy" concept, and she's deathly afraid that her friends will suspect she might not have known the gossip item (it's two years old!), she's got to squeeze it in somehow, no matter how much it damages her rhythm. What a terrible, terrible writer she is.

From "The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd", via Comics Alliance, 2010.

Cheap shots and medical advice

He's just asking on behalf of a friend:

.@DrPhil asks: "If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her?" then deletes the tweet later pic.twitter.com/1sVDMaghI3
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 20, 2013

Depends on what kind of drunk. If she's passed out, you should see a doctor. No, for yourself. Also, how does she feel about you when she's sober? If she thinks you're a faux-feminist rodeo clown, you might be Dr. Phil. [jump]

Beyond the horse race

Vixen Strangely, on Maureen Dowd and her little fantasy about "Bill" and "Barry" and the "woodshed", where she

appears to be in agreement that it is better to "be caught trying" in the words of former President Clinton, in a kind of disregard of what, exactly, one is caught trying to do.....It's reasonable enough for President Clinton to state his opinion based on his own experience of humanitarian crises (Bosnia, Rwanda) in which intervention could achieve the goal of stopping a massacre (albeit it is generally the concession of former presidents to withhold a bit more regarding the impressions of what a current president should do), and in the case of Dowd, I am not surprised to see her boil down a complicated issue to a matter of "Quien es mas macho?"--that being her schtick. But the implication that doing something is better than nothing is a curious bit of question-begging, given our recent history.

I think that to those people, to the Washington press corps, the ones who don't know enough about anything to work a real beat, the "something" really is more important than the "what"—it's an effect of that frantic fear of partisanship, of appearing to believe that one "what" might be better than another.

We like to talk about how they're covering a horse race during the campaign, but during the actual governing it's more like ice dancing, I think: what's expected of the contestant is the execution of a certain set of maneuvers—a big bill, a big scandal, a big veto, a leap over Congress—but the setting, costume, music, and order of operations are up to you, and it's not important whether it's Tchaikovsky or the Tijuana Brass. Points are for being ardent, audacious, and pretty; achieve them, and the presidential historians will admire you on TV throughout your retirement, fail and—well, who wants to look back when we could be looking forward? Axel jump! Camel spin! Press lift!

Press lift: Sinead Kerr as Senator McCain and  John Kerr as Ted Barrett.  Junko Kimura/Getty Images.