Maureen Dowd: Pushing 60 Years-Old, Her Bosses Don’t Want to Sleep with Her Anymore, and, in a Desperate Bid for Relevance, She Recently Plagiarized an Unknown Blogger. So Who Cares if She Accuses Joe Wilson of Mentally Addressing Obama as “Boy”?

The English papers are covering our news better than our mainstream media. No surprise, really. Damian Thompson of The Telegraph writes an excellent article on the “Maureen Dowd calling Joe Wilson a racist” story. It starts off: Nasty piece of work, Maureen Dowd. And it’s entitled Maureen Dowd’s disgusting insinuation that Joe Wilson is a racist would land her in court in Britain. He makes the point in his article that in the UK her slur on Joe Wilson would be actionable. Does Joe Wilson have a case in this country?

In an Op-Ed entitled “Boy, Oh, Boy” (In her usually chirpy, swinging, superficial style that I find so annoying that I never read her columns ever. I’d rather read yet another “Hate Whitey” piece by Chuck Blow than one of her editorials.) she writes:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
. . .
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

What the “Left” (I would rather call them the “Chuck Schumerians”- rhymes with Rastafarians) is trying to do is distract from the fact that they are in the process of defying the will of the American people to execute a power grab of terrifying proportions- the Healthcare Putsch- which will mean that the government is up your ass- literally (hah)- until the day a bureaucrat says you die. They’re trying to distract from the Healthcare Putsch by throwing Obama and his race into relief while they make out like bandits in the background. Obama’s like the hot-chick decoy who gets the security guard engrossed in her cleavage while the bankrobbers stroll by. The cleavage in that metaphor stands for race.

I think it’s going to backfire. The Democratic party is the boy who cried “race” at this point.

So Dowd is like, Wilson’s from the South, ergo he’s a big racist, ergo he’s actually addressing the president as “boy.” The fact that a so-called political columnist is writing about hearing “unspoken words in the air” to begin with is pathetic. You know, I give up. Now “unspoken words in the air” are being used against GOP leaders. Why stop at “boy”? If we’re playing the “unspoken words in the air I heard, fair or not” game, then the sky’s the limit.

Look, Maureen Down is almost 60. She’s not a good writer. She never was. Apparently, she pretty much parlayed her attractiveness into career success. I would have thought that kind of stuff was rare for an Irish-American woman, being one myself, but why should Irish-American women be any better? Kirsten Gillibrand’s ticket into politics was the fact that her Irish-American grandmother was the, ahem, “confidante” of the mayor of Albany. I shouldn’t judge others by myself, a fault to which our president is prone- to wit, when he accused doctors of unnecessarily taking out children’s tonsils for monetary gain.

From a 2005 New York Magazine interview with and profile of Maureen Dowd:

Wasn’t Howell Raines, at one point, Dowd’s boyfriend?

“He was my boss,” she says very firmly. Then she cracks up.
. . .
Only slightly less remarkable than her hold over Bush the First, despite her status as perhaps the single most effective basher of Bush the Second, is the fact that Dowd managed to be the apple of two successive executive editors’ eyes: Joe Lelyveld and his replacement, Howell Raines.

Dowd once threatened to quit (“Not for the first or last time,” says Lelyveld) after an editor announced on speakerphone that a front-page story she’d written on Kitty Kelley’s biography of Nancy Reagan “wasn’t up to the Times standard.” “Some very bad judgments were made by editors, and a story that should have been played with a lot of restraint was treated seriously and put on the front page and Maureen was pressured and I didn’t think she was at fault,” says Lelyveld. Lelyveld successfully appeased her with a bouquet of red roses.

From a nauseating book review in Salon of Dowd’s stupid book on (retch) “gender politics” entitled (heave) “Are Men Really Necessary? When Sexes Collide” (From the review: “One of the book’s most telling through-lines is the series of fictional pronouncements about singleness that have lodged in Dowd’s brain: Kristin Davis’ ‘Sex and the City’ wail ‘I’ve been dating since I was 15! I’m exhausted. Where is he?’ and Holly Hunter’s lament in ‘Broadcast News,’ ‘I’m beginning to repel the people I’m trying to attract.’” 338 pages of stuff like this? WHO would be reading this? The people who would find this noteworthy can’t read.):

It’s in moments like this that her bravado betrays her vulnerability and it becomes clear — for anyone who hasn’t heard that she’s dated successful guys like “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, actor Michael Douglas, office mate John Tierney, and (as she half-acknowledged in New York) former Times chief Howell Raines — that Maureen Dowd doesn’t hate men at all. She’s just flummoxed by them.

I hadn’t actually heard that she’d been with these guys- and I hadn’t cared. (Clearly, I’m perilously out of the loop when it comes to geriatric Maureen Dowd’s sex life.) EXCEPT that it explains why it was decided that the New York Times had to have the “dizzy bimbo” viewpoint on its Op-Ed page. Also, this paragraph, gushing over “Who hasn’t heard who Maureen Dowd’s slept with?” calls to mind the terrific article I read today in the Post by Kyle Smith on the Times’s failure to cover the Van Jones story until it was over. In it, he wrote:

The Times isn’t so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys!

I think that goes for the entire mainstream media. What is Chris Matthews if not an ancient, heavily rouged, high school girl?

Then, in May of this year, Dowd plagiarized this unknown blogger, and then lied about it. Too boring to go into, but there’s a good article about it called “Maureen Dowd’s lazy New York Times column” in the UK Guardian. Dan Kennedy writes:

The real Dowd scandal, though, is not that she sloppily lifted one paragraph from a blog (if that does, indeed, represent the extent of her wrongdoing), but that she has long written a lightly reported, solipsistic column that is often entertaining but fails to illuminate anything deeper than the conventional wisdom of the day.

And he’s even on her side as far as hating Dick Cheney. I know, extraordinary, right? One journalist criticizing another journalist despite their shared hatred of Cheney? They seem to do things differently over in the UK. Or it’s that the UK journalists aren’t anticipating a bailout from Obama (via US) any day now, or something.