Outside the mainstream vacuum, much has been written about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's obsession with John Edwards' hair and "Breck girl" smears, not to mention her emasculating character assassinations of Al Gore ("so feminized that he's practically lactating") and Barack Obama ("Obambi"), all of whom, in Dowd's eyes, fail to fill her "daddy" shoes.
What else can one say of her insipid, junior high, quasi-homophobic missives that hasn’t already been said? At this point, Dowd has come to resemble a substance abuser who refuses to admit she has a problem, in her case an addiction to the intoxicating schadenfreude she seems to derive by depicting top Democratic pols as fey girly men.
And it's not as if there hasn't been a chorus - an electronic Greek chorus - of Dowd interventions in alternative media circles and across the blogosphere.
Yet from the most influential news platform in America, Dowd continues to desperately seek this fix, injecting these inane ramblings into our national political discourse like an addict ever eager to turn on new users.
Occasionally, Dowd has shown a capacity to write clever columns based on fact. But when she strays from the facts, she often stumbles headlong into a fugue of petty, offensive and anachronistic projections, the kind of breathless banality you might expect to find in a sheltered gossip columnist's page. Absolutely cringe-worthy, she becomes the transparently repressed social observer at the dinner party, relishing in her captive audience, before which she unwittingly, and embarrassingly, reveals the depths of her narrow and wormy mind.
Today, Dowd is back, blurting out more buffoonish observations about her favorite piñata John Edwards. On this drive-by, however, she spends the bulk of her time (and ours) reciting a laundry list of Edwards' most trivial thoughts. There’s no point in thoroughly dissecting this op-ed. If I did I would wind up exerting ten times the amount of effort it took Dowd to phone it in. She presents her piece as though it's based on an interview with Edwards (and I have to assume it is), but it reads as if, while poolside or toe in the tide, Dowd opened a box of clippings titled "Banal Edwards Quotes," cut them up, mixed them around, and typed up the result. So hackneyed and vapid is this op-ed it resembles a deft spoof of Maureen Dowd’s worst writing.
If I were Dowd’s editors at The Times, I would’ve suggested holding
her paycheck until a rewrite was submitted. David Brooks might be wrong
99.9% of the time, but at least he goes to fantastical lengths to
justify his intellectually dishonest views. You can feel the smoke pouring from his ears as he attempts to twist the laws of logic.
I’d wager that Dowd put more effort in applying sunscreen than in the production of this piece.
Abysmal from start to finish, the following is just a glimpse of her probing column.
She begins:
Here are five things you might not know about John Edwards:
¶He never saw a single episode of “The Sopranos.”
¶He doesn’t like the opera, but his favorite musical is “Phantom of the Opera.”
¶His first date with Elizabeth was dancing at the Holiday Inn in Durham or Chapel Hill — he can’t remember which — sometime after which she made an ironclad rule that politicians should never dance.
¶He became a lawyer because as a kid he loved watching “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders” and “The Fugitive.” (Richard Kimble really needed a lawyer.)
¶His top sex symbol is a fellow North Carolinian, Andie MacDowell.
Don't worry, Dowd digs deeper, revealing what we need to know about a presidential candidate:
Asked about his Hollywood dream girl, natch, she’s a North Carolinian. “She’s in those skin commercials,” he says. “She was in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’” And his favorite actress is Glenn Close, who had to dub Andie MacDowell’s lines in her first big part, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” because her Southern accent was so thick.
[...]
He doesn’t watch much TV, he says, except when his son Jack gets him to watch “Jimmy Neutron,” or Elizabeth gets him to watch “Boston Legal” and “Brothers & Sisters” (a show he likes).
He loves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who once defended the right of rich pols like him to talk about poor people. [Cute dig. Dowd genuinely applies Colbert's satirical O'Reilly take on Edwards. In other words, she bases her cutting comment on the views of a fictitious fascist newsman who's driven by "truthiness." Well done. Even more preposterous, this is the most substantive line in her column; as if by accident, Dowd provides us a peek between the lines to glean an actual issue in Edwards' campaign: poverty.] He says he’s seen his fellow Southern lawyer Fred Thompson on “Law & Order” a time or two when flipping channels to get to sports. “I’m a huge Tar Heels fan,” he says. “I know way too much about basketball and football.”
Having already exhausted discussion of Edwards' views on the most pressing issues of the day - TV shows that influenced him to become a lawyer, TV shows he watches with his son and wife, TV shows in which he's seen Fred Thompson act, a couple of his favorite books and poems, and his "Hollywood dream girl" - Dowd returns to that telling dance at the Holiday Inn and then ends her illuminating portrait by reinserting the knife as he's walking out the door:
Recalling his first date with Elizabeth, in law school, he says: “I was such a classy guy, I took her to the Holiday Inn to dance. It was loud. Elizabeth made fun of me for weeks for taking her there. Elizabeth thinks the two rules you always use in politics are: Don’t dance. And don’t wear hats.”
Especially not if you’ve got such a fabulous haircut to show off.
Say it with me, Maureen. I am Maureen Dowd, and I am an addict.
Maureen Dowd Unintentionally Writes Self-Parody
Posted by: MediaBloodhound | July 09, 2007 at 05:20 AM
Why would Edwards give an interview to Dowd, and why would he answer dumb questions like this? Why would she ask dumb questions like this?
Ah, never mind. Too much work...
Posted by: Ahistoricality | July 09, 2007 at 03:28 PM
Dowd's mental condition may be due to the horrid red dye she applies to her hair.
Been there...
Posted by: Rula Lenska | July 09, 2007 at 04:53 PM
It would be stooping to Dowdie's level of appearance-based criticism to point out that all the clocks in her apartment are right twice a day.
Posted by: Kip W | July 09, 2007 at 05:47 PM
Yellow Dog Democrat
I am a male 60 years old I dig Maureen..have a photo of her on my desk top, I love smart women who are not affected by the existing charade of American Politics. I don't believe for a moment Maureen enjoys having to remind politicians about the denials and troubles they create on their own. She intuitively knows that many politicians just want her to shut up and salute...it simply isn't her style..Maureen isn't prejudice she reports on women and republicans as well.
Posted by: Barry Grumley | April 04, 2008 at 09:02 PM