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READ IT AND SLEEP
Just what readers of the Melbourne Age were screaming out for: 3315 words about Maureen Dowd, “the most dangerous columnist in America.” Dangerous to stock prices, maybe.
(Via Hal Colebatch)
A substantial amount of the story is about how Dowd is supposedly irresistible to men. All the evidence comes from the salivating personal testimony of male Beltway journalists (and one Clinton spokesman). The one relationship she has had that the article tells us about was with fellow NYT columnist John Tierney. All of Dowd’s friends, at least the ones who rate mentions here, are also journalists. Does Dowd know anyone else? Does the author of this article?
Posted by dsmith_michigan on 2005 12 30 at 02:48 PM • permalinkLefties think that Dowd is “feared” in the White House and that she is a real force.
Which is true in the sense that the White House is afraid she’ll stop writing. I bet that smarty-pants Rove is paying her.
Posted by NewSisyphus on 2005 12 30 at 02:49 PM • permalinkGranny Dowd: what a waste of genetic material, ink and Henna Rinse. Where do these maladjusted, college-credentialed-but-quarter-educated, self-worshipping journo-vermin come from? I’ve always thought it a great tribute to (or is it a curse of?) a free economy, that it tends to be so truly productive in its totality, such a rich and invigorating brew, that it can easily sustain an extremely frothy head of lumpen intellectuals - even a head as frothy as MoDo’s.
Dowd says she doesn’t mind that George W. Bush has nicknamed her “the Cobra”, and she probably likes being called “the flame-haired flamethrower”, but she hates all monikers that involve knives or other sharp objects. “I have a fear of castration,” she explains. “Not fear of being castrated but fear of castrating.”
Feminism wants a castrated woman, which Dowd seems to be avoiding ; but she’s not getting anything for it.
In the end she will not have struck up a good deal for a man, which was, after all, the point.
As to Dowd’s columns, as opposed to her life, they’re not as good as they ought to be, given what she’s trying to do. Bush derangement claims another victim.
It wouldn’t hurt to re-read Thurber & White’s _Is Sex Necessary_, which is entirely male self-mocking, as to pretentions and interests.
Nor has there been a better cartoon than Thurber’s smallish man hesitating before making a phone call, ``Psychologist about to call his wife.
“Most dangerous” was a typo. It should read “most dang erroneous.”
Posted by Jim Treacher on 2005 12 30 at 03:38 PM • permalinkThe really sad thing is that Dowd used to be an incredible columnist. A combination of humor, hipness, irrevence, tradition, she was liberal feminist AND Catholic! And she made it all come off. When I lived in New York, I used to turn immediately to her columns.
Then came 9/11. Suddenly, her self centeredness was not so appealing anymore. I figured she lost it when she had the column about fearing there was anthrax in her computer. If parody, it was awful. If real, it showed she was deranged.
She basically now has one column. It consists of trying to come up with new cutsy nicknames for Bush, Rumsfeld, etc., a joke about their stupidity, and a compliant how no man wants to marry a woman as smart and sucessful as her.
After 9/11, I decided that she and Ann Coulter needed to be placed in seclusion until the war was over. But at least Coutler is being funny, and most is done with a wink and a nod. Dowd seems to be serious.
When Dan Quayle mentioned Murphy Brown in one speech, he was mocked out of public life for treating the TV character as a real person. Then Dowd complained about “Ally McBeal” and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2005 12 30 at 04:26 PM • permalinkThat’s not a stock chart, it looks more like a suicide pact.
In reference to Maureen Dowd, someone had to take over for the congenitally silly Ellen Goodman.
Posted by Pat Patterson on 2005 12 30 at 04:26 PM • permalinkExpatriate curmudgeon Fred Reed asks: Will someone please marry Maureen Dowd?
Posted by The Sanity Inspector on 2005 12 30 at 04:30 PM • permalinkSorry I meant the other congenitally silly writer, Anna Quindlen.
Posted by Pat Patterson on 2005 12 30 at 04:32 PM • permalinkI concur with Mr. Bingley.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 12 30 at 04:46 PM • permalink>Sorry I meant the other congenitally silly writer, Anna Quindlen
I had a run in with Anna Quindlen once, or was it Gail Collins?—the late 1980s version of Dowd. Before a Guiliani for Mayor rally in 1989, she ran around giving orders to all the people there while we waited for Guiliani to arrive.
Then, when someone realized she was not with the campaign but a reporter, she got bent out of shape that she was told not to interfer with the campaign workers.
The New York Times Magazine ran a photo of the wicked witch as part of its review of her book.She lounges atop of bar stool, ruby slippers and fishnet stockings in an attempt to glamorize her bar-stool legs, a sultry look put on her face by make-up artisits, posed by fashion photographers and certainly surrounded by wispy public relations types. One might interpret the photo as attempting to make her attractive to men, but that would argue against her great intellectual dicovery that men are not necessary. So who?
As I gaze at the photo of the aging, unmarried princess, I am struck at how she has begun that elongating, skinnyficating body change where girls who were once attractive begin to look like nothing so much as witches. Her hands and fingers, especially, stike terror in me. Her face is getting long and her cheeks too hollow. Instead of having “marvelous cheekbones, dahling,” she is becoming…a hag. It will take some years for her nose to touch her chin, of course, but a hag has to start somewhere.
I know this is small of me, and if she were a kinder person herself, I would not attack her physical appearance. After all, I look like a shaved-headed mathematics professor with his hand stuck in a toaster, myself. But she has made her career attacking - often amusingly, more often of late, not - the looks of other people. Fair enough. Live by the sword…
Dear Maureen,
In order to attract a man, you’ve got to actually like them.—Nora (free advisor to the lovelorn)
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2005 12 30 at 07:46 PM • permalinkRemember that old Lili Tomlin joke? “The vibrator got so hot, we had to wear oven mitts.”
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2005 12 30 at 08:15 PM • permalinkI think Ariel wants in on MoDo’s pants which, going by the attached photo, are bloomers over pampers. This fluffer piece doesn’t do anything but serve up how trivial and meaningless MoDo’s career really is, but poor Ariel is just far too star-struck to notice as she’s writing it.
Now WTF is it doing in The Age? Did Jaspan run out of “BBC Cuts” copy? No wonder its circulation figures are in the toilet.
Ooh, I’ve just googled Ariel herself, and I want in on her pants! Hmm, a MoDo drag queen outfit, and a few lame pop culture references might be the trick. How could she tell the difference?
geez, that article on Dowd was first published nearly two months ago (Nov 7). So it goes in The Age today…why on earth?
A little from Wikepedia on the author follows:
Ariel Levy was raised in Larchmont, New York, and attended Wesleyan University in the 1990’s. Her experiences at Wesleyan, which she says had “co-ed showers, on principle,” seem to have had a strong influence on her views regarding modern sexuality.After leaving Wesleyan she was employed by Planned Parenthood for about a week, after which she was fired “because she is an extrememly (sic) poor typist.” Soon afterwards she was hired by New York magazine.
and the most wrong thing i’ve come across about Dowd: http://www.slate.com/id/25423/#ContinueArticle
Dowd’s moments of self-revelation are carefully rationed and, therefore, unusually effective.
yeah right.Dowd says she doesn’t mind that George W. Bush has nicknamed her “the Cobra”,
Another Age typo. The New York Times originally reported that President Bush called her The Asp, but that turned out to be a typo as well…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 12 31 at 12:57 AM • permalinkWhat an incredibly kiss-arse article. What is A.O. Scott (a movie reviewer for the Times, isn’t he?) after, anyway? Surely not Dowd, whose currency as a babe has long since been squandered, infelicitously, on late-night hours concocting self-aggrandizing, faux-naif admissions and assorted confessional splooges meant to show her as the brilliant-but-vulnerable cute chick at the Times: who me? Well, yes, I…I am that woman. I really have no stomach for this…this terrible criticism that people seem to need to throw at me (((simper))). But I’m incredibly smart. Won a Pulitzer. That’s why men don’t want to marry me, you know. That, and these marvelous shoes.
from the article (bolding added)
THERE ARE POSSIBLY even more naked women at Maureen Dowd’s house today than there were when this place was former US president John F. Kennedy’s Georgetown bachelor pad in the 1950s. They are lounging in the vintage posters, carved into her Deco furniture, painted in huge trompe l’oeil pastorals on the living-room wall.
“My girlfriend Michi said, ‘You’ve got to paint clothes on them.’ Like, you know, how they did at the Sistine Chapel,” says Dowd, who is drinking white wine from a goblet with a naked woman carved into its stem.
stats wrote: “One might interpret the photo as attempting to make her attractive to men, but that would argue against her great intellectual dicovery that men are not necessary. So who?”
Who, indeed?
#21 It could be said that Ariel is a quasi-MoDo…
—Nick
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2005 12 31 at 02:59 AM • permalink
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