Deconstructing Dowd

[MavKikiNYC]

The Prince of Tides, Tacking and Attacking
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 23, 2004

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

LOS ANGELES — I had to come all the way to Hollywood to find Democrats who can actually sound sincere when they say John Kerry has turned a corner.

Mr. Kerry is looking for corners to turn in his campaign just as frantically as the president is looking for corners to turn in Iraq. (I rate Mr. Kerry's chances higher.) But even here, among the right's despised liberal cultural elite, some disenchanted Democrats are already lusting for the Clinton restoration in 2008.

"Kerry's always trying too hard to prove his guy-dom," one influential Democrat sighed, "while Bush comes across as more of a real guy."

Republicans back in Washington are not only mocking the spandex-coated Mr. Kerry's windsurfing video in their ads; they scoff at the notion that the wind's at his back.

"I'm not sure it's turning a corner to do Regis and Kelly," sneered one who has taken to talking about Mr. Kerry in the past tense.

The Bushies' perverse private calculation about why Mr. Kerry can't get traction would be comic if it weren't tragic: he can't effectively argue that he could do something differently in Iraq because W. has so bollixed up the place that even a change at the top wouldn't help.

"He'd never be able to get any other countries to help us," one Bush insider said. "Even the British only have 7,000 troops in Iraq, compared to our 150,000." (The London Observer reported that despite growing dangers in Iraq, the main British force will soon be cut by a third.)

Mr. Kerry has finally begun to fight back and put the focus on Iraq instead of Vietnam. His speech on Monday was compelling and, unlike W.'s toxic cotton-candy spin, has the additional advantage of being true.

Going after Saddam, as the senator says, was a diversion from our greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden. We have "traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

We have, as Mr. Kerry says, a president and vice president who are "in denial" in a fantasy world, and who are guilty of "colossal failures of judgment." W. did "hitch his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military."

America's credibility in the world has plummeted, as Mr. Kerry says, just at the time we have to deal with the truly scary spokes in the "axis of evil": the ones who are a real nuclear threat, not an imaginary one.

Yet Mr. Kerry's case has a hollow center. He was asked at his press conference on Tuesday about W.'s snide reminders that his rival gave him authority to go to war (and, playing frat pledge to W.'s rush chairman, inanely agreed that he would still have voted to give that authority even if there were no W.M.D.).

That vote, he replied, was correct "because we needed to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for weapons. That's what America believed."

Not all Americans.

The administration rolled the Democrats on the authorization vote. It was clear at the time that going after Saddam to punish Osama made no sense, that Cheney & Co. were going to use Saddam as a lab rat for all their old neocon agendas. It was clear, as the fleet sailed toward Iraq, that the Bush crew had no interest in diplomacy - that it wanted to castrate the flaccid U.N., the flower child Colin Powell and his pinstriped State Department, snotty Old Europe, and the despised Saddam to show that America is a hyperpower that is not to be messed with.

As I quoted a girlfriend saying in September 2002, a month before Mr. Kerry's authorization vote, "Bush is like the guy who reserves a hotel room and asks you to the prom."

When Mr. Kerry says it was the way the president went about challenging Saddam that was wrong, rather than the fact that he challenged Saddam, he's sidestepping the central moral issue.

It was wrong for the president to take on Saddam as a response to 9/11, to pretend the dictator was a threat to our national security, to drum up a fake case on weapons and a faux link to Al Qaeda, and to divert our energy, emotions and matériel from the real enemy to an old enemy whose address we knew.

It was wrong to take Americans to war without telling them the truth about why we were doing it and what it would cost.

It wasn't the way W. did it. It was what he did.

[MavKikiNYC]

It should go without saying that Dowd's very particular perspective on the war to liberate Iraq is perversely wrong---that Preisdent Bush's decision was not only the right decision, it was correct on a Lincolnian, Rooseveltian, Churchillian, Trumanian scale. His decision to right American foreign policy and engage the terrorists pre-emptively is in the process of changing the course of world history.

But I've also wondered about how and why an intellect like Dowd's could be so psychotically wrong. Clearly the woman has an intelligence, and a developed intellect, but why are all of her writings so bitterly, corosively, venomously, jaggedly, pathologically, bitterly, hatefully negative? What could have happened to this woman to make her view with such an insular and concentrated hatred?

Not sure why it took me so long to think to do this, but I was having a discussion with a friend today (who quoted another friend who was quoting a former colleague of Dowd's.....I know this is 5th-hand info here, but still...) who mentioned that Maureen Dowd had been a paramour of Michael Douglas's for a time before he met and bred Catherine Zeta-Jones, and that in fact Douglas dropped Dowd sometime more-or-less after he took up with CZJ, and that it was a that point that Dowd's writings became unrelentingly black-heartedly bilious.

And then it all made sense. A few Google hits later, and it's all confirmed. When you read a Dowd column, you're not reading anything like real news analysis, you're merely reading her working through her grief and disappointment at being rejected by a sexual pathologue like Michael Douglas. Her hatred of W is directed toward him, it's merely a reflection of the hatred she feels toward all men, particularly those who have been unfaithful to her, or who have failed to bring her happiness.

Maureen Dowd's warpred, distorted view of the world is no more objective than Dan Rahter's. About the best that can be specualted, is that her wrong-headedness comes not from dishonesty, but from psychosis. On the other hand, at the institutional level, while there appears to be some movement afoot at CBS to remedy the credibility drubbing that Rahter has wrought upon the network and in particular it's news department, they NYTimes, by contrast, coddles, nurtures and rewards Dowd's lunatic ravings as a "good journalism" , and views her as a valuable commodity to the corporate entity.

There's been more commentary than I was previously aware of on the depth and dimension of Dowd's mental-illness-masquerading-as-journalism. I'm going to post a few pieces of reportage about her here because I believe it will make the voice that we readers hear in her writings clearer for what it is--the wounded yelpings of a spurned woman.

[MavKikiNYC]

A very revealing, very interesting article from 1999 on Dowd, apparently pre-Douglas infidelity:

Lady Liberties
For "panting puppy" Bill Clinton, "helpless victim" Ken Starr, and even our entire "soft-porn nation," Maureen Dowd has one message: She's angry with us! Really, really angry!

By Michael Wolff

Sex, or the opposite of sex, has made Maureen Dowd the New York Times op-ed-page poster girl.

She has flown past the pretense of perjury and indicted the president not just for his indiscretions but, really, for the nature of his sexuality -- self-indulgent and weak. He is a "panting puppy"; "he has made wickedness seem pathetic"; if he honestly described his encounters, "he would be laughed out of any locker room in the country"; he is, she says of his sexual classiness, no Jack Kennedy. She pauses along the way to heap scorn upon Kenneth Starr's sexuality, too. "He had become," she wrote, "the helpless victim of his cravings for ecstasy . . . gaining pleasure from repetition: " 'breasts,' 'genitalia,' 'inserted,' 'stain.' "

Dowd has risen above most of the other caustic voices in the impeachment cacophony because where others clearly have a political agenda, Dowd's views in her twice-weekly 700-word column seem born of a purer rage. She truly seems to have it in for unfaithful men, Hollywood, the media, and all other cornerstones of "trivial and craven and tawdry" morality -- the "soft-porn nation," as she recently put it.

Still, it did not necessarily seem like hypocrisy when she began to be linked with the actor Michael Douglas -- a kind of Bill Clinton's Bill Clinton who, the tabloids report, has undergone sexaholic therapy. Rather, it seemed like part of the logical background of her wrath. Perhaps she is drawn to such men (at the same time, Douglas appears to be involved with ABC newscaster Elizabeth Vargas). That would certainly explain her anger -- it's at her own women-who-love-too-much weakness. Maybe.

One of the hallmarks of her column, however, is its impersonal nature. She never lets us see the private Maureen Dowd or the domestic Dowd or the doubting Dowd. Although the column is relentlessly first-person, we aren't offered even the vaguest outlines of her daily life or the roots of her feelings. Unlike Clinton, who communicates with sentiment and vulnerability, Dowd is all armor and aggression.

Dowd, of course, took the "woman's spot" on the op-ed page, replacing the hugely popular Anna Quindlen, whose stock-in-trade was emotional and domestic nuance. But where Quindlen reached for a majestic acceptance and understanding of the pain and ambiguities of public as well as private life, Dowd is fixated on the essential depravity of man-kind. Quindlen was a caregiver; Dowd is an open wound.

In addition to her un-Times-like venom, the other un-Times-like feature of her column is that there is almost no reporting -- often, no new information at all. She doesn't look for stories, doesn't much confer with insiders, doesn't hit the streets. It's just 'tude. She is derisive, mocking, hyperbolic, bitchy. She is more in the style of a cable-network talking head than she is in the grand Times tradition of James Reston (whose antecedent is Walter Lippman); indeed, she more rightly belongs in the company of Westbrook Pegler and the other vitriolic Hearst columnists than in the world of Times worthies.

Even as a stylist, on which basis Dowd developed her reputation at the Times, she has tended to put aside her eye for the killer detail and become more of a speechifier, even a proselytizer, her chief devices being staccato repetitions, dripping sarcasm, and symbolic straw men. ("It makes perfect sense that Geraldo could be the NBC Nightly News anchor for the millennium. It makes perfect sense that 60 Minutes could hire Murphy Brown as a correspondent. It makes perfect sense that Bill Clinton could go on the board of DreamWorks.") Her style is really radio.

But it works. She is the Times' new voice. She is the Times' avenging heroine. They really, really love her.

Columns on the Times op-ed page have historically had a divided purpose: On the one hand, the mission is to have eminent journalists bring thoughtfulness and reason to the issues of the day; on the other, it's to reward successful service to the corporation (ergo, the page is something of a graveyard).

The new generation of columnists -- along with Dowd, there is Thomas Friedman representing the international perspective, Frank Rich the cultural side, Bob Herbert the underclass point of view -- is supposed to maintain that tradition of augustness and reward, while duking it out in the significantly more competitive world of today's punditry.

Although Dowd may not be succeeding in the august department, there is a 'You go, girl' squad cheering the way she has brought the Times some street cred with her buzz-producing pugnaciousness. Part of her appeal within the Times is precisely that she is not in the classic, sober, analytic, elitist, Ivy League (Wasp or Jewish) tradition. She is in that other newspaper tradition: urban, Irish, working-class. The Times, while distinguished by the former, has always been as much the latter (Harvard snot versus street reporter).

Arriving at the metro desk after the Washington Star folded (and after a brief stint at Time), Dowd almost immediately stood out in what is probably the most difficult, politically fraught, and competitive part of the paper (the highest ratio of reporters to bylines).

The Times often makes an internal distinction between reporters whose gift is reporting -- that is, bird-dogging the news -- and reporters who can turn a nice phrase and clever analogy (which are then repeated in Times Talk, the in-house newsletter). As the writer-reporter with the nicest phrases and cleverest analogies, Dowd excelled in the eighties era of a softer, more feature-heavy front page.

In 1986, she was rewarded with an assignment upgrade to the Washington bureau. In Washington, she starred both as a writer -- becoming one of the signature journalists of the Reagan and Bush years (she is often credited with helping foster the Bush goofy-preppy-endearing persona; Dowd and Bush are said to keep up a chummy correspondence) -- and as a Times insider. Howell Raines, then the Washington-bureau chief, now the head of the editorial page and in contention to be the paper's top editor, became her mentor and closest confidant, and, by most reports, she his. "She cracks Howell up and Howell cracks her up," says a senior Timesman. Many people at the Times believe that at least for a period they were romantically involved -- but part of the Dowd mystique is that no one seems to know for sure. Just as important, she became friendly with the publisher's son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then in the midst of his short climb to the top.

In Times legend, she crossed the Rubicon when she broke a front-page story on Kitty Kelley's Nancy Reagan biography, revealing that Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers. In Kremlinesque Times by-play, the fact that the story had been passed to the less-experienced weekend editors instead of being evaluated by the more stringent weekday editors got her into trouble. Unreported, unsubstantiated allegations about the First Lady of the United States on the front page of the Times . . . went the tenor of the public rebuke. In a memorable facedown over the issue, Dowd threatened to quit. "At that point, institutionally, at the highest levels, the decision was made that she was one of the paper's major assets," says a Times insider. After that, the job of the organization became to protect her and to keep her happy. Oft noted among the less valued staff, with envy and wonder, is that she has gotten away with more of an editorial voice in news reports than perhaps any other Times reporter before her.

In 1995, upon the departure of Anna Quindlen from the op-ed page, Dowd's "Liberties" column debuted.

The fierce Dowd cult at the paper -- she is held in awe by management and rank and file -- seems to be inspired not so much by the column itself as by her status as a real reporter (Frank Rich, for instance, who came from Harvard and started as the protégé of culture czar Arthur Gelb, is not particularly popular among the rank and file) and her virtuoso success within the Times organization. Also, the boys like her: She's the good-looking girl who belonged to the literary magazine in high school, sardonically commenting upon the cool guys. She is smart, surprisingly shy, funny, available, but not very available. She's Daria.

There is a kind of postmodern self-referentialism to her. She exists in a closed circle, protecting herself from a cruel world, a phony world. She gets material for her columns by reading the New York Times, watching television, and reading other people's columns. She almost never appears on television and would not be interviewed for this article ("Ms. Dowd," said her assistant, without irony, "does not speak to the press"). Her sources are other journalists; her kitchen cabinet includes the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier (quoted so often he can seem like a co-writer of the column); Rosalyn Carter's former press spokesman Paul Costello; Times reporter Alessandra Stanley, and Howell Raines. Oh, and her mother. "She checks everything with her mother," says a Washington-bureau veteran. "But beyond her circle of friends and her mother, she doesn't really speak to anyone else."

Except, recently, Douglas. The issue of the 47-year-old Dowd's relationships fascinates many at the Times. That she doesn't really do relationships -- at least not openly -- is what's fascinating. At the Washington Star (twenty years ago), she went out with John Tierney, now also at the Times. That ended badly, when, as she claimed in a pseudonymously published magazine piece, she found a little black dress not her own.

When she showed up with Michael Douglas at Ben and Sally's (i.e., Bradlee and Quinn's) twentieth-anniversary party, it was notable not so much for the celebrity factor as it was for the fact that Dowd had a date. Instead of lingering at the fringes of the crowd and huddling with her friends, as she is famous for doing, she was openly mingling and introducing Douglas to colleagues. "She was," says a Times friend who was at the party, "a different Maureen."

Since then, there's been speculation that it's Douglas's influence that has gotten her to include Starr and the Republicans within her circle of ire (Dowd's attack on Starr was so vicious that Starr's wife publicly rose to defend his honor); and, it's been suggested, Douglas has fostered, through Dowd, a lessening of hysteria on Raines's editorial page toward Clinton. If true, we might be in for it when Douglas fails to hide someone's little black dress.

Op-ed columns are judged, at least at the Times, on significantly more than just writing skills. It is perfectly possible within the Times to understand that someone can write boring or erratic or hysterical columns and still be thought of as an important columnist. Stature as a Times columnist has more to do with which way the wind is blowing at the Times. During the era of Reston, Tom Wicker, and Cyrus Sulzberger, what was valued was important gray-haired men who could break the news of what the world's other important gray-haired men were thinking. In some sense, the exact opposite is at a premium now. Like Dowd, Arthur Jr., who controls and runs the paper (and who is far more involved in editorial matters than his father was), does not see himself as an insider. Like Dowd, he sees glamorous insiders as trivial, craven, and tawdry, focusing his anger (like Dowd, he's quick to attack: "That's guy's an asshole," "That guy's a jerk") on the glitzy, the elite, the hoity-toity, the Hamptons, the Vineyard. The current of opinion, some say, runs from Sulzberger to Raines to Dowd. They are the new voice of the Times.

And they're not going to take it anymore.

[Epitome22]

I'm sorry. You're obviously very intelligent and thoughtful (as is Ms. Dowd) but this psycho analysis/conspiracy theory as to how/why Maureen Dowd could possibly be in opposition to the administration and the war is quite frankly bonkers.

Secondly, Intelligence doesen't always lead to sound judgement and sensibility. There are alot of freakishly intelligent people out there who are quite frankly full of sh*t. In fact, for many it seems the more intelligent you are, the more potential you have to be full of it on many issues. They may say "great minds think alike" but they really don't, and some great minds are frankly out of this world in more ways than one.

Thirdly why is she neccessarily wrong? From what I gathered from her recent appearance on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' friday night, her primary opposition to it is 'trumped up charges' which happens to be the exact issue most of the anti-war crowd is upset about, and the cheerleaders for the state frankly don't care about and mabe never cared about in the first place.

After much research and thought on the matter I now take the position the 'New Republic' magazine takes on the war, if maybe in reverse order. That Saddam was a scumbag, a murderer, an insult to human rights, a criminal with numerous violations according to UN standards and the boot to his ass was quite frankly long over do. But his connection to the war on terror, uniquely al qaeda was miniscule, he had neither the infamous weapons of mass destruction nor the capability to produce them, and all inclinations about his potential danger to the safety of the United states are at best, grievous and reckless overstatements.

[dude1394]

I can't ..... what dowd is ...... unless I see a few .......'s.....

[MavKikiNYC]

Nice to see a little bit of Mdm. Venom's psychoses spewed over toward faux-macho JFK-Deux's way. From the sound of it, he must've rebuffed her advances.


OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cooking His Own Goose
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 24, 2004
Columnist Page: Maureen Dowd
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

In yet another attempt to prove to George W. Bush that he is man enough to run this country, John Kerry made an animal sacrifice to the political gods in a cornfield in eastern Ohio last week.

Four dead geese are not too high a price to pay for a few rural, blue-collar votes in a swing state. As long as Mr. Kerry doesn't slip and ask Teresa to purée the carcasses into foie gras.

Tromping about in a camouflage costume and toting a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun that shrieked "I am not a merlot-loving, brie-eating, chatelaine-marrying dilettante," the Democratic nominee emerged from his shooting spree with three fellow hunters proclaiming, "Everybody got one, everybody got one," showing off a hand stained with goose blood.

One of my first presidential trips was going to Texas one weekend to cover Ronald Reagan hunting with James Baker at Mr. Baker's ranch. President Reagan came back proudly empty-handed. He didn't want to shoot any small animals. He had his faults, but he never overcompensated on macho posturing, thinking that blowing away a flock of birds in borrowed camouflage for the cameras or bombing a weakened dictator and then sashaying in Top Gun gear for the cameras would give him more brass.

Just as W. needed to shock and awe to prove he was no wimp, Mr. Kerry needed to shoot and eat. As Jodi Wilgoren wrote in The Times, a Kerry aide assured reporters that "two of the birds would soon be sent back to Mr. Kerry for consumption."

The senator is desperately trying to prove his regular-guydom. He's using more contractions and dropping G's, T's and N's, as Ms. Wilgoren points out, and he drank Budweiser with his male aides while watching a Red Sox game, when you know he was dying for an imported beer.

Democrats have been panting to get a gun into their nominee's hands for a month now. Apparently three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in Vietnam combat are not enough - even for Mr. Kerry, who seems to agree with the Vietnam-evading president and vice president that he has to prove he would be as tough on national security as they have been.

That wouldn't seem to be that hard, given that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney were the guys who were in charge when the C.I.A. warnings came true and Bin Laden struck in the U.S.; given that they let Osama and his top deputies slip away at Tora Bora; given that they had a war in Iraq over imaginary weapons; and given that they still don't even admit that their belligerence and bullying have spawned a large insurgency movement in Iraq and caused a recruitment swell for Islamic terrorism.

W. and Dick Cheney like being seen as a huge beast throwing its weight around. That was the whole point of whacking Saddam. The pair immediately began their Beavis-and-Butthead snickering and sneering at the Democrat's camouflage costume.

The vice president is right that Mr. Kerry can't compete in the arena of power hunting. When Mr. Kerry goes, only the birds are in danger. When Mr. Cheney and his pal Antonin Scalia go duck hunting together, the Constitution is in danger.

Even as they mocked the Democrat for trying to be macho with a wildlife tableau, the Republicans were trying to be macho with a wildlife tableau.

The Bush-Cheney campaign began showing a new ad on Friday aimed at scaring up more votes. Meant to be a chilling cross between "The Wolfen" and "The Blair Witch Project," the ad plays more like a cross between a Sierra Club promotion and "Lassie."

The wolves stalking around the forest are not meant to evoke scary Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons stalking around the Pentagon, planning more mischief. They are supposed to be the Al Qaeda terrorists stalking America, even though they look too cuddly for the narration that ominously warns: "In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operation by six billion dollars, cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."

One Kerry aide joked to a reporter that the Democrats should do a response ad where Mr. Kerry comes into the forest in a camouflage jacket and shoots the wolves.

Why not? A few more dead animals might do the trick for him.