It was so full of promise, the ideal candidate with grandiose plans to fundamentally transform America had won. The man the New York Times had worked so hard to help elect was about to usher in a period of utopian hope and change: a chicken in every pot and a Chevy Volt in every driveway. Of course, Chevy Volts turned out to be explosive junk and President Obama’s hope and change has an equally illustrious track record. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, ever the optimistic Obama cheerleader, realizes that Obama has not succeeded. Nevertheless, she constructs an argument explaining where the disconnect originated.

Following on the heels of Newt Gingrich’s overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primaries, Dowd penned a piece entitled “Showtime at the Apollo”. Her opening graph is a tear-jerker:

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on.

That doesn’t sound desperate at all. Imagine the thrill of being at the Apollo (as opposed to the usual $30,000 per-plate cost, the man of the people would allow participation by the peasants for a mere $200 to $5000), the goosebumps resulting from the dream of what might have been … if only Obama’s presidency was not an overwhelming and abject failure. His record is impossible to ignore, and unless Obama wants to guarantee his loss, his campaign will have to utilize other tactics. Dowd posits her winning idea:

The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up.

The latest polls indicate that the American people have already made the decision to break up. President Obama’s class warfare messaging and embracing of the Occupy Wallstreet fecal-fest have done little to encourage Americans to make up. Neither has the high unemployment or blatantly anti-business environment created by his administration.

When those tactics fail, one of the Left’s favorite tactics is to gloss over the president’s flagging record by blaming his predecessor:

The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W.’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader.

Blaming Bush is never out of style. The problem is, even DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz admits the Democrats own the economy. This dog won’t hunt anymore. Three years after Obama’s immaculation, Americans want jobs, not excuses.

Finally, Dowd gets around to expressing her true elitist confession about Obama’s failure:

(more…)

One of the favorite stories from CPAC11 is the one where Maureen Dowd tried to gain entry to the Bloggers’ Lounge and was denied. Denied faster than Lindsay Lohan at name-a-club on Sunset.

Yid with Lid reports:

On the second day of the event Liberal NY Times Columnist Maureen Dowd tried to get into the blogger’s lounge, lacking credentials she was not allowed to enter. Ms. Dowd was not happy and indignantly asked the person who blocked her entry, “Do you have any idea who I am?”

(more…)

In her recent New York Times piece, Maureen Dowd conjures an interesting take from the latest episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”, an episode which features Palin out caribou hunting with her father:

Sarah’s view of America is primitive. You’re either a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard Law School or you’re eviscerating animals for fun, which she presents as somehow more authentic.

I’m wondering why you can’t be both. I guarantee there are more than a few Harvard Law graduates for whom pumping a .30-06 slug into a caribou would be no problem whatsoever. What is a caribou to them anyway?  I’m pretty sure caribou can’t get a 165 on the LSAT so ef ‘em. Caribou aren’t partners in any prestigious law firms. They are largely unnecessary. I’m not afraid to say that, and I guarantee that Harvard Law grads aren’t either.

However, I’ll take an evening out drinking with an animal-eviscerating buddy over a night with Harvard Law grad any time. Sure, the Harvard Law grad could handle your public intoxication case, but could he or she apply a proper rear naked choke or kimura if you get into a fight?  I doubt it.

(more…)

So true to character, Maureen Dowd weighed in on the election, and got it wrong. See, she believes the vote wasn’t about Obama, it was about gullible voters.

She writes that Republicans “were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite “normal,” too Communist, too radical, too Great Society.”

Wait – you forgot “too Muslim and too Kenyan.”

Anyway, she missed the point about the election – and so did Obama. He spoke today, saying – and I paraphrase, because I’m lazy:

“America wants us to act, not to stand still.”

(more…)

So according to Maureen Dowd, we’re seeing a rising tide of vicious bullying this political season – the kind you might see in high school, when “teenage tormentors” would “spread rumors that you were pregnant.”

Oh how I hated that.

For Dowd, these new “Republican Mean Girls,” are angry, aggressive women who are angry and aggressive. And mean.

Why not just call them bitches?

Anyway, to the irony. Here Mo laments the evils of smearing women – right before doing essentially the same thing. In a way, she becomes that cliched head cheerleader who always supports the loutish jock. “You better leave him alone, or I’ll say you banged the gym teacher under the grandstands!”

Funny thing is – I did. I always did.

But Dowd’s biggest blind spot? She writes this column only a week after Meg Whitman was called a whore – and – after the California NOW chief said “whore” was an apt description. (more…)

While I’m not one to care what some over-paid harridans think (see Maureen Dowd), you have to admit the recent episode of the View, where Fox’s Bill O’Reilly got into a shouting match with the show’s two more extreme harpies was amusing to watch. It’s also very instructive on how the so called progressives… uh… think. Or should I say, operate. Progressives do not like open debate. They have an agenda, and anything at variance with that agenda must be shut down at all costs. When screeching and hollering didn’t work, the two co-hosts, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, stormed off the set in outrage when O’Reilly dared suggest that Muslims attacked us on 9/11.

What seemed like immature grandstanding on their part was a perfect example of how the left tries to stonewall any argument it doesn’t like. Not willing or able to provide actual intelligent and rational arguments of their own, the two women exited the stage.

Barbara Walters showed she was closer to a true liberal by telling the audience that what just happened was wrong and shouldn’t never occur on their show. It’s a talk show, after all. And as hosts, they should show some measure of respect to their guests. It seems the View’s history of crank hosts is still going strong.

(more…)

The the resident Goddess of Snark at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, thinks that Christine O’Donnell lives in a fantasy world. Sneering at O’Donnell’s interest in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis says more about Dowd’s isolation from normal Americans than it does about the GOP senate candidate from Delaware. If she bothered to check she would see that the two Oxford Inklings are amongst the best selling authors of all time. Their works have profoundly influenced tens of millions of lives and in spite of the critics, are major touchstones of 20th century literature.

It is not surprising that Dowd regards Tolkien and Lewis as her cultural enemies; they may be dead and gone but the emanations of their penumbras threaten her in ways that she may sense, but that she is probably afraid to examine deeply. Maybe its the fact that the Lord of the Rings has sold more than 150 million copies. Maybe its the fact that it, like the works of C.S. Lewis, celebrate the values of courage, honor, loyalty, friendship and patriotism. Or just maybe, its that her peers really believed in the inevitable rise to power, of what in the late 1960s and early 1970s was called the counterculture. Millions of students, hippies and other freaks were reading Tolkien and absorbing his ideas and rejecting those of the New Left. (more…)

We all know by now how the left reacts to the presence of the truth:  the screaming, the name-calling, the hysterical slander; the way they designate the craziest Koran-burning, abortionist-shooting nutcase they can find to represent the right; the way they demonize commentators like Rush and Coulter and Glenn Beck, without ever engaging with their ideas, and then use their names as insults to fling at people who have nothing to do with them.

In short, the left reacts to the truth the way a vampire reacts to a cross…  or the way the left reacts to a cross, come to think of it.  So when I see their brains start to smoke, I know one of the good guys is talking sense.

Last week, I and just about everyone else took note of a cover piece in Forbes magazine by Dinesh D’Souza called “How Obama Thinks.“  Basically, D’Souza put forward the psychological theory that certain of the president’s destructive and contradictory policies might be explained by examining his relationship with his father and his father’s anti-colonial philosophy.  The highlight of this well-reasoned and intelligent article was D’Souza’s examination of a heretofore almost wholly ignored piece of writing by the elder Obama.  It reveals that the president’s economist father had some very distasteful anti-western ideas.

Now as someone who doesn’t usually believe in analysis at a distance, I nonetheless found the piece remarkably convincing.  I was therefore not at all surprised when the White House, in the person of Press Sec Robert Gibbs, ripped into Forbes for daring to publish it.  “Did they not fact check this at all?” Gibbs cried.  Forbes editor-in-chief Steve Forbes, quite rightly, stood by the story.  Everyone acknowledges that D’Souza is putting forward a theory but as Forbes pointed out, “No facts are in contention.” (more…)

In her latest Hail Mary effort to replace the flag of conservative Reason with the flag of liberal Emotion, Maureen Dowd goes talons-out for Newt Gingrich, for “making outrageous, unsubstantiated comments to appeal to the wing nuts among us. “

Harry Reid tweets Lady Gaga while Newt Gingrich is truly gaga…The conservative who fancies himself a historian and visionary did not use his critical faculties to resist his party’s lunacy but instead has embraced it, shamelessly. He has given a full-throated endorsement to a dangerously irresponsible and un-Christian theory by Ann Coulter-in-pants Dinesh D’Souza.

For those who missed round one, D’Souza is the author of a new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, a peek into which was afforded us thanks to the recent issue of Forbes, which published “How Obama Thinks.” D’Souza’s thesis: that Obama is acting out his Kenyan father’s anti-colonial resentment against the West.

What makes D’Souza’s quite logical interpretation of Obama’s psyche “dangerously irresponsible” to Dowd is, of course, the mere fact that she disagrees with it. If Maureen says it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Q.E.D., no further proof necessary.

Gingrich’s support for D’Souza’s theory—that you can only understand Obama “if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”—made proud, loud Dowd howl louder: (more…)

As usual, Maureen Dowd’s latest musings in the pages of the once-august New York Times — she’s writing in the same space where  collosi like Flora Lewis and “Red” Tony Lewis once trod! — are a free-range mental mix of banal social observation, half-baked politics and quotes from famous movies (doesn’t she know that’s Frank Rich’s job?).  Still, there’s a barb or two aimed at Barry that ought to please discriminating tastes:

The Oval Office, the classiest, most powerful place on earth, is now suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel conference room or a ’70s conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that even some Obama aides find ugly.

It almost made me long for the Technicolor Belle Watling swagging and swathing style of the Clintons’ Little Rock decorator, Kaki Hockersmith.

The recession redo, paid for by the nonprofit White House Historical Association, was the latest tone-deaf move by a White House that was supposed to excel at connection and communication. Message: I care, but not enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations.

(more…)

GIBBS:  Good evening.  On our broadcast tonight:

• Miracle in Detroit–First Sharia law zone in nation records falling crime rates as word of amputations spreads.
• Voters heard–Congress unanimously passes tern limits bill, setting seasonal daily bag at ten.
• Gimme shelter–Hovel-ready projects to provide corrugated cardboard dwellings for urban homeless.
• And finally, Gray Lady Gray – New York Times to boost circulation with Sunday photo feature: “Op-Ed Beauties–Babes of the Times.”

Those stories and more later.  But first, Obama senior advisor David Axelrod joins us from Chicago shortly after being questioned by the FBI about former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s disappearance.  Welcome, sir.

AXELROD:  Thanks for having me on, Bob.

GIBBS:  Any word on Blagojevich, David?

AXELROD:  Who?

GIBBS:  Never mind.  Rumor is the Obamas will extend their stay on Martha’s Vineyard by two weeks.  True?

AXELROD:  Yes, Bob.  With state-of-the-art communications, the president can avoid his responsibilities wherever he is. Doesn’t matter to him at all.

GIBBS:  But so many Americans are suffering while he parties on.  Doesn’t it look bad? (more…)

Over the next ten days, I will present to you America’s top ten journalists that are most biased to the left. On this list you will find denizens of the Old Media that just can’t seem to help themselves from delivering the news with a leftward tilt, journalists for whom balance means to condemn all Republicans and conservatives, folks that never met a righty they could like much less agree with or even report upon fairly.

This list will be peopled by journos that, in true Kealian fashion, simply can’t understand those Republicans and/or conservatives. After all, these journalists never met anyone that would support a conservative so they just don’t understand how conservatives could ever stand for truth. These are folks that just don’t “get” that there is any other side to a story but that of their own ideologically leftward political bent.

\This list will be restricted to working journalists (or one who just retired in one case), so biased old hacks like Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, or Walter Duranty will be excluded even as we take their leftism for granted. Also you will not find those whose career is but a cartoon of journalism. People such as Keith Olbermann, John Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, or Chris Matthews do not belong on a journalist list, even one highlighting left-wing bias. Such people are simply too silly or admittedly partisan even for a list such as this.

The biggest problem is arriving at just ten. There are dozens of worthy nominees, we all know. Singling out so small a number from such a large field presented a challenge, for sure. (more…)

It’s hard to respect a “journalist” who repeatedly insulted and mocked leading conservatives he was assigned cover, and even wished death on some of them, to a secretive email list comprised of liberal media figures around the country.  Whatever this says about Weigel’s political orientation, it speaks loudly and clearly to the fact that he was an unprofessional jerk, and that’s putting it kindly.

Weigel has mostly owned up to this fact, which I think says something positive about his character.

But as long as Weigel is airing more of his “Journolist” laundry, perhaps it should be pointed out that at one point in time Weigel aired this same kind of vitriol against leading liberal figures.

For example, do you think Dave still thinks Paul Krugman is “obviously insane”, “simple-minded” and a “cancer on the Times”? Does he still think that Krugman’s column is a “litany of propaganda, lies, and insults”?

Does he still think that Maureen Dowd “sucks” and that her work is “absolute tripe”? Does he still wonder: “why is this woman employed”?

Because I sure do (all of the above), but then I do not have a professional need to ingratiate myself with the liberal media establishment. (more…)

JOE BIDEN: [on phone] Sure, sure, I’ll tell him.  No problem.  [hangs up]  Charlie Rangel, Boss.  Said he appreciated the offer but would rather you didn’t come to Harlem to campaign with him.

OBAMA:  Good grief.  Harlem?  I’m that toxic?  We are gonna get smoked in November.  Lame duckdom, here I come.

JOE BIDEN:  Loser talk, Chief.  Stay away from the press with that attitude.  MoDo nailed it in her column about me —I’m your go-to PR guy. Now, either hole up at Camp David and watch your world crumble, or trust me to turn things around.

OBAMA: Rescue me, Joe.

BIDEN: All right. But we’re gonna hafta take a page outta Dolly Parton’s book and think outside the buxom.

OBAMA:  Outside the . . . ? (more…)

When you’ve lost the New York Times:

The press traveling with Obama on the campaign never had a lovey-dovey relationship with him. He treated us with aloof correctness, and occasional spurts of irritation. Like many Democrats, he thinks the press is supposed to be on his side.

The patrician George Bush senior was always gracious with reporters while conveying the sense that what we do for a living was rude.

The former constitutional lawyer now in the White House understands that the press has a role in the democracy. But he is an elitist, too, as well as thin-skinned and controlling. So he ends up regarding scribes as intrusive, conveying a distaste for what he sees as the fundamental unseriousness of a press driven by blog-around-the-clock deadlines.

Thanks, Mo!  Now we’re getting somewhere: (more…)

Has the liberal media started rushing the exits in an effort to escape from Camp Obama?  I believe this to be true.  But don’t take my word for it — let’s examine the evidence.

It may have all started with James Carville.  Last week, Carville was on CNN with Anderson Cooper , flipping out about the administration’s response to the BP spill.  Not long after that Carville took his frothy charges of “political stupidity” to ABC, making some strong accusations about the lack of leadership and competence coming from the big office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps James Carville?s rabid rants were also a signal to the formerly faithful members of the press that vacation time was over and real reporting and journalism was going to be back in fashion.

On June 1, Maureen Dowd of the financially troubled, yet still venerated New York Times, wrote a op-ed piece that wondered if “Yes we can” has been downgraded to “Will we ever?”  She later proclaimed, “The oil won’t stop flowing, but the magic has.” (more…)

Why does Frank Rich still have a job?  Not only is Rich the last and least interesting of the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times — and, given that his competition includes Maureen Dowd and Paul “The End is Near!” Krugman, that is really saying something — he’s also the Times’s worst drama critic, whose judgments have not stood the test of even two decades, a non-bestselling author and a failed showbiz wannabee.

Stung by all the criticism of a recent, utterly ludicrous essay in the once-august pages of the Times, which has now degenerated in a haven for lazy moral-equivalence desperate non-housewives, and former Enron advisers, the old “Butcher of Broadway” was back over the weekend with the following enormity:

Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!

(more…)

I don’t write about Maureen Dowd simply because she rarely offers anything worthy of serious, intellectual discussion. I don’t claim any sort of high intellect for myself, of course, and don’t necessarily claim to be able to thoroughly judge the work of the deepest of thinkers but Dowd’s work is like the old saying about pornography inasmuch as when it comes to stupid prattle. I know it when I see it.

Breaking my own no-Mo-Dowd rule, though, her April 10 column must be singled out as a prime example of just how silly, inconsequential, and, well, just plain dumb MoDo really is. In it she equated radical, oppressive, dangerous Islam to today’s Catholic Church, as if they were entirely equivalent in their treatment of women. It is astonishing that she thinks that radical Islam and the modern Catholic Church are indistinguishable in this respect, but there you have it, she apparently really does.

Dowd started her piece last week by relating a recent encounter she had in Saudi Arabia with a “group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.” Dowd asked her hosts how they could stand living in that oppressive Saudi culture and she wondered how such “spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?”

But as she asked that provocative question, it struck Dowd that she, too, lived in such a culture: (more…)

Bill Whittle posted this video essay on Big Journalism recently, which got us to thinking: what would today’s media make of the sentiments that animated the Declaration of Independence? You remember, this musty old thing:

Not so much the famous bit about “when in the course of human events,” but the stuff further down, the things that really angered the colonists about the form of government they were about to cast off.

Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world: (more…)

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)