Monday, July 06, 2009
Dowd: still "burbling" about Palin
Commentary by T.L. Hubeart
Jr., as
featured at my blog “Right as Rain.”
So formulaic--and mindless--is the typical Maureen Dowd paint-by-numbers snark-fest that the most effective critique is perhaps to take her latest ho-hum against Sarah Palin, and turn it inside-out like clothing:
Maureen
Dowd showed on Sunday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be
a New York Times columnist.
Journalist
Barbie is one nutty puppy.
Usually we don't find that exquisite battiness in our newspaper people until
they've been battered by sordid scandals like plagiarism (Jayson Blair),
gnawing problems like ties
to Malaysia (Paul Krugman), scary forged letters
from foreign leaders ("Mayor
of Paris" on Caroline Kennedy), or even forged news (Stalin's enabler Walter
Duranty).
When Dowd started saying her
mother was "in (her) head," some of her colleagues began to think
of her as "a strange woman," as an unnamed source told Arthur
Sulzberger Jr.. The source and fellow Times staffers even began
reading up on mental illness -- in between fits of manic depression and
paranoia as their newsroom continued
to be downsized.
And at the same time Todd Purdum dreamed, as he crafted
a hit piece on Sarah Palin for Vanity Fair, that the governor's
behavior had caused Alaskans to rush to local bookstores in a frenzied search
for copies of--not the Bible, or The Purpose Driven Life, or even one of
those NRA magazines so beloved by people who cling
to guns and religion. No, they all wanted the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a publication with an easily
memorable and euphonious title that trips off the tongue. Purdum's was a pretty tall tale, of course, but Maureen
Dowd wholeheartedly believed him. In fact, she had to.
Irrational
Palin hatred can drive its inhabitants loopy. So at least "MoDope" is ahead of the curve on that one.
And as Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and 943 pages of light
reading about histrionic
personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, and dependent personality
disorder, a well-known columnist in New York hung a virtual sign on her
column that said, "Save time--I'm already in Crazy Town.”
And readers who saw Dowd's byline before them said, "Sheesh,
this 'girlish burbling' again" and quickly turned the page.
Posted by T. Hubeart
at 8:21 PM
Labels: buffoons, Gov. Palin,
liberals, media bias, politics