No, I Do Not Like Maureen Dowd

After posting a lengthy quote from Maureen Dowd's most recent column yesterday, Open Bar asked if it meant that I like Maureen Dowd now. The answer is no, I do not like Maureen Dowd. I think Maureen Dowd is a snarky asshole who is so pre-occupied with belittling political figures that she obscures her underlying message (on the days when she even has one). She loads her column up with insutls, sarcasm, and inside jokes based on offbeat news reports from the campaign trail. As a result, they tend to read more like a rambling summary of trivial news stories about the candidates, and less like journalistic prose that has a beginning, middle, end, and a coherent theme.

In order to prove my point, I have hacked in to her personal computer and located her column for tomorrow. A classic example of Dowd-esque writing:

This week in Tampa, Florida, U.S. gold-medal hopeful Barry Obama is rehearsing for the first event in the O-lympics. It's a house-off with the McCampaign and their 8 McMansions. Barry's crowd has been crowing all week about cars and mansions and elitism (oh my!). Meanwhile, Johnny and the GOP have spun the wicked witch of the northwest into a sweet little girl from Kansas. And now she is ready to charm the lollipop guild at the U.N. Enchante, Dorothy.

But while Johnny and his might-be mistress flirt with the French on First Avenue, something's rotten in the State of New York. And it's just down the road on Wall Street. Johnny doesn't know too much about the economy, he told us a few months ago, and then he announced last week that the fundamentals are strong. Barry chided Johnny for taking the fun out of fundamentals, and little Dorothy shacked up with Sean Hannity for a cozy recovery interview after that mean old Charlie Gibson asked her about the Bush Doctrine. The newly-minted feminists on the right thought Charlie was a little too hard on Bristol's babygrandmamma. It's not like she said we might go to war with China.

To clean up the mortgage mess, Henry Paulson and the Bushies over at Treasury want to know if they can bum $700 billion off of Congress. They'll totally pay it back. In O'Henry's view, the moral of this story is that the way out of a financial crisis borne of insufficient oversight on Wall Street is to give him a blank check and the authority to spend three-quarters of a trillion with no oversight at all. Cheney and Rummy fumed that they hadn't thought of it first. Oh and by the way, he needs the money like now.

I wonder if Barry likes jelly beans.