Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Bulldog Edition” edition.

As it appears that I will need to be out and about early this day (spotting in transit, perhaps, that rarest of avi, the Libidinous Liberal Lass who is still too Saturday Night and not yet nearly enough Sabbath Morning), the Mouse Circus might just slip right on by me.

So just in case, the castle staff have whipped up a special Early Bird “Becalmed in the Maladroit Metaphor Latitudes” menu just for today, because over at the increasingly-creepy and cat-pee-smelling Gray Lady’s house, while you slept, behind the lace curtains in the parlor, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd began trying to pull together a pundit minyan for the Clinton campaign.

Dear Frank and Modo and everyone else: Please quit counting the Clinton machine out.

Remember what happened the last time you did that?

And the time before?

And the time before that?

And 1999?

And 1994?

And 1991?

And yet every time, like the whey-faced private in the last reel of virtually every John Wayne war movie ever made, you still pop your head up and declare “Hey! It’s all clear, Sarge!"

Time to light up a Lucky Strike, tip back your lid and sigh, “Whew, that was clo…”

And then – wham! – right through the melon.

Frank’s piece was just rather silly.

Good title though – “The Audacity of Hopelessness”.

However studded as it was with phases like –-

“The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe...”

“After promising a cakewalk to the nomination...”

“...she was routed (notice the past tense) by an insurgency.”

“...her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn”

-- I believe Frank has extending the “Election 2008 is Hillary’s Iraq” metaphor well past both its sell-by date, and the line beyond which using the slaughter and failure in Iraq as symbolic of anything as trivial as a primary fight is just in bad taste.

But again, nice title Frank.

Dowd, on the other hand is just her usual mess with "¿Quién Es Less Macho?".

She really has no schtick left but a sniffy, reductive hyper-feminization and/or hyper-masculinization of every fucking thing. That combined with her humping the leg of a thesaurus in the service of this perpetual, decaying, barely-sublimated estrus she seems stranded in has gone well past the point of merely being tiresome.

Sorry, Modo, but everything cannot be centrifuged into either toast points and cream rinse, or hairy troglodytes flogged puppies with a bicycle chain.

Not either Hillary, She Wolf of the DLC, or Emily Post Hussein.

Not Pebbles or Bam Bam.

See, in Modo’s world the furniture is all arranged like this:

“The first serious female candidate for president was rejected by voters drawn to the more feminine management style of her male rival.”


“Hillary was so busy trying to prove she could be one of the boys…that she only belatedly realized that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.”


“Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity.”


“…many Americans would like to see their government focus more on those staples of female fiction: relationships and conversation.”


“She tried once more to cast Obama as a weak sister…”


“Like a prudent housekeeper, Obama spent the cash he raised…” while “Hillaryland spent like a hedge fund manager in a flat-screen TV store.”

And while I know that at long last this really may be the only dialectic your curdled Catholicism allows you to comprehend, really Maureen, as a one-size-gags-all metaphor for everydamnedthing it kinda sucks.

The big big world is far more complex and fascinating than that. Oh and I don’t know which drunken Irish relative laid this scar across your soul, but the opposite of bellicosity is not a weak sister. These are not the only two choices life or politics offers you. They are, in fact, merely the two ends of the same broken whiskey bottle into which you keep trying to stuff all variations and dimensions of human behavior.

You are right in this, however; “The bullying and bellicosity of the Bush administration have left many Americans exhausted and yearning for…” something.

But not your, “Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity.”

Not an “Obama [who] tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek.”

Like a block of keys stripped from your keyboard, what you are conspicuously absenting from your column stands out in such sharp relief because it is so conspicuously absent from the instrument you are using to create it. From your own emotional lexicon.

Because what Senator Obama appears to be is...a gentleman.

Imagine that? And how spiritually famished you must be, Modo, not to recognize one when he’s standing right there?

Not Slick Willie II. Not Jebus. Not Obambi. None of the tired, cloying, Dowdian archetypes that cobweb you like so much Blanche DuBois-brand Spanish Moss, and not whatever, clever, diminutive you cobble up next week.

Just a gentleman.

Relaxed. Comfortable in his own skin. Articulate. Flawed. Confident. At ease in the company of strong, accomplished women. Courteous, but not one to be shoved around. Casually brilliant, but not frantically “Oh! Oh! Oh! PickMe!PickMe!PickMe!”

And for the record, no, to the extent this gentleman is succeeding it is not because he is running away from “hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.”

Je-zus, Maureen; do you ever just give your neuroses $20 and send them off to the movies?

Senator Obama is currently succeeding as well as he is for two, main reasons;

1. Because Senator Clinton made the profound blunder of running a White House Rose Garden campaign before she had a White House Rose Garden to run it out of.
2. Because his team has quietly figured out how to run Howard Dean’s 50-state campaign, but with jet fuel instead of NASCAR high-test, a strategic infusion of netroots widgets and sensibilities, and some serious fucking Drupal upgrades.

Enjoy your Sunday.