Maureen Dowd: For Future Reference.

I'm writing this to document the dog's  breakfast Maureen Dowd made of her column last week for one reason.

Consider that, after 20 years of "documenting the atrocities", part of me says, honestly, why bother?

When I was 10 or 11, my dad was driving us back from a trip out West and wanted to go fishing.  He was an avid if not terribly successful fisherman, so my brother and I frequently found ourselves fishing with dad in a rented boat with cement coffee can anchor out on a lake somewhere trying keep quiet, or being dragged to some likely spot hard by the Kankakee River, usually near the town of Momence, and usually at some ungodly hour before sunrise.  During a trip to Chicago one bitterly windy day, my dad broke out the Pocket Fisherman to fish off the revetment stones that seperate Lake Michigan from the Adler Planetarium.  This was a different Pocket Fisherman from the one he left unattended at just the wrong moment and had been yanked out into some lake we were visiting by something large and fast.  I can still see it skittering down the gravel beach before disappearing forever beneath the waves.  

My brother and I tried casting our lines out in the general direction of the thieving fish in the slim hope of hooking dad's line and pulling his rig back in.  Not impossible -- I had done it once before at a different lake when my brother's line had been snatched by some clever fish -- but this time, no luck.  

Anyway, on some car trip to or from some arid patch of Nebraska or Iowa, my dad saw a road sign advertising a fish farm, so we went.  Outside were large water tanks packed with catfish.  In my memory they were so wall-to-wall that you could have walked on catfish from from side of a tank to the other and never gotten your shoes wet.  That's probably an exaggeration, but there were a lot of fish in a small space.  And for whatever the price was -- $5, $10, I don't remember -- the owners would take some catfish out of the big tanks, put them in smaller, wading-pool sized tanks, and you could "fish" for them.  

My father declined, and back we went on the dusty road to wherever we were going.

So what is the point of the story?

Critiquing the media these days is like fishing at a fish farm.  With dynamite.  

The media is now so densely pack with hacks and frauds and Conservative apologists, lob a critique anywhere in any direction and you're bound to hit something.  

Well, you have probably noticed  the decline of the media has almost exactly parallelled the collapse of the Republican party.  I used to describe their incestuous relationship as two drunks leaning against each other for support, but it's worse than that.  They are two institutions bound together by the chains they themselves forged, drowning in a cesspool of depravity and privilege they themselves created, and they risk dragging the rest of us under with them.

But in this shitpile, there is still a hierarchy.  An aristocracy.  

And near the top of the shitpile is The New York Times.  And near the top of The New York Times is an ancient, joyless husk named Maureen Dowd.  

Over the last few days, everyone has dunked on  Maureen Dowd.  If you don’t know why, let me explain.

One month ago, this was the headline of Maureen Dowd’s column in The New York Times:

Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go!

Then she goes meandering down memory lane, something about Rehoboth beach and french fries.  But then…suddenly.

But now my gladdening images have been replaced by a maddening one: President Biden hunkered down in his house there, recovering from Covid, resisting talking to anyone who will tell him the truth, hoarsely yelling, “Get off my beach!” at the growing list of Democratic lawmakers and donors trying to warn him that he is pulling down his party and the country. 

It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy.

The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.

Further down the page there’s this.  I've highlighted the part I want you to keep in mind:

But Republicans are nervous about a Dem ticket swap. Tom Cotton posted that it would be a “coup.” 

And finally 

Really, what the Democrats need is a thrilling open convention, rather than a coronation. Trump just had one of those, after all. 

No, what Democrats didn’t need was “a thrilling open convention”.   That’s what Dowd needed:  some Democrats-in-Disarray chaos to reanimate her dead heart.  

But she didn’t get it, so less than a month later, this was her column’s headline:

The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup.

Yes, hell hath no fury like Maureen Dowd every day of the week.

  

It’s going to be a glorious coronation — except that everyone’s mad at one another.

Top Democrats are bristling with resentments even as they are about to try to put on a united front at the United Center in the Windy City. 

A month ago, calling it a “coup” was only something a scumbag like Tom Cotton would try.

A month later, it’s in her own fucking headline.

And whatever bitter whispering leakers Dowd is listening to or making up, there is clearly not some secret civil war going on.  

Are there some resentful assholes out there?  Of course there are.  There always are. And their snark will always find its way to someone in the legacy media like Maureen Dowd, who will always be delighted to amplify the hell out of it.

Remember Dowd’s hot-take on Al Gore a quarter of a century ago?

Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating.

This is from The Educated Imagination blog in May of 2010:

What’s Wrong with the New York Times? 

“Obambi”.  That’s Maureen Dowd‘s nickname for Obama which she employed right through the primaries until his nomination in 2008.  The problem with it?  Well, it of course has nothing to do with anyone recognizable as Barack Obama, a remarkably capable politician who, by the time he’d announced his candidacy, had already made a career of overseeing the self-destruction of his opponents.  But Dowd pushed the “Obambi” conceit for almost two years because she could.  As is regularly the case, she lacked the discipline to weigh whether or not she should.  

This, remember, is the same person who during the 2000 election gleefully perpetuated the fiction that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the internet”, and suggested that he is “so feminized” that he is “practically lactating”.

And that’s a pattern of behavior with Dowd which is disturbing for at least a couple of reasons.  The first is that she never lets a fact get in the way of a low blow she regards as clever, and the second is that she has an unmistakable tendency to feminize males in order to dismiss them — and moreover does so almost exclusively with Democrats, calling them “the mommy party” (you can guess who “the daddy party” is).  She likewise occasionally masculinizes women for much the same purpose, most especially Hillary Clinton — or “Hillzilla”, as Dowd dubbed her during the primaries.  Gender stereotyping is one of a number of strategies that Dowd regularly resorts to in place of anything that might be characterized as responsible criticism.

Here are some notable examples of Dowd’s effort to emasculate Obama — because girly-men are, you know, self-evidently a joke that everybody gets: “diffident debutante“, “America’s pretty boy“,  “effete“, “emotionally delicate“, “weak sister“, “legally blonde“.  Ask yourself: Does any of this even remotely coincide with your estimation of the man, however you feel about his politics?  And why diminish him with feminine comparisons?  What is going on here? 

14 years later people are still asking “What is going on here?" even louder.

Don’t expect an answer anytime soon.

Like the rest of the geriatric aristocrats sitting atop the media shitpile,  no one can force Dowd to leave.  

She's 72 years old and she's an institution.  She will never bow out voluntarily, and since the 1986 modification of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, age-based hiring discrimination and  mandatory retirement ages have, with a few exceptions, been phased out.  So, theoretically, as long as Dowd can do the job, the job is hers.

So what exactly is Dowd's job?  And is she still doing it?

Maureen Dowd's job is lobbing verbal cinderblocks from her very high place into traffic and watching people scramble.  And after showing the world a quarter of a century of cask-strength bile directed at every Democrat who crosses her field of vision, who can doubt that she loves the act of venomous hatred.  She doesn't know or care who it hurts because all those little people way down there aren't her concern.  None of what she does will ever affect her personally, and her crazy/shitty takes regularly translates into lots of angry reactions from pissed off Liberals on social media.

And at the Times, all engagement is good engagement.  

And that will be the Times’ legacy.  That, in exchange for eyeballs and clicks, the Times let ghouls and grifters like Dowd gobble up all the goodwill the Times’ investigative reporting has earned them, leaving nothing behind but a gossip rag that no decent person would have in their house.  

There is also a very real and very toxic knock on effect of the Times’ allowing garbage people like Maureen Dowd to use their megaphone to spread their venom.

This was an exchange between John Roberts and Chris Coons on Fox News

ROBERTS: A coup is still a coup

COONS: That is literally ridiculous

ROBERTS: Well, you tell that to Maureen Dowd, because those are the words that she used

COONS: I will ... the one attempted coup that happened in my lifetime was January 6.

Legacy media's main function these days is to generate anonymous quotes,  baseless speculation and/or outright lies under the banner of their vestigial respectability so that Conservative propaganda outlets can then spin it up into Scandal!  Which can then go ricocheting around the Conservative media ecosystem until it acquires enough acceleration so it can be fed back into the legacy media in the form of "gotcha" questions and pundit musings about "buzz" and what's "in the air".

And on that basis, Maureen Dowd is a complete success.

So why am I documenting the dog's  breakfast Maureen Dowd made of her column last week?

So that, five years from now, when the state of the legacy media has gotten nothing but worse I can take this out and look at it and wonder why anyone ever thought it would.  

I Am The Liberal Media