Maureen Dowd: This time, we know she’s really serious (maybe)

The liberal who did more to get Trump elected than any other bemoans the death of Roe v. Wade

Every American from Gen-X and older would know not to trust this woman if she promises to hold the football for you. Frankly, you shouldn’t trust Charlie Brown’s kicking skills either, since anyone who falls that badly after failing to connect with a ball is doing something odd. But this story is about comedy of errors/witty needling of Hillary Clinton that made Maureen Dowd famous and kept her relevant — not football tips.

Maureen Dowd personifies Lucy from Peanuts, except for her, the Democratic Party (and its ostensible leadership) is sort of a Charlie Brown.

Oh, the tribulations of Job Biden! Kyrsten Sinema humiliated him. Mitch McConnell disrespected him. The supreme court blocked him. Vladimir Putin scorned him. Inflation defied him. Covid stalked him. Even Stacey Abrams stiffed him.
Maureen Dowd, “Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back” (NYT Jan. 16, 2022)

Come on, Joe, just kick this gosh darn football for once and stop messing around!

Perhaps the Democratic Party is full of incompetent blockheads who just don’t know what they’re doing.

Or perhaps no ‘liberal’ columnist helped put more Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court than Maureen Dowd.

Dowd wrote nearly 200 articles bashing the Clintons. No single ‘liberal’ printed more widely read copy that more vigorously attacked her own side without getting financed by Team Murdoch. (Or at least, no single liberal who writes as well as Maureen Dowd…certain online media sources discovered anti-Hillary clickbait helped pay the bills…)

Almost as if the placekicker was getting paid by the other side…

Sure, she’s an equal opportunity mocker. When she called Hillary a ‘hawk’ and Donald Trump a ‘dove’ — she was making a joke about both of them. Except one side is critical and concerned about hawkishness.

The other side doesn’t read, or at least believes dove practice waterboarding and “much worse” because it works. They also believe that sacrificial lambs require them to carry firearms for self-defense.

The man on the left called for U.S. military forces to remove protesters so he could pose with a Bible. The woman on the right testified at length as part of nearly a dozen investigations into one decision she made while at the State Department that resulted in 4 Americans dying. The woman in the middle thought that the man was a ‘dove’ and the woman was a ‘hawk’ (or perhaps a cybernetic murder-robot from the future).

Dowd’s readers may be unfamiliar with the remarkable catholicity of the Catholic justices on the the U.S. Supreme Court. Seven judges were raised Catholic. Six 6 appear to be practicing Catholics.

The seventh, Neil Gorsuch, converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism, which may actually make him even more catholic somehow. Gorsuch became a judge because Maureen Dowd, like a lot of American women, really really did not like Hillary Clinton.

Mind you, three of these justices went to the same Catholic preparatory school in Georgetown. I wonder if some priest was impressed at the sins they confessed…

There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down.
- Maureen Dowd, “Too Much Church in the State”

Dowd’s writing always struck me as slightly more intellectual brand of churchyard gossip. Poor woman, couldn’t keep her husband from straying…maybe its because she was too busy taking over the world to look after her bedroom?

But it’s hard for me to watch the church trying to control women’s sexuality after a shocking number of its own priests sexually assaulted children and teenagers for decades…
Dowd, “Too Much Church in the State”

I know, right? It’s like someone shouldn’t try to profit off someone else’s sexuality by calling them Barbie or robot (too much, too little, too weird, too hypocritical…HEY KEEP THAT BALL STEADY!).

We have no one in the public arena like Mario Cuomo, who respected the multiplicity of values in an open society and had the guts to wade into the lion’s den at Notre Dame in 1984.
Dowd, “Too Much Church in the State”

Allow me to introduce Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Imagine a DIVORCED Catholic woman speaking at Notre Dame?

Dowd’s opposition to the ‘radical Republican’ agenda is the same sort of despair as one might find from a player on a losing baseball team who, having decided the game is lost, opts to throw in the towel, actively berate her own side, and then HELP the other side.

For example, consider her reasoning in this line:

…Republicans, and a shrinking but influential number of moderate Democrats, are attributing the surge of inflation to aggressive government spending. That’s driven down poll numbers for Biden and the Democrats. If Republicans win in November, as seems likely, Democratic ambitions will shrink

Maureen Dowd, “Still Feeling the Bern”

Odd. It’s almost as though she accepted everything Mitch McConnell (the “Prince of Darkness”) said, chose to amplify it, and spread his analysis, then claim there’s something wrong with Democrats for disagreeing with McConnel?

Or consider the sort of writing in, “Zelenskyy and Trump: Two performers, one hero.” Obviously, readers understood that she was NOT calling Trump a hero, because everybody reads past the headlines, right?

One of these men was impeached for asking the other man to do him a favor and announce a corruption investigation of his political rival. The other one is trying to fight off Russian invaders. Nobody reads past headlines, let alone bothers with captions these days. Notice how big Donald’s hands aren’t?

Well, maybe that tiny minority that actually reads an entire article. Readers might get down to a para like this:

[Trump] sicced a mob on the Capitol, while he went back to the comfort of the White House to watch his attempted coup play out on TV and gloat about the frightened, barricaded lawmakers and his own trapped vice president….
Zelenskyy has stayed rooted in Kyiv to rally the morale of his brutalized country…Zelenskyy knows, as Putin’s “Target №1,” he could lose his life.

Dowd, “Zelenskyy and Trump: Two performers, one hero” (The New York Times, March 8, 2022)

But most audiences don’t pay for a subscription to the New York Times. Most people get the headline and the picture.

Anyone who actually did read the whole piece might frown at words like ‘blackguard’ and stop before reading further. Maybe that’s why she chose that word?

With supporters like this who appear to be ‘prominent,’ one doesn’t have to wonder why there’s so little enthusiasm for the Democrats:

Democrats should not be defined by their left wing…“They’re not popular,” Carville said of such far-lefties, adding in a line spoken directly to them: “People don’t like you.”
Maureen Dowd: “Can Democrats dodge Doomsday?” (February 2022)

Exactly! “People don’t like you so shut up and stay home!”

Good pep talk! Great tactics to mobilize people to get work done! Rah rah rah we suck rah rah!

And this is how catastrophes happen.