MAUREEN DOWD AND LARRY SINCLAIR: SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

Let's see: One is a nutjob and a menace to society whose moneymaking scam is calling Barack Obama a big faggot, and the other is, er....

First, Sinclair:

Larry Sinclair filed suit in Minnesota District Court on Monday [February 11] against Barack Obama, along with Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod and others, regarding issues stemming from Sinclair's allegations that he used cocaine and performed a sexual act with Obama in 1999....

This story has been picked up by the Globe, the supermarket tabloid (so you know it's true!), to the delight of the Free Republic crowd. Sinclair, one assumes, is a loser who's desperate for money (the Globe says he's dying) and who may well have been put up to this by Republican operatives. But what's Maureen Dowd's excuse? Here's her lite version of the same Obama's-not-a-real-man slander, minus the drugs:

... 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.

...[Clinton] tried once more to cast Obama as a weak sister on his willingness to talk to Raul Castro.

Obama tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek....

Like a prudent housekeeper, Obama spent the cash he raised ... far more shrewdly, on ads rather than on himself....

I don't care if Dowd would say she means this as praise ("Business schools have begun teaching the value of a less autocratic leadership style, with an emphasis on behavior women excel at," she writes elsewhere in the column). I don't buy that. All of her female words for Obama ("sewing circle," "chick," "housekeeper") suggest female insubstantiality and powerlessness. You half wish she'd just come out and call him a big homo -- which you know her doppelganger, Ann Coulter, will do any day now.

Here, according to Dowd, is some "evidence" that Obama's not a macho man:

...At the University of Texas on Thursday morning, Obama proved that he was not a cowboy in overdrive like W. when he demurred at throwing a spiral because his pass might not be as good as the Longhorn stars'.

Er, he actually went to the football facility at the university -- isn't that kind of a guy thing to do? And he seems not have thrown the football for the cameras (at least not in this clip), but he did catch one -- and Longhorns quarterback Colt McCoy seems to have seen him throw at some point:

Obama then went to the field to see the stadium's construction and catch a pass or two from McCoy.

"He's got a good arm," McCoy said. "I told him I didn't want to throw it too hard because he's got a big game himself tonight."

Well, when the facts don't fit her preposterous thesis, Dowd sticks with the thesis.

*****

Meanwhile, there's Larry Sinclair. It's hard to tell if he's just a freelance nut or a cog in the right's character-assassination machine. If he's the latter, I don't think it's because his handlers believe a lot of people will fall for this crap -- I think they just want the ideas (Obama as an adult powdered-drug user, Obama as gay) floating out there, as items that will work their way into backyard-barbecue conversations and online chats (a lot of Obama slanders, by the way, shows up on Craigslist).

Sinclair's YouTube "confession" is here. Two comments, Larry: (1) Your narrative would be a lot more plausible if it didn't seem like inept, cliche-ridden fiction ("I met Obama at an upscale lounge..."). (2) I just love this detail:

Mr. Obama obtained powdered cocaine for my use, crack cocaine for his use.

Can't you just picture it? "Larry, you're a white guy -- you like that nose candy. Not me. I'm black -- I like the pipe!"

Because that's what you'd do, isn't it, if you were buying drugs from the backseat of a limousine? (Yup, poor scruffy Larry implausibly claims they were in his limousine.) Rather than buying powdered coke or crack, you'd carefully order a small dose of each from your waitperson? Like a couple in a restaurant ordering wine by the glass because one wants pinot noir and the other wants chardonnay? Oh, yeah, that's plausible.