THE WRONG STUFF

Maureen Dowd, in need of repairing what little is left of her reputation, seeks out one of the few people in the little town of Unity who is more petulant and small-minded than she is:

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity.

Just as Hillary was testing out the unfamiliar familiarity “Barack and me” Friday and talking about “his grace and his grit,” Carmella began loudly booing and waving her sign.

“We want Hillary!” screamed the 57-year-old retired ad saleswoman and Clinton delegate.

“It’s over, lady!” yelled some Obama supporters a few yards away.

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the Unity humidity. The chief Obama strategist fetched a glass of water and brought it to the woman, who was wearing five Hillary buttons.

This amenity did not stop the disunity. Carmella and her friends continued to cry, “Nobama!” “We love you, Hillary!” and “We need Hillary!” as Barack Obama sat onstage on a stool behind his former rival, his finger studiously at his lips.

Carmella was not impressed with all the kissing, laughing and whispering that Hill and Bam were diligently doing for the cameras, so that the moment could produce, as Obama press aide Robert Gibbs put it on “Larry King Live,” “a great picture.”

When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears.

As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears.

When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears.

“Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.

When Obama talked about moving beyond “all the petty bickering,” as Hillary robo-nodded at his side and CNN’s Candy Crowley applied pre-broadcast lipstick above her, Carmella glared at people applauding.

I am PUMA, I wish I could hear myself roar.

(Somewhat cross-posted at this dump)

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Aimai points out in the comments that there's a very high likelihood that Dowd's dateline on this is bogus and that she was nowhere near Unity. I've poked around but haven't been able to call it one way or another. In addition, Molly Ivors has a slightly different take on this editorial. To be fair (yeah, I know, we're talking about MoDo here), she certainly wasn't the only person in the media who spotlighted Carmella's buffoonery. Unlike Ivors, I don't see these hardcore PUMAs climbing on the bus eventually (I mean, this woman flew in from Denver to plug up her ears with tissues). I hope I'm wrong, but as I've pointed out elsewhere, I think their numbers are wildly exaggerated and hopefully this media feeding frenzy will dry up soon.