HILLARY didn’t hang her head and cry, after she shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.I know that dated pop-culture references are a Dowd tic, but Clinton is trying to win an election by making a serious point about the character and dangerous ideas of her opponent. She wasn't trying to kill for thrills.
... After getting steadily bolder at rallies about puncturing her former friend Donald Trump, Clinton channeled Johnny Cash’s song and delivered a coup de grâce so devastating that commentators predicted it will be known simply as the Reno speech.Yes, Maureen, make sure to get that "former friend" bit in there, so we'll suspect that Clinton is a hypocrite for criticizing Trump.
... In this insane campaign year, Hillary doesn’t even need an oppo-research team digging up nasty stuff about her opponent’s record. She just has to stand there and wait for Trump to open his mouth. Or to wait for his wacky entourage to weigh in....Yeah, Dowd tells us, it was a great speech, but it didn't require any actual effort.
In Reno, Hillary simply pointed out the obvious: Trump, who has no fixed ideology of his own except winning, has let himself become a host body for an ugly mélange of people and groups that spew poison, from Breitbart News -- its chief, Stephen Bannon, is now helping run Trump’s campaign -- to white supremacist David Duke to radio host Alex Jones.This is where the column shifts from catty to immoral. Trump is a grown man, 70 years old, and he's running for president as the nominee of a major party, but somehow he's not responsible for his own words and deeds. He has no idea what he's saying and doing! He's possessed! It's all the fault of other people who've brainwashed him!
When Anderson Cooper asked Trump on Thursday if he was embracing the alt-right movement, Trump replied like a perfectly oblivious vessel: “I don’t even know -- nobody even knows what it is.”
Dowd writes this even though she acknowledges Trump's long history of bigotry, or at least a small part of it. Naturally, she makes this part of a bigger indictment of Hillary:
If Hillary had a normal opponent, her vulnerabilities would be more glaring. She would have spent the last week getting peppered with questions about how the F.B.I. discovered 14,900 more emails from her private server, which are going to drip out through the fall.Yes, that's all we get about Trump's decades of racism. Trump's history of housing discrimination is outlined in great detail in a front-page story today in Dowd's paper, but to Dowd it's useful only as wordplay. There's nothing in this column about Trump's birtherism, his call for the death penalty for the wrongly convicted Central Park Five, or the fact that black workers were removed from the floor in Trump casinos on a number of occasions, such as when he walked in, or when a mobbed-up high roller complained.
But Hillary does not have a normal opponent. She has one who manages to self-destruct in every news cycle. So instead she was soaring above her own paranoia and mocking Trump’s paranoia, soaring above her egregious messes and gamboling through Trump’s egregious messes.
In Reno, instead of having to talk about the email marked “C,” the ones classified as confidential, she talked about a very different “C”: She recalled the Justice Department’s housing discrimination suit against the real estate developer and his father in the ’70s, charging that the applications of black and Latino residents were “marked with ‘C’ -- ‘C’ for colored.”
All of that preceded Trump's encounters with Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. All of it was Trump being Trump, not Trump being a "perfectly oblivious vessel" for the racism of others.
But to Dowd, the real tragedy of the Trump campaign's racism is that it obscures the horror of Clintonism:
Extremists always ride to Hillary’s rescue. Just as Ken Starr and impeachment-crazed conservatives in the House pushed it way too far and made laughingstocks of themselves, succumbing to Clinton Derangement Syndrome, so the alt-right allows Hillary to have an easy target that occludes the Clintons’ own transgressions.She clearly feels sorry for Trump, who, in her view, doesn't know what he's doing:
... Trump ... has been seduced by the roar of the crowd and hijacked by a dark force he doesn’t seem to fathom. Ultimately, the stain will extend beyond a campaign loss to damage his business brand.Black people? Who cares! WHAT ABOUT TRUMP'S BRAND????
What upsets Dowd more than Trump's racism -- which isn't really his, after all! -- is the sin so great that no political journalist in America can forgive it: Clinton's choice not to hold press conferences:
When reporters approached Clinton after her Reno speech, she ignored the questions being served up and told the press to have some of the chocolate being served up. “Love the truffles,” she said in a condescending let-them-eat-chocolate moment.This, unlike Trump's racism, genuinely infuriates Dowd, so much so that only a straw man is sufficient to convey how great a danger is posed by Clinton and her allies:
Many people believe that Trump is so demented and dangerous that any criticism of Hillary should be tabled or suppressed, that her malfeasance is so small compared to his that it is not worth mentioning. But that’s not good for her or us to leave so many things hanging out there, without her ever having to explain herself.Who is saying that "any criticism of Hillary should be tabled or suppressed"? Yes, Clinton isn't holding press conferences, but she's not threatening to put critical reporters in jail, or, like Trump, arguing that they should be sued into silence. She's given 350 interviews this year, even if they're not all with mainstream journalists. You can cover politics without attending press conferences, as I.F. Stone did. Just do some damn journalism.
Letting her rise above everything for the good of the country is not good for the country.
But, no, the press conference drought is horrible. Why?
Hillary is more easily able to continue to cold-shoulder the press on serious issues, which really is an outrage and will hurt her in the end, because she’s building up a giant bubble of hostility that will follow her into the White House.Oh -- it's not because the public is less informed, it's because reporters have no choice but to be hostile to her. Well, reporters do have a choice. Everything isn't about you, folks.
And what's this about "cold-shoulder[ing] the press on serious issues"? Everyone knows that if Clinton did hold a press conference, there wouldn't be any questions about the economy or race relaitons or Syria or gun violence or climate change or health care or student debt -- every question would be a gotcha, and the vast majority would be about the Clinton Foundation or the damn emails. Those aren't "serious issues."
This may be one of Dowd's worst column ever. And that's saying a lot.
17 comments:
She can write stll worse; she WILL, she MUST.
She runs an Overton Window Roadshow, moving from each cretinous stupid deposit of snickering & drats hurled at ceiling fans, to the next, in a moron's mimic of a columnist.
Cripes, she found her level a bottom much no later than the Clinton Nineties and just anchored there moving about muck. She just skids along the bottom, like she did during the Dubya Dicks Iraq years, & as she has during the entire Obama presidency. It isn't amazing how she hoover in muck at one end and craps it out the other, she's done this 30 FREAKING YEARS!
I stopped reading MoDo years and years ago.
Sure, she was fun to read when she was mocking Dumbaya and Dickie Death. But even then, she didn't know when to stop before she beat a subject to an unfunny death.
And her col-dumbs on Gore and Kerry, were jejune. And she continued in her juvenile, gossipy way, to try to knock Obama down a few pegs.
Why the NY Times keeps her, Bobo, and mini-Bobo Douche-hat, is a mystery.
She should certainly attack Kerry, since you mention him, for daring to lecture Iran for its modest support of the Houthis in Yemen when his boss is fully aiding in Saudi Arabia's decimation of that poor country.
I used to like reading Maureen Dowd, and then something got in the way of my enjoyment. She went from fairly smart and articulated to just plain snarky, and snarkiness is the sign of a weak thinker. Today I tried to read her column... The Johnny Cash reference ("Block that metaphor" the New Yorker used to say) sealed it for me. It was cheap and superfluous...
Having spent a number of years teaching middle school, it's obvious to me that Maureen Dowd is extremely jealous of Hillary Clinton and the success that she's made of her life; it's almost palpable. Even though Hillary Clinton has been betrayed by her husband on numerous occasions, held up to ridicule by the left and the right, the elite and the common, she gets through it with grace and class, and that just chaps Maureen's ass no end.
Jane Austen -- or Margaret Mitchell -- couldn't have come up with a more seething cauldron of envy.
I am afraid that as far as the MSM and the Maureen Dowds of the Village Media, Hillary has no more fucks left to give. She knows they hate her to Level 10 and have for years and nothing she can do will keep her from being a target to get. Also, Maureen Dowd bemoaning a candidate's failure to address "serious" issues made me laugh and laugh.
There was a much better version of the same joke on Twitter right after Clinton's speech ("Hillary shot a campaign in Reno just to watch it die"), which a) is funnier and b) makes more sense. Dowd is a painfully not-funny person who subjects her readers to ceaseless labored attempts at hilarity because she has no idea whatsoever how not-funny she really is.
"that her malfeasance is so small compared to his that it is not worth mentioning. But that’s not good for her or us to leave so many things hanging out there, without her ever having to explain herself."
The biggest issue I have with this statement is the fact HRC has been cleared of every previous scandal and it's not clear this alleged scandal Is going anywhere. At what point do responsible journalists say call me when you have a real smoking gun and a dead body.
Ordinarily I wouldn't cut any politician slack, but I think in this case, she's earned it: cleared by 2 different special prosecutors n the 90's, cleared by numerous Bhen Ghazi committees, and recently cleared b he FBI.
Till there is a honest to god smoking gun and dead body, for the good of the country move on.
This is the legacy of an establishment press that always considered the Clintons backwater rubes from the wilds of Arkansas, people who had forgotten their station.
Had Bill remained governor, there would have been no shortage of "Isn't it amazing!" pieces about this charming Democrat who really cared about the people of his state, and wasn't just another redneck bigot in that quaint, unknowable world.
But the Clintons had "pretensions." Damned if Bill didn't think he should be president. And damned if the slickster didn't con the nation into voting him in, wrongly displacing a man who was obviously to the manor born. (That was certainly how Bush saw it, though, to his credit, he has come to appreciate Clinton and form a sort of friendship. Which speaks well of Bush.)
Thus it started, abetted, to be sure, by some of the whackiest Arkansas grifters around, and a clueless class of reporters who should really stay away from the stock market. And sellers of bridges.
It was never close for the "cosmopolitan" Dowd. Electing presidents from bassackward hellholes is simply not on in her circles.
And they say we live in a classless society.
Indeed they do. But it's MoDo who brings the "classlessness."
Here lies Maureen Dowd.
"From catty to immoral"
"If Hillary had a normal opponent, her vulnerabilities would be more glaring."
I guess Dowd missed this year's Democratic primary. It was hard fought ... on actual issues. And as such, both Sanders' and Clinton's vulnerabilities (and strengths) emerged. But more to the point of Dowd's statement: Thank you Ms. Obvious.
If only the GOP in 2008 didn't field the Cranky McCain/Crazy Palin ticket following the Bush ClusterF*** Years, we could have focused more on Obama's vulnerabilities. Had only the GOP not nominated this year Il Douche, we could focus on trade policy, the environment, etc., instead of running out of popcorn while watching the GOP implode. If only, Maureen.
When your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, the head and his team members...why get in the way?
The GOP/Republican nominee is self distructing and has whipped off the hood of his party for all of America to see.
All while blowing up THE obstructionist party of 21st century America ... using THEIR Southern Strategy on steroids!
EYup, almost as if that were the plan.
If Hillary held a press conference today, the first overwrought question would be "What's your response to Donald Trump's challenge that he'll release his medical records if you will?" Followed by headlines HILLARY REFUSES TO RELEASE MEDICAL RECORDS, days of frenzied reporting of Trump's tweets, etc etc. That's what passes for journalism in today's America.
I hope Hillary never holds another one of the pointless rituals.
Dowd was so close when she wrote this: "pushed it way too far and made laughingstocks of themselves, succumbing to Clinton Derangement Syndrome." She just neglected to include herself in that group. Oh well. Self-awareness was never her strong suit.
If Maureen Dowd can explain what the supposed scandal is behind the "EMAIL SCANDAL" I'll eat a shoe.
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