Maureen Dowd is a Black Fly in Your Chardonnay (JM)

The Monster Mash

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters.

If this isn’t the beginning to a Kafka novel I want out, right now.

I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but all over the candidate’s picture in the U.S. News & World Report I was reading.

Good god, you are telling America a story about having too much sauce on your face. I swear if they remade It’s A Wonderful Life starring Maureen Dowd, there’d be this scene where Clarence would start scratching his head, shrug and let Maureen jump. Of course, this wouldn’t happen, Maureen would live and write a column entitled “It’s a Wonderful Maureen”, discussing how God’s purpose is best served by inane references to Obama’s nutrition stump speech and “Saw IV”. Oh also, good job reminding the public Obama is trying to quit smoking, relevant and crucial.

“It’s on my ear,” he complained, looking down at the magazine.

Feeling cocky after 11 straight wins, he called me “MoDowd” and tweaked me for my many columns suggesting he would need to toughen up to beat the Clinton machine. “She’s trying to give me hair on my chest,” he said mockingly, plucking at his shirt.

Man, you know what’s cocky, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination mocking Her Royal Highness, Maureen Dowd. I mean seriously Barack Obama, how dare you! Don’t you know who she is? I mean clearly you do, you mocked her with a stupid nickname. Honestly, sometimes Obama is likable, particularly when jousting with Dowd. He’d be the bestest class president ever. (Editor’s Note: Obama fans: ignore that last shot at Obama, it was completely inappropriate and in no way expresses the feelings of the author or this publication) (Other Editor’s Note: Clinton fans: It soooo does.)

After losing Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and his mojo, and getting whipsawed around by Hillary and his own chuckleheaded coterie of advisers, he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.

Hillary’s undeniably tough, as even admiring conservatives admit. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page dubbed her Ma Barker, saying she had tapped into the angst of blue-collar women who know they have to ignore their “moping” men and “suck it up and hold the house together.”

Ma Clinton knows where Obambi’s soft spots are; she knows he likes being petted on his pedestal, that he’s unnerved by her, and that he can never fully accept how shameless she is. What could be more shameless than suggesting to Democrats that John McCain would make a better commander in chief than Obama?

Allow me to take a break from hitting Obama to take a swipe at Hillary for a minute. Obama’s weakness is that he cannot full accept how shameless Hillary is?

The Obama campaign seems naïve when it keeps reacting with hurt feelings and play-by-the-rules protestations to the Clinton modus vivendi of grabbing the slightest slip and ripping it open. Hillary’s kneecapper Howard Wolfson compares the goo-goo Obama campaign to Ken Starr with a straight face.

Goo-goo Obama campaign?! Also “modus vivendi” means agreeing to disagree. In other words, it’s a plan to live side-by-side. In other other words, you just totally misused the Latin expression modus vivendi. Of course, that’s your modus operandi to be modus ridiculous and modus atrocious.

The superdelegates are watching to see if Obama can stiffen his backbone. After seeing their candidates lose races they should have won in 2000 and 2004 because they flinched at Republican political waterboarding, Democrats do not want to watch the bully swipe their lollipop a third time.

A Play: Explanation Time At the Institute For Understanding Everything

Hal: Say, the American public seems interested in politics for the first time in a long time. Why do you think this is?

Gerald: Well, might I suggest that it has something to do with Maureen Dowd?

Hal: Really? Please explain this fascinating hypothesis.

Gerald: Well, remember when a few months ago when I developed my “We Need More Ridiculous Analogies About Schoolyard Playgrounds Hypothesis”?

Hal: Oh yes, that was quite the hypothesis.

Gerald: Check out this week’s NYT column by Maureen Dowd. See the line about bullies and lollipops?

Hal: By gum, that is exactly what you predicted!

Daniel Finkelstein: Do I hear good ideas being generated in here?

Fin

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

Way to transition Maureen. Note how the first sentence has nothing to do with the previous paragraph and almost next to nothing to do with the remainder of the paragraph. I am not sure what “multiculturalism” has to do with “impassioned egghead advisers”, but these kinds of implications are nasty and serve next to know purpose other than creating the same kind of weird meme that brought down Kerry and Dukakis. How much better off would we have been with Kerry and Dukakis? Seriously, I want Obama to go down in the primary, but not like this, not for this reason.

First, his University of Chicago economics adviser, Austan Goolsbee, took it upon himself to reassure Canadian officials that Obama was hard on Nafta only to court the economic populist vote. In a meeting in Chicago, a memo from the Canadian consulate noted, “Goolsbee said he has always been impressed with Canada, sharing his experiences which have included trips to Montreal and Toronto as part of the Yale debate team and visits to Vancouver with his wife.”

You know what you are Maureen, you’re a breakfast TV host. You introduce people with banal facts that eat up time and space. You’re also absurdly mean and pretty unfunny. I imagine that this is what breakfast TV was like in Soviet Russia. “In America, you watch television, in Soviet Russia television watches you.”

See Maureen, if you’re going make non-sequitor jokes they might as well be from the master himself, Yakov Smirnoff. You want one more? Okay… "The first time I went to a restaurant, they asked me 'How many in your party?' and I said 'Six hundred million'." Comic gold…

While we’ve seen book tours that set up a presidential run, we’ve never seen one that tore one down. That is, until Samantha Power — the Dublin-born Harvard expert on human rights who drily refers to herself as “genocide chick” — hit London to promote her new book.

Power, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, told The Scotsman that Hillary was “a monster” and the BBC that Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan was merely a “best-case scenario.” (She’s now resigned.)

Ma Clinton pounced, telling reporters in Mississippi, “He keeps telling people one thing, while his campaign tells people abroad something else.”

Ma Clinton?! This is just a whole new psychological level. Stop, now, before you give America the weirdest Oedipal complex of all time…

Hillary successfully recast herself in Ohio as a beer-drinking former waitress. Only after last week’s reversals did the Obama camp raise a louder ruckus about her tax returns. Obviously, Ms. Night Shift does not want to reveal the details of the fortune that Bill Clinton has made, sometimes through dubious associations.

Next month, the tax returns will be available early next month. If you’re going to get down in the muck with the Clintons you’re gonna have to do better than tax returns.

It has taken Obama a year to start seriously rebutting Hillary’s risible claim that she has far more national security experience than he does. Having a first lady tea in Belfast is not equivalent to bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

Obama sounded whiny after his losses, chastising reporters on his plane for asking him hard questions about Goolsbee and Antonin Rezko. Privately, his people conceded that he hadn’t been as fierce about winning as Hillary, once more playing rope-a-dope.

He’s now learned what Hillary learned in Iowa: You can’t cruise to victory on a coronation strategy.

If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president.

I guess the last four paragraphs of the column are fine. I agree with most of these sentiments, though I suspect Hillary would incorporate him in the vice presidency, I think the nature of the role has changed substantially over these last 15-20 years and a complex administration requires more voices.

Alright, one more Yakov Smirnoff joke, but seriously this is getting ridiculous: “In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.”