I awoke early today and read my New York Times. What I saw enraged me, so I am going back to bed to see if I can wake up on the right side in a few hours.
What I saw was Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd impersonating bloggers. At long last the dynamic duo has been radicalized. At long last they have seen enough of this administration.
Maureen thinks Dick Cheney is going to New Orleans to “hunt looters”. Tom gets huffy about Grover Norquist:
Oooh. How snarky of both of these sell-outs. Friedman is finally mad enough to hope Norquist’s basement is flooded. Dowd is mad enough to say:
Let’s play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families.
All I have to say to Tom and Maureen is “where the fuck were you in 2004 when we needed you?” While you were critiquing John Kerry’s charisma and flip-flopping, Bush and Cheney were leading our country to ruin. You want to act outraged now? You want to make clever remarks now? Fuck you both.
I find both these columnists offensively detached from the reality of the consequences wrought by DC politics, in different ways. Tom “Deep Thoughts” Friedman is offensive in his swaddled cluelessness–“Hey Kids! Let’s put on a democracy in Iraq!” A fellow poster introduced me to my favorite nickname for him: “Captain Obvious.” Too bad what was obvious to all of us escaped him for 2 years! He is the victim of his obtuse, optimistic naivete.
Dowd is kind of his antithesis–equally snide and critical about the utterly trivial and the profoundly depraved, always straining for the clever bon mot, she strikes me as someone who doesn’t believe in anything and doesn’t much care how anything shakes out.
I’m still glad they’re adding to the voices pointing out how despicable the BushCo behavior was around this crisis, but I understand why it grates. They’re camping out on the high ground when it’s easy to do so.
Russert, Brooks, Security Moms, and wingnuts voted for Bush because 9/11 scared the shit out of them. They wanted a “Bad Motherfucker” in charge who wasn’t bashful about going “Mid-evil” on some terrorists ass… and keeping them safe.
Thousands of people have died this past week (some estimate 10 times the amount of 9/11), 1.5 million were made homeless and a landmass the size of Great Britain (or the size of a nuclear attack) lay in ruins and the “Security Alert” never moved up from YELLOW… so what does that tell you.
This adminstration has no clue on how to keep Americans safe… and really could not give a shit as illustrated in their actions on the first three days of this catatrophe.
This is what is unhinding a lot of folks… they were all willing to turn a blind eye to the looting (of the Federal Gov’t that is) and the fundalmentalism…as long as they were SAFE… well… that quaint notion of safety was drowned in Norquist’s bathtub last week.
It’s the Security… Stupid
…and it always was…
Watch for more. I thought that Bush was untouchable as long as he has his terrorism boogey man to scare the shit out of the electorate but now Spurious George is showing cracks in his teflon.
Of course, we’ll find out what went wrong with the hurrican relief because…bwahahahahahahha…heheheheheheh…waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…ohmygodddddddddddddddd….George himself is going to be leading the investigation! The man with the sign on his desk that says, “The buck stops anyplace BUT here”….
is a bit unfair.
Maureen Dowd has been absolutely consistent in ridiculing Bush and his handlers. Her criticism of Kerry is nothing I didn’t say myself – it’s astonishing that even today, we don’t know if John Kerry thinks the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.
Friedman, on the other hand, is only now opening his eyes to the incompetence and stupidity of the Bush crew after several years of being their favorite Timesman.
True, Friedman has taken a whole new line here, Dowd gives us more of what she has been doing in the past. I understand Booman’s outrage but I am thankful for any support that they give.
Dowd wasted a column with seven weeks to go on bashing Kerry. Did she bash Kerry on substance? No. And even that would have been unforgiveable so late in the game. She didn’t take the stakes seriously. She wasted her position on the Times with senseless whining when the world was burning and desperate.
Friedman was even worse. He actually fell into the same trap that Kerry did, and then helped dig Kerry’s hole deeper for him.
Fuck them both for having buyer’s remorse now.
was also one of the first columnists to turn on Bushco and devoted many column inches to lambasting this administration, long before it was cool. She compiled a book of her columns called “Bushworld” about the alternate reality that the Bush Administration lives in. That you don’t like her is fine. She’s made an entire career out of being flip and churlish, and no one is safe from her satiric barbs, including Kery. But, in fairness to her record, she’s been calling Bush, Cheney, and the one she called Coyote Rummy back in 2002, on their shit for years now.
Friedman is putz.
and I could care less about her silly columns about Cheney’s duckhunting. She is not a serious person, and she doesn’t treat her position seriously.
If she wrote one Naomi Wolf column about Al Gore being an alpha male, she wrote two dozen. Her perspective is that politics doesn’t matter but you can get paid for making fun of politicians.
Then explain to me how today’s column is a reversal of that trend. I read it. There is no departure from her usual style or arc. It is wholly consistant with the trend of her columns of the past several years. I agree with you that she doesn’t convey the gravity of political impact on real events, but I don’t see that changing ever. She is who she is, and I give her props for shooting holes in Bush’s bubble, when she was one of a very few mainstream columnists to do so.
I’ve been disgusted with Dowd since she used that valuable real estate on the op-ed page of the NYT in the late 90’s writing column after column about Clinton’s sex life. I kept screaming at the paper – “Who the fuck cares!!!! Aren’t there more important things going on in this country, in the world?” And then, as you say ridiculing and trivializing Gore. Doing the same with Kerry.
Snark, satire is no excuse to me. That kind of smarmy ridicule has real consequences. Namely a Bush presidency and all the horrors that have come from it. You can say that MoDo doesn’t have that kind of power, but she is very widely read by the media types who enjoy her snark and reverberate it over and over throughout the media. Ridicule is powerful. How many voters heard nothing of substance about the real issues, just bullshit about Clinton blowjobs, Gore’s plaid shirts, Kerry’s windsurfing while the Republicans got a pass as they were destroying our country. She was a prime enabler of this kind of distraction.
NOW she goes after Bush. OK, appreciated. But too little too late. She needs to take a look at how she contributed to the disasters she now decries.
After President Al Gore finishes his second term of office, the federal budget is back in balance, New Orleans has been rebuilt, and the veterans of the Dubyas Iraq Adventure are fully taken care of. Maybe.
Maureen Dowd has been the only one on the NYT op-ed page to consistently point out the dangerous idiocy of Bush and his regime and likening her to the odious faux liberal yuppie Friedman is way off base.
Should she have praised Kerry for his DLC style, stick in the mud campaign performance and his political cowardice? I don’t think so.
I voted for Kerry even though when I heard him say, (at the photo op on the rim of the Grand Canyon), that, “…knowing what I know now I still would have gone after Hussein by invading Iraq”, I realized he was a lost cause.
I appreciate the merit in the argument for accepting the lesser of 2 evils in order to prevent the greater evil from triumphing, but I don’t believe expecting others to ignore the bad traits of the “lesser evil” candidate is warranted.
She’s a columnist who’s been consistently critical of Bush. She’s done it in her column and in public appearances, and has been the least diplomatic about it every time I’ve seen her on C-SPAN.
Sure, she was critical of Kerry, but that’s not backing Bush, that’s being critical of Kerry. I think a lot of us wanted to vote, “None of the above,” but held our breath and voted, hoping for the best.
Just because you didn’t like that she was critical of Kerry doesn’t mean she’s being inconsistent about Bush. She’s not the perfect columnist, and often writes things I don’t like, but you can’t say she’s been anything like a Bush supporter, or even Bush agnostic.
If you want to lay into a columnist for not going against Bush until now, you could pick on Brooks, who nearly ripped Bush a new one last Friday night on the NewsHour. But then why pick on someone when they finally get it right?
I think Tom Friedman is in a class by himself because at the time of the war he was probably the most popular and influential foreign policy journalist in this country. Intelligent, sensible people like my lifelong Dem mother paid attention to him, believed him, trusted his take on things. “Well, Tom Friedman says. . .” was a mantra I heard often then. He chose to use that incredible public platform to preach for the war, pulling along with him many many influential people and who knows how many ordinary Americans. (If my mother is any indication, most of them still trust him.)
Thanks! Reading this made it worth getting out of bed today. In Broadcast News Holly Hunter is asked how it feels to always be right and she says “it’s awful.” Yeah, we were right, they were wrong, but who can enjoy it when so many people have died?
At the outset, I am no fan of Tom Friedman because of his overly simplistic views of the IT revolution in India and his “World is Flat” bombasts. But that is another topic.
Neither am I a big fan of Maureen Dowd since I heard her on David Letterman saying she is too sensitive and therefore purposely does not read any criticism of her columns. (She mentioned growing up in a family of large number of siblings, and how she was the most sensitive child)
But Maureen has been consistently ciriticizing Bush and this administration for a long time. She may not have met your expectations of vitriol pre-2004 election, but she has NOT changed her position.
Tom Friedman is now showing classic flip-flop behavior. He carried water for Bush because based on his travels through the middle East and friendship with intellectuals throughout that region, he felt that democracy was sorely needed to wipe out the regressive societies in Arab countries. So when 43 was hailing democratic Iraq as a beacon, TF was glued to that argument. But he soured on 43 based on the energy non-policies of this administration, and now the ineptitude and callousness in the wake of Katrina has removed the scales from his eyes (so one can hope).
I think your criticism of Dowd is off the mark, but Friedman is on it.
‘Every side I get up on,is the wrong side of bed
If it weren’t so expensive,I’d wish I was dead’
John Prine– ‘Dear Abby’ :))))