I rarely read Steve Gilliard’s blog, but last night I saw that Buzzflash, a news portal I respect, favorably linked to his newest entry. Says Buzzflash, “The inimitable Steve Gilliard analyzes Maureen Dowd’s withering takedown of Bushevik groupie Judy Miller — in which she’s essentially told not to bother returning to the NYT.” I read MoDo’s satiric paean to Judith Miller and enjoyed it very much. I thought the column pretty much spoke for itself, so I wondered what impressive insight had garnered Gilliard such high praise. I ask you, gentle reader, to please take a look at this, and tell me what his “analysis” brings to the table other than blatant misogyny.
Perhaps I view Mr. Gilliard through a very specific prism, because I only really became aware of him in a diary called Hating Women on this website. There I learned that he had been taken to task by another blogger for implying that everyone was responsible for the crime of rape except the rapist. The comment in the Gilliard piece in question that I found most offensive was that Natalee Holloway, who had recently gone missing in Aruba, must have been trying to “pull a train,” when she left that bar with 3 men. But, there is much in the blog entry entitled Girls Gone Wild to offend.
Once again, Gilliard has opened up a window into his psyche, and the view isn’t pretty. In his entry MoDo Comes Out Swinging, we learn that he may have progeny unaccounted for:
Let me put it this way, if anyone liked me like MoDo says she likes Miller, well, I’d have to check to see if I owed them child support.
While this strikes me as a pathetic attempt at demonstrating his virility, a later passage shows us, once again, his incredible contempt for women who dare to be sexual. After contorting the definition of the word “tropism” (to be oriented towards) into special Dowd code for “slutty,” he really takes the gloves off.
Ok, after calling her a drama queen and a whore, tropism being a fancy word for women who likes powerful men and fucks them, she then goes after her bosses for not supervising her and letting her hurt the paper.
While there is little indication — certainly in Dowd’s column — that Judith Miller slept her way to horrifically bad gouge on WMD, such sexual exploits would have been the least of her crimes. Only in Gilliard’s twisted imagination does Miller become a femme fatale, rather than simply a “media whore.”
Not only does his analysis not bring any real insight to Dowd’s piece, it reduces it to some type of petty “girl fight.” He is not alone in this. I’ve read allusions to mud wrestling and such, with regards to Dowd’s shot across Miller’s bow. I have to wonder if we were talking about two male journalists battling over the soul of the New York Times, if such condescending portrayals would abound, and bizarre rants like Gilliard’s be venerated throughout the blogosphere.