Booman posted a short article on Sunday called Obvious Observation…an attack on Maureen Dowd and more specifically on her latest column in the NY Times, Myth and Madness. In it she speaks of the O’Donnell win and also about some of Barack Obama’s failings and how they might relate to the reasons why his poll numbers are plummeting so badly.
I never read her myself…I never read the Times at all unless it runs an article that interests me either in terms of my ongoing media analysis or one that is on a subject that really interests me…of which there are very few, I might add.
But Booman…
Y’mean…she’s wrong?
Where?
Just sayin’…
Badly written though it may be (And as hostile to her as I am assuming you are.), I must ask you…
What does she say in this piece that is so far off?
I don’t know much about her work because it exists totally in that playdate of the mind, Mainstream MediaLand. I do not pay much attention to the actual content of the media, left, right or center. It’s almost all lies told in the service of one special interest (often laughingly referred to as “a sponsor”) or another.
But from a fairly neutral point of view…if one sees all media as bullshit-driven then one can consume it in a quite neutral manner…just where did she go wrong here?
I don’t see it, myself.
Read on for a point-by-point analysis if you so desire.
Point by point (The quotes are all from Dowd’s piece.):
Christine O’Donnell is in a fantasy world. Literally.
The pretty Palin Mini-Me identifies with the women of Middle Earth, comparing herself to the female characters in the “Lord of the Rings” novels by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Is O’Donnell not a Palin clone?
And is she not living in multiple fantasy worlds?
At the Values Voter Summit here on Friday, the 41-year-old O’Donnell cited another fantasy world to conjure up a Christlike image for the Tea Party.
“We’re rowdy, we’re passionate,” she told the enraptured crowd. “It reminds me of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books, where the little girl asks someone about Aslan the lion, who represents God, and she says with a little concern over such a fearsome lion, `Is he safe?’ And her friend says, `Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’ “
She’s right that there’s an untamed beast rampaging through American politics. But this beast does not seem blessed; rather it has loosed a kind of ugliness and wildness in the land.
Is the “untamed beast rampaging through American politics” not “loosing a kind of ugliness and wildness” in the culture?
We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy. But maybe she’s smart as a fox in doing a Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin.
Is O’Donnell not “alarmingly loopy?” But also…is she not showing a kind of foxy intelligence by undertaking a “Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin?”
I mean…she won, right? Remember Bush II’s crow? “Get over it…I won.” Nasty but true.
She’s also smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth — two elements Barack Obama was able to summon during his campaign that are sorely missing from his presidency.
Is politics not comprised of large elements of passion and myth…especially in this hypnomedia age? And are these not two elements that “Barack Obama was able to summon during his campaign that are sorely missing from his presidency?”
She might have gone a broom too far, though, when she once told Bill Maher that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and went on a date with a witch that included “a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”
Do you think that O’Donnell’s little witchcraft thing will not help to sink her?
What is wrong with the following lick?
Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality. His ivory tower approach to the nation’s fears and anxieties about the economy gave rise to a tower of angry babble. Tea Party is basically a big tent for anger.
“Tea Party is basically a big tent for anger?”
Check.
And do you not think that if Barack Obama was not so committed an intellectual…he is, y’know…and/or was gifted with more ability (or perhaps better said, would allow himself) to communicate more strongly on an emotional level, a great deal of that anger would have been dissipated? I do. Many people think that the Tea Party movement is basically racist in its composition. I do not. If the exact clone of Barack Obama only white…Barry O’Mara…was in exactly the same position and acted exactly the same way, the anger would still be there, unquenched. It would have different excuses; the buzzwords and concepts used by the right wing media to fan that anger would be different, but the anger itself would be identical.
How about this idea of Dowd’s?
He seems weary of crisis management, conveying the attitude of the hero in “The Incredibles” who has to keep saving the world: “Sometimes I just want it to stay saved!”
The president seems put upon and impatient with reality while his foes seem happy to embrace fantasy.
How far off is that observation?
Not very, I think.
Does Obama not seem weary to you? Maybe not just of “crisis management”, but of the whole hot roil of politics? He does to me. I can relate, too. He’s too fucking intelligent to be a politician. Too much conscience. I really think that he is seriously considering being the “really good one-term president” that he mentioned on ABC. Watch.
Or this.
Obama can connect with policy. He just can’t connect with the objects of policy. Empathy seems more like an abstract concept than something to practice.
He has never shaken off that slight patronizing attitude toward the working-class voters he is losing now, the ones he dubbed “bitter” during his campaign. There is no premium in trying to save people’s jobs and lift them up and give them health care if they feel that you can’t relate to them. That’s how Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his job, despite D.C.’s progress on schools and crime.
The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
You do not see this, at least as the media are communicating it to the sheeple? Of course…Dowd is part of that media. But if the media create the reality…which I think is a self-evident truth in the US today…then that’s what she is seeing as well. Media flacks mostly believe in their own self-created reality. That’s why they are so effective. They’re not lying, most of them. (Except for the intelligence assets, of course.) They’re just as asleep as their audience.
Just like O’Donnell. Only much bigger and much more powerful.
The only truly off content in this whole column is this:
When Rahm Emanuel leaves to go run for mayor in Chicago, all the blood will drain out of the White House.
However, even here…it has been quite true that the only “hot” member of this out-of-the-cool administration has been Rahm.
Bad hot, in my view, but media-driven electoral politics isn’t so much about what you do as it is about the way that you do it.
“T’aint Whatcha Do Hit’s The Way ‘Atcha Do It” went Trummy Young’s big hit tune with the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra in the midst of the Great(er) Depression.
Yup.
Hot sells.
Cool repels.
Yup.
I personally think that…consciously, semi-consciously or otherwise…Obama’s choice of Elizabeth Warren is meant to maintain some of that “hotness” in the administration.
Just sayin’…
This is pretty off, too:
And Obama can go to Ben’s Chili Bowl for lunch every day and it won’t matter.
It will matter. Perhaps the single best general cultural movement to come out of the Obama adminstration’s first two years has been the increased general consciousness of how badly Americans eat. I have eaten at Ben’s Chili Bowl. I used to play a lot at the Lincoln Theater next door, and there simply was no other food available close to the theater during rehearsal breaks.
It SUCKS!!!
Grease city.
Up and down the line.
I do not give a rat’s ass if Ben’s is some kind of black cultural landmark. Bad food has been part of the ongoing downfall of black culture in this society for going on 40 years. Of all minority cultures, including working-class whites. Poisonously bad. Where is the American obesity epidemic most obvious? On the streets of the ghettos of American cities and on the streets of American lower-middle class, working class and rural small towns and neighborhoods. Bet on it. if I distrust Obama at all it is for his tacit approval of that shit. That and being a grown, supposedly intelligent man who smoked cigarettes well into the 21st century. (If not still smoking.) Both acts speak to a weak spirit if not pure stupidity. Bet on that as well.
But other than that…Dowd pinned it.
Is she an establishment media ass?
I’ll have to take your word for it.
But every ass finds a good seat once in a while.
She sat right down square in the middle of this one as far as I am concerned.
Yup.
Later…
AG
Maybe no one you know, Booman.
But somebody does, even if it’s only the Lords of the Hypnomedia, leftiness version thereof.
I dunno.
What kinds of fools actually still take the NY Times seriously?
Them I guess.
Oh.
I guess you take it seriously.
Nevermind.
I mean, so do I, of course. Take it seriously. The same way that I take seriously any weapon that is being aimed at the culture by a special interest group or two or three or four. (Say pro-Israel interests, other money behind the Democratic Party, certain other elements of the corporate/financial world and the left wing of the right wing as represented by parts of the US intelligence system. Like dat.)
But…seriously seriously?
As in telling some form of the truth?
After its part in the run-up to the Iraq War?
Please.
Wake me when it’s over.
Where is Judith Miler now? In jail for her part in that lethal hype attack?
Hmmmm…
Oh.
From the Times right down the intel memory hole. First The wall Street Journal, then NavySEALs.com and MediaChannel.org and finally all the way around to the (supposed) other side of the media compass, Fox News.
Same reporter; same controllers, placed to do her asset work in the Times until she got busted. Then onward and sideways.
Too smart for what, exactly?
On the evidence of just this saga, let alone the many other Times fails.
Please.
Not smart enough, more accurately.
Bet on it.
AG
I’d take that one in a minute.
Free food?
HELL yes!!!
What’s that you say?
I’d have to be nice to restaurants whose owners are “connected” in the NY Times sense?
Uhhhhh…..OK.
Kin I have fries wid dat?
Later…
AG
maybe she would have written it this way:
But of course…then the Times would never have published it.
Too close to home for the Grey Lady.
Bet on it.
Way too close to home.
AG
People in my generational cohort, and a few elders who have some sassiness, are all a flutter about wanting to go to Stewart/Colbert’s double rally in DC on 30 October.
I’m kind of curious how the Colbert side of it will roll, since he plays tongue in cheek conservative to the hilt…
First of all, blacks have had issues with food quality going back forever in this country. A lot of the standard soul food diet is based on stuff the slave owners wouldn’t eat. Well, the slave owners were making wise choices in many cases. And having lived in suburbs and having lived in black neighborhoods in our cities, I can tell you that it is easy to eat right in the suburbs and nearly impossible to eat right in our inner cities. The Obamas know this better than anyone, and they’ve been excellent on this issue.
As for your greater point, I am not interested in doing a point-by-point assessment of Dowd’s piece.
You are a musician. When you play a piece of music, you are doing it to either please a certain audience or, perhaps more ambitiously, to convince that audience of something. You can play all your notes correctly and still fail to accomplish either of those objectives. Political writing is no different.
More importantly, pleasing your audience is the dull part of the job. It’s actually too easy to be self-interesting. It’s punching the clock. Real art has to convince. It has to make converts. It has to accomplish something.
Say what you want about Dowd’s piece, but it combines preaching to the choir with giving comfort to the enemy. That’s not art. It’s crap that serves no obvious purpose but fulfilling the obligation she has to write two columns a week.
I’d also add…any artist who isn’t remotely contrarian, who lacks any ability to surprise…is a pop artist who is selling the equivalent of a Big Mac.
Like I said…I have little use for Ms. Dowd’s work…or that of any other writer who manages to parse the middle differences finely enough to be hired by he MSM. I agree completely w/your overall assessment of it.
Nevertheless…I see almost nothing that she said that was not plainly true in this case.
As for “soul food”…better off eating chitlins, hog knuckles, collard and dandelion greens, beans and rice than denatured fast food, deep fried greasy potatoes and twice-fried offal on a chemical bun.
Which is what Ben’s sells.
Bet on it.
AG
Like I said…I have little use for Ms. Dowd’s work or for that matter the work of any other writer who manages to parse the middle differences finely enough to be hired by the MSM. I agree completely w/your overall assessment of it.
Nevertheless…I see almost nothing that she said that was not plainly true in this case.
As for “soul food”…better off eating chitlins, hog knuckles, collard and dandelion greens, beans and rice than denatured fast food, deep fried greasy potatoes and twice-fried offal on a chemical bun.
Which is what Ben’s sells.
Bet on it.
AG
Well, what did I say about it?
Did I say it was full of lies and distortions?
No. I said it was dense and predictable. I said she was mailing it in. I said it had no appeal to any audience, and that it wasn’t convincing to anyone. In other words, it has calories but no nutrition. And it tastes bad.
She’s writing about politics, so presumably she has an opinion about what ought to happen in this country. She isn’t oblivious to what’s looming on the horizon. She is painfully aware of it.
So, how does her column help? Who is she trying to convince to change their minds about something? If anything, she’s trying to make us more apathetic. She lays out the stakes to a certain degree, and then punts on what it all means.
I can lay out for you all the reasons there are to be frustrated and disappointed about our political system. But when the problem is apathy in the face of insanity, I don’t see how that is a good use of my time and limited talent.
I don’t understand people who engage in work without a mind to what they’re trying to accomplish. But people whose work undermines what they’d like to see accomplished? I find them either mystifying or infuriating.
Here’s your post:
The post contains about 100 angry words, of which only two are “predictable” and “dense”. Only 2% of the whole.
Eight sentences. The one that has those words in it is near the end of the paragraph. Everything else is just insult snark.
Fire her.
She’s a dinosaur.
No one likes her work anymore. (Yogi Berra-“Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” Right. But Yogi was going for effect.)
The people who read the Times are too smart for her? (I took care of that one above, I believe.)
Listen, Booman…if you don’t like her writing, don’t read her. And if she is doing some real harm, if she is spreading lies or disinfo, by all means point it out. But if you want to get mad at the Times, fer chrissake…Lord knows there’s some really serious criminality going on in the board room of that AIPAC/CIA-dominated rag. Why pick on a society/political writer?
She’s meaningless in the larger scope of things.
Really.
AG
I’ve never noticed you to be particularly receptive to the criticism that you ought to focus on something else. It’s a pretty universal reaction writer’s have to that criticism.
Focus on what you must, Booman.
And rest assured that I will, too.
I happened on this post of yours and that led me to the Dowd article. I read it and then went to sleep. When I woke up, the first thing that struck my mind…which really surprised me, because what Ms. Dowd does or does not say is generally not even w/in the scope of my attentions… was that she had hit the nail right on the head.
And you…who I read regularly…had missed.
So I mentioned it.
Now it’s growing out of proportion.
I think the NY Times is in the business of criminal disinformation. All of the theater and movie reviews, the Sunday Mag, the fluff columnists like Dowd…they’re all there to divert attention from the real agenda at hand, which is keeping the white, middle class/upper middle class leftiness elite in line.
In line with whatever the PermaGov thinks is the right thing to do for its own survival.
Boycott Cuba?
Sure. That Fidel…whadda piece of work!!!
Support Israel?
OK. What’s new?
Withdraw some support for Israel because it is getting out of line w/the Palestinians and we’re scared shitless of what Iran is up to?
Hoo boy. We can do that!!!
Drum up support for a blood-for-oil war?
OH yes!!! Judith? C’mere. I’ve got an…assignment fer ya.
And so on and so forth.
That’s where my focus lies.
And yes…I am not prone to accepting suggestions about changing it. They have be very good suggestions, and well backed-up too.
Like…the one I gave to you.
Take it or leave it, Booman. My job is to lay certain ideas down as publicly as I can manage to do so given my position in the world. My chosen position in the world, I might add.
Which I have done.
Now?
Time to go back to practicing.
Got some hard work coming down the pike.
Later…
AG
I know many self identified white Tea party members (unfortunately). They are dripping with racism (Blacks and Hispanics) and homophobia and hatred of muslims (and quite a few other religions too). To claim that is not a big motivating factor for that movement is to have your head in the proverbial sand.
Consider that self identified tea partiers include both Chritian dominionists such as Palin, and Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, so-called libertarian. What connects them? Racism, pure and simple.
I didn’t say that they are not there, Steven. Just that they would be equally “there” if their presidential enemy/figurehead-for-everything-that-is-wrong-in-their-lives was white.
I wrote:
Racism, religionism, sexism(s)…all components of the mix. But the root?
The root is me-firstism. With a big dollop of “How come this ain’t working anymore? They tol’ me it was always gonna be like it was in them Norman Rockwell paintings, but it ain’t. And I’m I’m madder than hell about it!”
You’ve got me-firstists in every societal niche.
Jewish me-firsters.
Gay me-firsters.
Female me-firsters.
Black me-firsters.
All kinds of me-firsters.
The difference here?
There are lot of this particular type; they wield a great deal of electoral power and they are feeling the heat of evolution breathing down their necks.
The heat of change.
“They” ruled America for several hundred years.
“They” essentially ruled the world from the end of WW II until the late ’60s societal revolutions here. “They” have been fighting a rear-guard action since then. And winning, to an appreciable degree. They still had their oversized cars, their mortgages that they could manage to pay, etc.
And then suddenly…the roof caved in.
Years of “Me first and fuck you!!!” caught up with the system and brought it down. And they went home and sulked while a newer paradigm elected a new president.
But the opposition has done a good job on him. They found his weaknesses and then they exploited them, just as they did with Bill Clinton. Different weaknesses, same foe, same tactics. Tried and true tactics that been proven to work over the long term.
Their racism is just a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.
Just a symptom.
And a tactic.
Bet on it.
AG