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
