- Maureen Dowd uses someone else’s perfectly reasonable paragraph -> FREAKOUT.
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I’ve long ceased reading her, for the same reason I stopped watching snuff films and Total Request Live: if I wanted to actively particpate in the dumbing down and destruction of American culture, I could at least get paid for it. Fortunately, there are people watchdogging the watchdogs, and they’ve done a fine job of chronicling her sins against thoughtful political observation. A sampling:
“Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the ‘pious smarty-pants’ and the ‘amiable idler,’ and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. ‘Al Gore is desperate to get chicks,’ she said in her column. ‘Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn’t stop turning off women, he’ll never be president.’”
[Lots of good links to Dowd’s facile, creepy editorializing in Lemieux’s post.]
Honestly, that’s just a tiny, tiny sampling. It’s not for nothing that Lemieux files all Dowdiana under the category FREE DAHLIA LITHWICK . Dowd’s not merely frustratingly shallow; her retrograde sexual politics and elitist faux-identification with the hoi polloi have been actively damaging to establishment media, which continues to take her seriously out of what I can only assume is Stockholm syndrome.
