all, let us know what's going on when you try to comment. there may be a glitch in operation here

Dowd's "analysis" is garbage and her irrational hatred of all things Clinton is worse than some of the wackiest wingnuts. And she's already been dropping hints that Obama just might be a "girly man". She's terrible and a waste of space on the NY Times op-ed pages. Plus, she reeks of elitism even as she accuses her targets of being elitist.

Greg, I probably give this site an unfair amount of shit from time to time, but I never quarreled with any criticism of Maureen Dowd on TPM. She's horrible. After reading this post, its good to see that she is an all around douchebag - I started to believe that she was scared of black men, by her constant emasculating of Obama that seemed to put her at ease.

Dowd is little more than a gossip columnist (and a bad one at that since she seems to always be behind the times in her gratuitous blathering). How she ever got her job I'll never know.

In all fairness, Dowd was all about the cheap pseudo-analysis of Bush back when that was more profitable.

For me, though, Dowd is just the flipside of the same paleo-feminist coin that spawned many of Clinton's most ardent defenders (for example, Erica Jong, Sylvia Welsh, Taylor Marsh, etc.). Instead of addressing issues and treating their opponents as equal participants in a rational discourse, they presume an omniscience of the human psyche. They apply these archaic, pop-psychological concepts to "expose the irrationality" of anyone who disagrees with them. Instead of responding to discourse, they talk about their would-be interlocutor's alleged "Mommy issues" and search out for hidden symbols of their "misogyny."

The difference with Dowd is that she doesn't have an agenda. She's just obnoxious. With that said, no respectable newspaper or web site should give a platform for this species of boomer narcissism. You're absolutely right when you say Dowd's garbage belongs "in another time." It's an embarrassing anachronism, just like the empty conjecture that sexism cost Clinton the nomination.

it's only been the last 5 months or so that I've been checking out Dowd in the NYT (after the NYT went "free"). She came with so much hype, it seemed that she was a "must read" ... Sheesh, her columns are so light and so predictable. Compare them to the work of Frank Rich, her op ed partner on many days, and it quickly becomes embarrassing ... Her treatment of everyone is superficial and jejune: it's not just Hillary, as others have pointed out.

Dowd's become a caricature of everything that is wrong with journalism today. Nitpicky. Small details that mean nothing to anyone that blow up into an entire column, wasted space.

I actually used to like her. Long time ago, I guess.

Dowd's constant treatment of politics as little more than Royal Court Entertainment really belongs to another time -- the Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton presidencies. It's thoroughly out of touch with what people want from their political commentary today.

Well said. Extremely well said. That precisely captures my critique of what the MSM political coverage degenerated into after the end of the Cold War. Dowd was a pioneer in this brave new frontier "journalism" and all of the accolades she received for it at the time only validated her toxic trivialization of politics.

Dowd, however, is, in the end, just an opinion-monger and her tired toxicity is at least peddled as opinion. The real problem is that we now have an entire class of purported journalists--people who are obstensibly actual news reporters--who share the "politics as court gossip" outlook. That attitude is pervasive at the political news department of ABC News and Politico. CNN and MSNBC are not excepted. CNN's addition of Mo Rocca to its political convention coverage team in 2004 was a particularly foul example, as was the way he was there throughout the Democratic primary but was not there during the first part of the Republican convention. The latter two, however, at least sporadically attempt to rise above it, albeit with the kind of success you'd expect from addicts trying to kick a habit cold turkey without getting treatment.

At ABC and Politico, however, they wallow in it. That think that's what their job is. What was, and is, "the Note" but the concentrated essence of this degenerate view of what political news is? What is Ben Smith's column other than a droll court gossip sheet?

Another juicy quote:

[Peggy] Aulisio asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. [Editorial page editor Andrew] Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

I beg to differ with Mr. Rosenthal.

It is good to see Dowd being taken to task by her own paper, but you're quite right to challenge her assertion that "nobody objected" to her past characterizations of men.

I have to wonder.... Is Maureen Dowd necessary?

I like Maureen Dowd. She's good at what she does. When Al Gore demanded Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other masterminds behind Abu Ghraib resign, but didn't mention Dick Cheney, Dowd described the omission thusly:
(He did not ask the neocon cabal ringleader, Dick Cheney, to step down, perhaps in a spirit of second-banana solidarity.)

I stopped reading Maureen Dowd way before she became irrelevant. I can't stand her. The only way to get her off the NYT is to stop reading her. Stop emailing her articles to your friends.

I think it's easy to criticize bad journalism when it comes from the right (O'Reilly, Broder, etc...), but we should be just as wary of those in our wings who give liberalism a bad name, and MoDo is one of those people.

I think there were two times that Dowd (accidentally I'm sure) made good points. I would like her and Judith Miller to be imprisoned in adjoining cells and be forced into being a captive audience to the other.

Greg Sargent: What is the point of thumping your chest about the heat you took if you kept it quiet at the time? Certainly as HusseinTenaX said, the commentators are generally in agreement with you about Dowd.

isnt the editor a little too late on this issue and isn't the editor just trying to make excuses for why hillary lost

http://sensico.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/dwc-checklist-4-change-part-5/

Let me guess? Maureen Dowd was being misogynistic in her comments? /snark

Clinton lost. It's over. Move on.

Maureen Dowd is the love child of Liz Smith and Robert Novak. Breezy and gossipy. Predictable and tiresome. Too silly to be taken seriously. Too tedious to be remembered. Altogether, a dim bulb that flickers annoyingly.

This blog took a fair amount of heat for suggesting during the primary that Maureen Dowd's nonstop catty columns about Hillary had an obsessive, even unhinged quality to them.

Obsessive and unhinged are excellent adjectives for what Dowd has become.

Her columns are embarassing, and offer little insight into the political process. I would venture that if Ms. Dowd were Mr. Dowd, that column would have been discontinued some time ago.

As it is, we get treated to her obsession with masculinity.

And whoever said, above, that she just isn't very bright? I completely agree. I watched her simpering performance on David Letterman in the wake of her latest book and was completely turned off by her.

There are at least two things that come to mind that I consider impossible to find;

1- A PhD who listens to, and takes seriously, Sean Hannity's commentary on his radio program.

2- A 'journalist' who accepts criticism of their work, regardless of how well deserved the criticism may be.

1- A PhD who listens to, and takes seriously, Sean Hannity's commentary on his radio program.

You could just say: A PhD who listens to and takes seriously Faux News in any medium.

Oh brother, let's move on. Any day now there won't be anymore clinton whining. I can't wait. The whining is ten times more tiresome than any dowd piece. I actually like dowd and she blasts everyone, so what. Don't read her if you don't like her.

MoDo and Tom Friedman. From the same mold.

Somebody hit it on the head, they are narcissistic boomers who think they're such hot shit despite their obvious irrelevance and pathetic behind-the-times pandering.

Worse yet, they are viewed as Lefties, and as many have stated, they clearly don't know what the f*ck they are talking about and it winds up hurting us as a party.

It's about time NYT hires Glenn Greenwald or Josh M. or someone who can contribute something of value.

MoDo is the worst of the worst and her saying that no one complains when she "feminizes" men (correct that -- male Democrats), is laughably untrue. I refuse to cite her work even when she bashes Bush or Cheney. She should not be given credibility, ever.

Who cares about Dowd? Seriously, I stopped reading her garbage years ago. If I want op-eds there's plenty here at TPM, Kevin Drum or Digby that are much more worthwhile.

The NY Times' roster of columnists once was the most respected in the country. Those who've gained columns during the regime of Keller and Rosenthal aren't fit for a fourth-rate blog.

Maureen Dowd's commentary reminds me of projection TV: It seems bright on first blush if you happen to glance at it head on; when you start looking at it from different angles, it loses its sharpness. Anything that doesn't stand up to a second read without making embarrassing assumptions about human nature is simply not good journalism.

P.S. How come Greg talks directly to Tena but not me? So much for not playing favorites in the liberal blogosphere!

Maureen Dowd's main problem is that she seldom presents original ideas and doesn't write very well - as opposed, say, to Paul Krugman, who usually pens persuasive essays on important ideas or proposals.

I don't detect right-wing bias in her columns, just Grade B quality gossip column content.

Personally, I've always seen her as a kind of a cartoonist, only using words instead of pictures. You don't take what she says seriously, but she makes you laugh.

Can anyone remember the last time anyone praised a Dowd column for offering anything even remotely interesting in the way of reporting, context, knowledge, or genuine insight? We sure can't

Dowd was right to say HRC is a "flawed science
experiment," a "flawed feminist test," and she was one of the first to come out saying this.

But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction.

[...]

As a possible first Madame President, Hillary is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill out of the equation. Her story is wrapped up in her marriage, and her marriage is wrapped up in a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies.

She also might have been the first to suggest HRC made Obama a better candidate.

Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?

Obama had not been hit hard until this campaign; he sailed through his Senate race. Without Hillary, he never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control.

Molly Ivins, she ain't.

I miss Molly's words so very much and always thought that she struck a good balance between good-natured humor and "snarkiness" with common-sense, insightful political commentary. She too had a somewhat "politics as spectator sport" writing style, but what was never lost was her true passion for politics and her sincere desire to get people to THINK.

I do like Maureen overall and have read her for years. I think she's quite bright and there are times her insights are spot-on, but my greatest disappointment with her is a sense that she does not demand enough of herself as a writer these days, and that she's capable of delivering a lot more but has allowed her "lighter style" to substitute for true analysis.

Puns and other wordplay, cultural references - these are all literary tools that can be very effective, such as the time Dowd compared Rudy Giuliani's campaign death throes to a scene from an opera, but she overuses those literary gimmicks to the point where they just become tiresome and too cute by half, and the writing overall becomes stale and outdated.

oh and Kozmik don't forget to fuck off on the subject of gay men.

Greg writes: Dowd's constant treatment of politics as little more than Royal Court Entertainment really belongs to another time -- the Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton presidencies.

I, on the other hand, think that Dowd's "treatment of politics" was as ridiculous then as it is now.

YMMV.

She's sort of a want-a-be H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) who said that a successful columnist had to be querulous and bellicose, never defending anyone of anything if he can help it, but if the job was forced on him, it'd be tackled by denouncing someone or something else.

Two problems: Dowd isn't nearly as accomplished as Mencken was in dishing out gibes - (Mencken, a self-described cynic said that a cynic was a man who when he smelled flowers looked for a coffin); Secondly, the American public is particularly lacking in a sense of humor these days so even if she was, very few could 'get' it.

As an aside, I have a friend who is a political journalist who once made gentle fun of Dowd in one of his pieces.

After that, she wouldn't return his calls and pretty much blackballed him.

In other words, she dishes it but can't take it.

Maureen Dowd is your typical weedy two-face who in grade-school, middle-school, and high-school turns on her friends and sneers at them and calls them names once she gets in with what she thinks is the "cool" crowd.

She's really just one more aspect of the hydra-headed evil that is David Broder, a Washington "insider" who thinks it's all a game and wants to rage at and attack anyone who wants to show some basic morality and make a difference.

I'm sure Maureen Dowd would love to sit down to some posh restaurant dinner with Ann Coulter and drink and giggle about the poor shmucks who dare to think that the government should help them rather than rich corporations and rich Republicans and rich hypocrites like Maureen Dowd.

Dowd aside, one of the reasons punditry in the newspapers is more and more irrelevant is age. Many pundits are simply completely out of touch outside the beltway. With few exceptions, the club is over fifty upwards to the Florida Condo age range. They have been taken at their word for so long without being challenged, they are journalistically flabby. They give up nothing of substance, but merely an occasional annoying distortion or entertaining one liner. By and large, much of their work would not get a passing grade from a high school teacher if it were fact checked or looked at for supporting data. They expect us to take them at their word when their word is unsupported.

When Maureen's good she's very, very good and when she's bad, she's horrid.

The DC press corps scene is a cross between the Gods on Mt. Olympus and high school.

The media are one of the few constants in transient Washington. They sit on their lofty perch; some times intervening and raising up the politicians below, sometimes throwing thunderbolts.

DC is a very small town, with a rigid hierarchy. Those who rule the social swirl, the mean girls and the jocks, aren't necessarily looking at politics from an intellectual and policy point of view, even though they may be more than capable of doing so. It's all very court of Louis XIV.

DC is an echo chamber, a bubble, a down-market Versailles. It's one reason why the press coverage of politics is so dismal.

Aside from the ad hominem attacks, which have nothing to do with how she writes a column ...

You have got to be joking -- _ad_hominem_ is just about all she does!

"You have got to be joking -- _ad_hominem_ is just about all she does!" - Cervantes

Amen brother.

Dowd's a joke as a columnist. Sort of like Cal Thomas, though with a better sense of humor. But not to be taken seriously.