by Damozel | The thing about Dowd is that the more times you read one of her postings, the less you know what any of it means. So often she just hurls poison darts at all and sundry. Nothing is any worse---and no one is any better---than anything or anyone else. In today's column, she's still on about Sarah Palin.
What is she saying, if you boil it down to the essentials? Um...hmmmm....huh....yeah. Eh? Okay:
[shorter nutshell version] Concern Trolling for Mean Girls: The Candidates: Sarah Palin, McCain's "Trophy Vice" is clearly the sort of candidate who will resonate with dwellers in trailer parks and regular readers of supermarket tabloids all across the US. Now that Democrats are circulating the stories as fast as the stories come out, will McCain keep playing the sexism card to shield her?
And willl McCain's use of the sexism card to shield Palin be as bad for women as Hillary Clinton's playing the sexism card to cover up her incompetent management or as my gleeful backstabbling? Keep your fingers crossed!
Others drew different conclusions about the meaning of this Dowdian masterpiece of inkblot prose.
Not Your Sweetie responds to MoDo's last paragraph, which reads as follows---
When McCain gets in trouble, he pulls out the P.O.W. card. Now Republicans are pulling out the sexist card. Hillary cried sexism to cover up her incompetent management of her campaign, and now Republicans have picked up that trick. But when you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any legitimate question, you only hurt women. And that’s just another splash of reality.
---as I did, by calling her out for hypocrisy:
Awww, I am touched! Maureen was looking for my welfare all along and silly me I thought any bloody woman who can conceivably compete with her for a shrinking pool of available men is to be stomped in the ground with all available means...(NYS)
Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog seems to have understood Dowd differently---and doubtless better---than I did. He does a great job of culling out certain typically suggestive Dowdisms that have to do with erupting, spilling, messy, sticky fluids. And he says:
Well, now the GOP ticket has truly lost Maureen Dowd....
You don't have to be a gender studies major to read between the lines here: details "spill out"; they're "erupting"; they're "messy" and "sticky."
You see, real leaders (real men) have control -- in the sexual analogy, that's control of fluids. To Dowd, the McCain-Palin team has lost control of the fluids. (That's why Bill Clinton, who you'd think would be regarded as more male than most because of his tomcatting, is lumped in with the non-manly: he didn't keep his fluids under control. In other words, he got caught.)
Whatever you think of that reading, note that this is the first time Dowd's written a truly energized, jokey column -- joking insults are her A game -- that's all about the McCain campaign's faults.
Heh. And that's a view I admit hadn't occurred to me.
BN-Politics MoDo Watch:
Maureen Dowd on Sarah Palin: Fan Fic for Mean Girls (Continued)
Maureen Dowd, the Redemptive Power of Misfortune, and John McCain
Maureen Dowd: Two Against the One
And Maureen Dowd Knows Narcissism
Maureen Dowd Talks out of her ... Ear Again
Maureen Dowd Luuuurves Obama: The Saga Continues
Has Maureen Dowd Got a Big Swoony High School Crush on Obama?
New Yorker Cover: Maureen Dowd Gets it Right (Sort of)
Obama's Adventures Among the Working Classes
Maureen Dowd's Vicious Attack on Hillary: Internalized Misogyny or Something Much More Basic?
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