Don Hazen, Alternet, August 15, 2008
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has evolved into a destructive force. Her pieces are almost purely gossip, innuendo, and meanness; worst of all they are often wrong. I used to enjoy her writing; she was frequently funny, and her cutting take seemed more focused on the forces of evil. Now, more often than not, she is the evil, generating paranoia without a purpose — her own brand of the politics of destruction.
Did something happen along the way to reprogram her writing brain? Was it the publishing of her book and how it was received that has stimulated her inner misanthrope? The work she has been producing is not good journalism or op-ed writing. I don’t know what her family was like growing up, but it must have been pretty vicious — playing gotcha all the time, and forcing her to make stuff up as she went along.
So a thank you to Salon’s Joan Walsh, who today gleefully writes:
I’m always happy when events conspire to prove that a nasty Maureen Dowd column was fantasy as quickly as possible. It only took a day to disprove her fanciful depiction of Hillary Clinton trying to topple Obama in Denver, “Yes, She Can.”
Dowd was pushing the line that Billary and their forces were at work to undermine the Obama effort by insisting on a separate roll-call vote. But it seems that Barack and Hillary can actually get along when the chips are down.
The Clinton and Obama campaigns announced jointly that her name will be put into nomination Wednesday, Aug. 27, in Denver, and there will be a roll-call vote. The two teams are still working out the mechanics, a Clinton aide said, but it looks like each state will announce its tally for both candidates “I am convinced that honoring Senator Clinton’s historic campaign in this way will help us celebrate this defining moment in our history and bring the party together in a strong united fashion,” Obama said in the campaign statement.
The role of Dowd in the larger political landscape is increasingly a topic of hand-wringing.
1 response so far ↓
Mo MoDo // August 17, 2008 at 1:29 pm |
And forcing a roll call vote wasn’t a victory for Hillary? It’s unprecedented in modern politics for the loser to have this much influence on the convention.
The 2008 convention is really the kick-off for Clinton’s 2012 campaign and somehow like the true mythical Cassandra, Dowd will be given the blame for just pointing out the truth.