Tony Kushner thinks it's fine for a movie to "manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth."

"History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama. It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying that Lincoln didn’t have green socks, he had blue socks."

The green/blue sock equivalent ridiculousness in Kushner's screenplay was having Connecticut vote against the abolition of slavery when in fact it voted for.

This dog whistle whistles both ways.

"New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd set the Jewish political community on fire [Sunday] with a column about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals that, according to her critics, peddled anti-Semitic imagery," reports Politico.

You know all the racist things Republicans are always saying, as seen by Democrats? It's like that.

"Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.

Snake-like... because the title of the article is "Neocons Slither Back." Dowd may not write the headline, and though she does use the word "slither" in her text, she's quoting Paul Wolfowitz, and he was saying that Obama shouldn't be allowed to "slither through" without having to take — Dowd's words here — "a clear position on liberals."

Dowd proceeds to say "Republicans are bananas on this one." Of course, if a Republican said Obama was bananas, that Republican would probably be accused of racism, because bananas remind us of monkeys, and the monkey is an animal that is associated with some racist iconography, and it's assumed that anything you say about the President is said while thinking about his race — which makes it conveniently/absurdly dangerous to criticize the President.



You can see why those who support Romney are tempted to scare his critics the same way. I'd recommend resisting this temptation. At some point, there really is anti-Semitism even where the text never says "Jewish." (I still think the Michael Moore movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" was trading in anti-Semitism.) Call it when you really see it, but be careful. You want to preserve your credibility — if not for its own sake — at least for the purpose of calling out your opponents when they cry racism (or some other unaccepted ism) and you think it's not there. The other option is to say "racism," "anti-Semism," etc. so often that no one cares about any analysis in that category anymore.

And by the way, if we're going to look at Dowd's imagery, we should look at all of it. She says "[Dan] Senor got out over his skis before Romney’s speech in Jerusalem..." I had to check Wikipedia to be sure that Senor is Jewish. He is. But skiing? Isn't the stereotype about Jews that they don't ski? I did my Google research on this. (Google is a wonderful way to check for the existence of a stereotype. Go ahead and try it to see what's been said about Jews and snakes or black people and monkeys.) Weeding out the articles about Jewish names ending in -ski, I found many references to the stereotype that Jews don't ski. The Ski Channel has an item titled "Yes, Jews Do Ski, Thank You":

I’m continuing my desire to rid the world of skiing stereotypes. Growing up, I always asked my parents why we didn’t take more ski trips. My mother always had a few excuses, but there’s one that stuck with me. “Well, honey, skiing isn’t a very Jewish sport.”.Hmm? I’m sorry? What is a Jewish sport? Bobbing for Matzoh balls?

And here's a Buddy Hackett routine on the Jews-don't-ski theme. ("I told her, 'Jews don't ski. Jews play pinochle and say, 'Helen, bring fruit.'") You know a stereotype is in place, when it's used as a basis for jokes like that.

Some things aren't funny at all, and some comedy is used to mask pain and anger, but let's calm down, be discerning, and keep some humor as we try to slither through the complicated problems strewn in our path by some obvious enemies who can't even think of laughing off that inept "Innocence of the Muslims" YouTube video.

"Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces."

Writes Maureen Dowd, smiling.

"We have to fight the dangerous streams in culture, the consumerism and narcissism and me-ism that erode the borders of our moral culture."

"We can’t put shallow celebrity before core decency. We have to have a deeper faith in the human spirit. As they say, he who has the heart to help has the right to complain."

Said Cory Booker, interviewed by Maureen Dowd (because her column today is about the decline of character and because Booker once ran into a burning house to save a neighbor).

When it comes to the Constitution and the Affordable Care Act, one must wonder who is the little lamb brought up as a pet.

"This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word..."

That's the beginning of paragraph 4 of Maureen Dowd's attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her rant includes many of the hackneyed phrases we're accustomed to seeing in anti-Court writing:

It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.

How do hacks writing NYT columns dress up?

All the fancy diplomas... cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.

I elided "of the conservative majority" to highlight how political liberals bitching about conservative judges talk just like political conservatives bitching about liberal judges... and all their fancy diplomas cannot disguise it!

But I'm interested in the phrase that sounded new "cosseted behind white marble pillars." Can one be cosseted by pillars? What exactly is cosseting anyway? Did you picture something like this?



No. That's a corset. Do you let similar words affect your understanding of a word? (I once lost a spelling bee because I allowed the word "ostrich" to intrude upon my understanding of "ostracize.")

But cosset... it's something soft, not pillarlike, is it not?

cosset
1650s, "to fondle, caress, indulge," from a noun (1570s) meaning "lamb brought up as a pet" (applied to persons from 1590s), perhaps from O.E. cot-sæta "one who dwells in a cot." 

When it comes to the Constitution and the Affordable Care Act, one must wonder who is the little lamb brought up as a pet.

"Isn’t this the last guy who should be pointing fingers and accusing others of taking pills for recreational purposes?"

Maureen Dowd takes a shot at Rush Limbaugh, kind of missing the point, because no one doubts that Rush paid for his own recreational pills. But I say "kind of," because Rush's attack on Sandra Fluke floundered because he lost focus on the real issue: that she wanted reimbursement for her birth control expenses. He veered into simply attacking the woman for —  he assumed — having a whole lot of sex — 3 times a day!

Gov. Corbett suggests that Second Mile groomed children for Jerry Sandusky.

Chris Wallace, on Fox News Sunday, did an excellent job of drawing out Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who, bound by ethical restraints, was trying to be circumspect. Here's a key moment in the colloquy. Wallace has just asked Corbett about the Second Mile charity "that Jerry Sandusky helped form for disadvantaged kids that quite frankly gave him access to these young boys."

WALLACE: Should actions be taken against the charity or the CEO who allegedly was told about some of these abuses as far back 2002?

CORBETT: ... I'm going to be very careful here....  If you talk to people who have worked with Second Mile, it has done great work.... But in this case, as the allegations indicate, some of it was used to pick on some children and the term was used, grooming, groom those children for Mr. Sandusky's purposes.

Did Corbett just reveal that there were other individuals within Second Mile who functioned in grooming children for Sandusky?

Corbett also appeared on "Meet the Press" this morning, and I thought David Gregory was much less successful in breaking through Corbett's controlled facade. It was interesting to compare these 2 interviews. Gregory expressed outrage on behalf of the children. ("You have to understand people, those of us who are parents, including myself, I have a nine-year-old boy at home....") Wallace, by contrast, came off at first — to my ear — as a Paterno fanboy. ("But, Governor, let me point out -- these are just allegations. Joe Paterno, who had spent half a century at Penn State, did not have an opportunity to offer a full defense. Why not let him finish his season and retire as he offered to do?")

I don't know whether Gregory and Wallace were showing how they really felt or using a strategy to lure Corbett into making revelations, but the Wallace interview was more revealing.

ADDED: Wallace also interviewed Franco Harris, a football star who came out of Penn State, and he seemed very much in service of the pro-Paterno attitude that I thought I detected in Wallace. It got a little odd when Wallace grilled Harris about the distinction — a vitally important distinction — between criminal law and morality.

WALLACE: Franco, Joe Paterno may have followed the letter of the law, or complied with it by informing his superior. But on a moral basis in the end, he was fired because of his failure not any kind of legal breach. Shouldn't he have called the cops when he heard about this abuse, or at least followed up with the person he tell the athletic director to find out where this investigation stood?

FRANCO HARRIS...: Hey, Chris, let me go back for a minute. As you know there was a grand jury investigation, and at the end of that investigation, they found that Joe Paterno cooperated fully with them and had good testimony and there was no charges against Joe Paterno.

And then, all of the sudden, something came out about a moral obligation, and everybody jumped on that. And everybody said it should be a moral procedure. It should be a moral procedure. And like that is subject to people's own train of thought with that.

So, I thought that was unfair and I think it is unfair how people were treating Joe with this issue, because Joe is highly moral person and great moral character. And so, it's very disturbing to me when somebody said this, everybody else jumped on this.

Harris's perspective, which looks benighted today, is exactly the way the NYT presented it in one its earliest reports, as I discussed here ("NYT says Joe Paterno "not implicated of wrongdoing in a grand jury report.") Later, Maureen Dowd — in the NYT — focused on the moral requirements that transcend law.

On "Meet the Press," David Gregory, talking to E.J. Dionne and David Brooks, brought up the Maureen Dowd piece, which, he said "helped to really sort of bring it home to me." Brooks took the opportunity to generalize:

I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK."... If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense.  You have a script to follow.  And this is necessary because people do not intervene. 

We don't know what sin is anymore. That's vaguely crazy when we're talking about raping a 10-year-old child, but Brooks seems to be working on some larger, brooding meditation about what's wrong with all of us these days.

"It would appear to be the rare case of a pedophile caught in the act, and you’d think a graduate student would know enough to stop the rape and call the police."

"But [Mike] McQueary, who was 28 years old at the time, was a serf in the powerfully paternal Paternoland. According to the report, he called his dad, went home and then the next day went to the coach’s house to tell him."

Writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

Paterno, who has cast himself for 46 years as a moral compass teaching his “kids” values, testified that he did not call the police at the time either. The family man who had faced difficult moments at Brown University as a poor Italian with a Brooklyn accent must have decided that his reputation was more important than justice.

In case you've forgotten, the story Paterno heard — according to the grand jury report — was that McQueary, a graduate assistant coach, saw "a naked boy about 10 years old 'with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.'"

Now, let's remember how the New York Times reported on the Penn State story a couple days ago. I wrote:

NYT says Joe Paterno "not implicated of wrongdoing in a grand jury report."

That's buried in the last paragraph of today's article — by Mark Viera — on the Penn State scandal, followed by this paean to Paterno:

Paterno helped propel Penn State to the top tiers of college football, and the university had one of the most pristine images in the sport, largely thanks to Paterno and his success in 46 seasons as head coach.

But the indictment did allege facts that implicated Paterno!

The NYT had trouble facing up to the reality that Paterno was implicated in terrible moral wrongs. It's good to see Dowd's column attacking the entire power structure at Penn State. All are to blame. A man who was seen raping children was harbored and protected and empowered for over a decade. Read the entire timeline summarized by Dowd. There's no way Paterno could cut himself off from responsibility once he had knowledge.

UPDATE, 9:56 a.m.: Paterno retirement announced.

"We have had several Texas presidents, but none so deeply, intensely Texas as this guy would be."

Man, Rick Perry is freaking out the New York Times. Gail Collins is all:

You think of Rick Perry, you think of Texas. And more Texas. Perry the cowboy coyote-killer, the lord of the Texas job-creation machine, the g-dropping glad-hander with a “howdy” for every stranger in the room. He barely exists in the national mind outside of the Texas connection.

And Maureen Dowd is all over the place talking about Perry with references to an obvious and old Hollywood movie.

Do these New York women realize that this kind of elitist contempt makes Rick Perry more appealing... to a lot of people... including me?

ADDED:

Well, do they?
	No, and if they'd widen their perspective on America, they'd be more successful.
	No. But their blinkered view works well to serve the interests of the NYT.
	Yes. But their goal is to feed the prejudice of the kind of folks who subscribe to the NYT.
	Yes, and they're great at stirring up trouble and getting links from friend and foe alike.
pollcode.com free polls

Maureen Dowd: "Perry told the students, 'God uses broken people to reach a broken world.' What does that even mean?"

That's in a column that's all about portraying Perry as the epitome of a special American-style of idiocy:

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

But if you're so smart, why can't you understand the poetically rich "God uses broken people to reach a broken world"? You think intelligence is demonstrated by the pompous overachiever's use of big words and long sentences?

Crisp aphorism marks the genius.

"It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job."

That's how Maureen Dowd sums it up this week.

Lot of insults for Republicans too: "They’re revolutionary Bolsheviks who want to eat Obama alive" and "nihilist[s who] go unchallenged in their crazy claims to be saving the country they’re hurting."

Obama wisecrack: "Maybe I should throw the game."

Spoken during the 2008 campaign, in the context of observing all the problems the next President would face.

Quoted by Maureen Dowd, who, naturally, wisecracks that he must now wish he had.

It's not really very funny. On the other hand, why does anyone step up to be President? It's some evidence of Obama's normality, which was one thing I always found appealing. You'd think it would only be really weird folk who'd decide they should be President and can actually handle the impossible job of dealing with all of the problems in the world and putting up with being the biggest punching bag in the world. And here was someone seemingly normal willing to do it... and perhaps as able to do the impossible as anyone else (and more able than John McCain).

More Dowd (boldface by me):

Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as disrespectful. So why would the White House act disrespectful by scheduling a speech to a joint session of Congress at the exact time when the Republicans already had a debate planned?...

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.

Re-re-re-spect-spect-spect-spect. (I'm supplying the pop culture reference that I expected to pop out of Dowd, given her usual style and how clearly set up that one seems. Is it a reach to suggest that she wanted to reference the famous Aretha Franklin recording, and she or her editor fretted that it would seem racial?)

"While Perry was playing the retro trigger-happy cowboy, Obama was playing the retro henpecked husband."

Maureen Dowd:

In Cannon Falls, Minn., the president compared negotiating with House Republicans to negotiating with his wife.

“In my house,” Obama noted, “if I said, ‘You know, Michelle, honey, we got to cut back, so we’re going to have you stop shopping completely. You can’t buy shoes; you can’t buy dresses; but I’m keeping my golf clubs.’ You know, that wouldn’t go over so well.”

In Decorah, he said: “Everybody cannot get 100 percent of what they want. Now, for those of you who are married, there is an analogy here. I basically let Michelle have 90 percent of what she wants. But, at a certain point, I have to draw the line and say, ‘Give me my little 10 percent.’ ”

You know what bugs me about this analogy? It's the contempt for the intelligence of the audience. The federal budget is not the same as a household budget scaled up. A husband and wife can't just "raise the debt ceiling." And the 10% Obama is referring to is not the avoidance of an expenditure (like the golf clubs). It's taxes. There is nothing like that in the family budget. The husband and wife do not have the option of commanding other people to give them money... unless they rob people... in which case the wife would be right to say, no, we can't go out robbing people. And the husband would be crazy to think he was making a modest and moderate argument by saying, "But honey, it's only for 10%."

Now, I'm not saying that taxes are theft. I think we should pay taxes to pay for whatever it is that we want and need from government. I'm just saying that the analogy between the federal budget and the household budget is all off. It's used by politicians to sound folksy and to try to persuade people who are not supposed to be very bright.

"What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?"

Maureen Dowd observes that "Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the 'hobbits'":

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

That term, "hobbits" (for tea partiers), comes from the Wall Street Journal and John McCain. I'm not sure what hobbits — the actual literary characters — have to do with "towel-snappin" and "whipping" anybody "into submission."

Dowd is not kind to President Obama:

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

Kill you?! The hobbits?

From that Wall Street Journal article: 

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Sorry, but I don't remember all that "Lord of the Rings" stuff enough to understand that. Mordor is a place, right? Yes. "Mordor was the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron. It was a terrible land of darkness and fear, inhabited by Orcs and other evil creatures." Does that make Obama the "Dark Lord"? I understand the Journal's hope that the Tea Party will go back to their modest home towns after they do whatever they think is their mission in Washington, that "terrible land of darkness and fear."

"I can hardly wait for The Althouse Woman to tear Maureen Dowd a new one today on MD's put down of Bob Dylan performing in China."

Meade reads me that comment from AllenS at the Crocus Café just as the last track of the vinyl record "New Morning" ends. We're playing "New Morning" — an album I've had since it came out when I was a college sophomore — because Meade cooked rainbow trout last night and he's been singing bits of "Sign on the Window" ever since...

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about

That is what's it's all about. Except we're in Madison, Wisconsin, not Utah. We're too old to have kids together. The house is too big to call a cabin. And we bought the rainbow trout at Whole Foods.

I started writing this post because I wanted to say, AllenS, I'm not going to do it. I'm not interested in what Maureen Dowd says about Bob Dylan. I started reading her column yesterday, and I got sick of it at the second paragraph:

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Her Bob Dylan is "the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems." I've listened to Bob Dylan singing in 5 different decades, and Dowd has him stuck in the 60s, and the early 60s at that. She's seeing him as the instrument of the American political left, when he broke away from them almost a half century ago.

It's true that Dylan still frequently plays “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” — the 2 songs Dowd thinks Dylan could have sung to upset Chinese government officials. (To play a concert in Beijing, Dylan submitted his playlist for government approval. Here's my April 6th blog post on the subject: "What's the big deal about Dylan's 'protest' songs in China anyway? They're almost entirely aimed at the United States.")

Now that I am writing about Dowd's column, I realized I had to read the whole thing and not just get tripped up at the stereotype of the early 60s Dylan (and the disgusting lie about Rush Limbaugh). And I see she does get around to something like the point I was going to make. She taps David Hajdu's book “Positively 4th Street” for something closer to the real Bob:

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”

He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. 

I imagine Dowd had written the column she wanted to write, then called up David Hajdu, who gave her material that forced her to backtrack and reformulate her attack. But the reformulation is lame. The lefty folky politicos were the true 60s?! If there is some true spirit of the 60s, it would be more accurate to say it is whatever Bob Dylan was. It was complicated. Politically and personally.

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.

He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.

A pack of kids... who call me “Pa”... That must be what it’s all about....

Real personal life, with the beauty of love and family, enhanced by the comforts of material affluence. A cabin. Fresh food. That's a more subversive message to the Chinese than what Dowd calls "[i]conic songs of revolution like 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' and 'Blowin’ in the Wind.'"

The day began with memories of rainbow trout, and I began writing this post meaning to end with rainbow. Looking up the "Sign in the Window" lyrics at bobdylan.com with my search term "rainbow" — I was looking for the rainbow — I saw all Dylan's "rainbow"s, including a second one in "Father of Night" — which is the aforementioned last track on the album "New Morning":

Father of night, Father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away
Father, who teacheth the bird to fly
Builder of rainbows up in the sky...

Is that subversive in China?

There are 3 other Bob Dylan songs with rainbows:

1. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." This is a song full of everything bad Dylan could think of to throw at us, and yet: "I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow..."

2. "Desolation Row." He's singing about "Ophelia," who's "already... an old maid" at the age of 22. She "wears an iron vest" and has "her profession" as "her religion." Her sin is "lifelessness." She does, however, have "her eyes ... fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow." See? She doesn't belong in the city! She needs God, a husband, a bunch of kids, and a cabin in Utah. (Ah! This makes me think about how I went to New York City, instead of out into some western landscape, after all those listens-through of "New Morning" in college.)

3. "Beyond the Horizon." "Beyond the horizon, behind the sun/At the end of the rainbow life has only begun... The bells of St. Mary, how sweetly they chime/Beyond the horizon I found you just in time." Note, at the link to the lyrics at Bob Dylan's own website — scroll down — there's a YouTube embed of Guy Lombardo playing "Red Sails in the Sunset."

Think about what that means! "We marry tomorrow/And she goes sailing no more." They marry... and they go to the Rainbow Room! Or they catch rainbow trout. Or they eat rainbow trout that they bought at Whole Foods in Madison and play their old Bob Dylan records.

"Once, he baked in existential estrangement, opportunistically tilting at authority figures..."

Baked? What are you trying to say, Maureen Dowd?

Maureen Dowd speaks of Obama's "righteous self-regard."

In context:

At first it was exciting that Obama was the sort of brainy, cultivated Democrat who would be at home in a “West Wing” episode.

But now he acts like he really thinks he’s on “West Wing,” gliding through an imaginary, amber-lit set where his righteous self-regard is bound to be rewarded by the end of the hour.

I've never watched "West Wing," and that reference doesn't make me regret my avoidance of it.

His arrogance led him to assume: If I build it, they will understand. He can’t get the gratitude he feels he deserves for his achievements if no one knows what he achieved and why those achievements are so vital.

People liked him. And we liked the idea of ourselves liking him. The mistake was for him ever to think that made us want the things on the Democrats' wish list.

We want the best people to govern us, but many voters are so turned off by Obama’s superior air that they’re rushing into the arms of disturbingly inferior pols.

No. We hate the policies, and we're voting for the people who will undo them. It doesn't matter if they aren't as sleek and pretty. We want out of the place where the glamorous hero led us.

Rush Limbaugh on Maureen Dowd: "I know every detail because I know the guy" she loved and who was cruel to her.

Rush Limbaugh offers a somewhat sympathetic but teasing and gossipy explanation for why Maureen Dowd isn't fun to read anymore:

What happened is that a guy she really had -- she was in love with -- dumped her and was mean to her.  Didn't just dump her, but did it in a mean, mean way.  And she had everything invested in this guy, and she hasn't been the same since this happened.  If I didn't have the scruples I have, I'd give you every detail because I know every detail because I know the guy.  I have heard the guy explain the story, and I got livid! I was livid when I heard the story being told. The guy told me how much fun it was! I said, "Gee whiz! I'm supposed to be the guy with no heart here! I'm the conservative! I'm supposed to be the guy that has no compassion!" (interruption) Oh, yeah, big time liberal.  Oh, no question, absolutely.  At any rate, it's just a sad thing out there.

He doesn't go on to do a riff about how she was in love with Obama or some comic thing. It ends very quickly. 

I was in a fisking mood over the weekend.

I had to go after:

1. Robert Gibbs defending Obama's stance on Don't Ask Don't Tell.

2. Maureen Dowd attempting to portray Sharron Angle as a "mean girl."

3. Bill Maher trashing white men who love women like Sarah Palin.

4. Bill Maher portraying Christine O'Donnell as an irritating screwball.

5. Emily Bazelon tarring Christian fundamentalists with homophobia.

What's with powerful women and thick bumpers of bangs?

Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:



What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...



... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...



... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!



What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?