Maureen Down wrote a column for the New York Tomes today that begins "Al Gore must want to punch Hillary Clinton right through the hole in the ozone layer."
Funny, because that is exactly what I would like to do to Ms. Dowd.
Like million of Americans, I sincerely hope to have Al Gore as my next president, and I will not take kindly to Ms. Dowd savaging him on a regular basis from her bully pulpit at the Times.
What the hell did Al Gore ever do to Ms. Dowd anyway?
Wear "earth tones?"
Grow a beard with Her Royal Highness's permission?
Having free access to Lexis, I did a search to see if my memory is still intact, and indeed it is: Maureen pursued Al Gore with her bon mots and pointless ridicule in 1999-2000 like Inspector Javert went after Jean Valjean.
What the hell is her problem???????????
Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what our next president wears so long as it is not a flight suit with a SOCK stuffed in the crotch. I want Al Gore, a good, kind, intelligent man, to be my next president and I don't want this obnoxious schoolyard bully to get the taunting and ridicule started again!!!!!!!
Somebody needs to stop her.
On the off chance that readers don't remember Ms. Dowd's contributions to turning Al Gore into an object of mockery -- despite which he DID win the election in 2000 -- I have collected a few of Ms. Dowd's oh-so-witty offerings, beginning with today's uncalled for attack, followed by some examples from 1999. Read them at your own risk. They make me want to vomit.
(Note: the articles are now butchered up to comply with "fair use.")
ENTER OZONE WOMAN
The New York Times
May 24, 2006
By Maureen Dowd
Al Gore must want to punch Hillary Clinton right through the hole in the ozone layer.
At the National Press Club here yesterday, the New York senator finally took a passionate stand. After giving a courteous nod to her old rival Al as "a committed visionary on global warming," she purloined his issue and his revolution, going his Earth Tones in the Balance one better by wearing a blinding yellow pantsuit that looked as if it could provide solar power to all of Tennessee.
. . . This is supposed to be Ozone Man's moment in the sun. His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," opens today, buoyed by such raves that his supporters believe his green crusade could net him both a gold statuette and a white house.
He's being hailed as the new Comeback Kid, as New York magazine calls him, a passionate pedant. (Better than a compassionate conservative.)
. . .
Gore loyalists suggest that they could be co-front-runners -- a couple of raccoons in a bag.
The two hall monitors have always bumped against each other, first competing to be Bill Clinton's co-president, and then over Democratic money in the 2000 election.
So we are left with the prospect of a race between these two Democrats (Al, a popularly elected president; Hillary, a co-ruler). Neither was president, but both think they have been. . . . They have shared the problem of stiff, situational personae, when they seemed to wake up every morning trying to figure out who they should be, how they should appear or how they should position themselves. By fashioning their identities all the time, they condemned themselves to being seen merely as identity fashioners.
. . . Al, who says he and Bill have made up and are now brotherly, may want to embrace the Big Dog this time, realizing the cost of muzzling him in 2000 (and the cost of taking hired guns' advice to soft-peddle the environment).
. . .
What a contest: two ersatz ex-presidents vying for the support of a real one.
AL NEEDS TO LOOSEN UP, AND SHAKE BILL'S FATHERLY EMBRACE
Cleveland Plain Dealer
May 17, 1999
By Maureen Dowd
The pressure's on for Al Gore to relax.
I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow.
It's painful to picture the coiled vice president trying to uncoil.
Will the father of the Internet soak in a soothing aromatherapy bath or ask those Buddhist monks for a mantra? Will the hero of "Love Story" try reflexology on his feet? Will Farmer Al darken his West Wing office and get daily 90-minute massages with that New Age music that sounds like whales mating?
.
. . .
Embarrassingly, he is losing the women's vote to W., the same vote that Saturday Night Bill kept solid despite sexual harassment charges, despite an affair with an intern, despite humiliating his wife, despite a rape accusation. Gore, ever the faithful husband, ever the champion of diversity, shows up with posies and chocolates and women voters slam the door in his face.
. . .
On top of all this, the president rushes in to infantilize his vice president, calling Berke to offer an extremely rare interview. The president meant to praise his friend but ended up broadcasting his fears that Gore's rigor mortis could be fatal.
Clinton's counsel for Gore to get casual and lose the blue suit illustrates the box Gore finds himself in. The next time Gore saunters out in his khakis and a polo shirt, he'll just look like a tight guy who had his clothes laid out by a loose guy.
Gore is in a spiral of self-consciousness. He's also in a bind. . . .
THE PRODIGAL SON VS. THE GOOD SON
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
June 18, 1999
By Maureen Dowd
MANCHESTER, N.H. - Al Gore is the Tin Man: immobile, rusting,
decent, badly in need of that oil can.
George W. Bush is the Scarecrow: charming, limber, cocky, fidgety,
seeking to stuff his head with a few more weighty thoughts. (Dan
Quayle and Gary Bauer are, of course, the Flying Monkeys.)
Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct
that he's practically lactating.
Al is the Good Son, the early-achieving scion from Harvard and
Tennessee who always thought he would be president. (So did his
parents.) George is the Prodigal Son, the late-blooming scion from
(gee, which would you rather have as Prezz, Maureen?)
. . .
The Good Son, who was applying himself while his rival was finding
himself, is not green. But he is beige, and so puckered in his
pronouncements that his Hollywood pals want to coach him on how to
talk to people.
One knows his subjects cold but can't heat up an audience. The
other promises the global vision thing as soon as he gets his
geography down.
It's going to be an interesting year, Toto.
GORE LUGS HIS BAGGAGE SOUTH FOR THE WINTER
Plain Dealer
October 11, 1999
By Maureen Dowd
When Al Gore began stressing his Tennessee roots, running for president in the South in 1987, a top official for a rival campaign was dismissive.
"Gore just hasn't captured their imagination," said Donna Brazile, then the national field director for Richard Gephardt. "You don't hear Southern party chairmen going around saying, 'Gore, Gore, Gore!'
. . .
The cautious Gore's choice of the incautious Brazile is strange, and like so many of the vice president's moves, it has caused a lot of people to shake their heads and say, "Why is he doing that?"
. . .
With an accentuated twang, Gore rhapsodizes about starting fresh, far from the Gucci Gulch of lobbyists on K Street: "Home is not only a place, it's an idea ... Home is where we learn our values."
But he isn't trading "K Street for the aisles of K Mart," as he so clunkily puts it. He's simply packing up all those same old Washington Democratic insiders and the mercenary values of K Street and moving them South. Instead of "Nashville," this movie should be entitled "Hackville."
Gore is smart. He's been in politics his whole life. He's skilled at policy-making.
And yet he can't seem to get it right.
(blah, blah, blah)
Gore cherishes his reputation for decency. But as he scrambles away from Bill Clinton's baggage, he adds new advisers with baggage, and his old advisers pile on more baggage. This campaign needs nothing so much as a porter.
. . .
Gore's clumsiness has been so startling that even those close to him are beginning to psychoanalyze his ambition. Does he really want it, they wonder, or is he in the race just because daddy always wanted it?
It's a bad sign when a man who is already in the White House runs for president and people ask: Why is he doing that?
ANYONE COULD HAVE GIVEN GORE THIS ADVICE FOR FREE: BE YOUR OWN GUY
Cleveland Plain Dealer
November 4, 1999
By Maureen Dowd
I will say this in Naomi Wolf's favor: You've got to respect a woman who gets a vice president to pay her a salary higher than his own.
Time magazine revealed that Al Gore hired Wolf, who has written extensively on women and sexual power, as a $15,000-a-month consultant to help him with everything from his shift to earth tones to his efforts to break with Bill Clinton.
. . .
Of course, when a man has to pony up a fortune to a woman to teach him how to be a man, that definitely takes the edge off his top-dogginess.
. . .
"If Gore actually was a dominant male, he wouldn't need to be told how to have gusto."
The deliberate Gore had seven years to get his team together, and yet his pack of gurus becomes ever wackier, like the portal to John Malkovich's head.
Imagine the scene when the earthy campaign manager, Donna Brazile, learned that the airy Naomi was receiving consulting fees that could have totaled $180,000 for a year, compared with the vice president's annual salary of $175,400. Brazile cut Wolf's fee down to $5,000 a month.
. . .
Now Wolf approves of Gore's switch from navy to tan.
It's deliciously Byzantine. Gore, whose shot at the presidency is in jeopardy because Clinton had a preoccupation with sex, has turned to an author with a preoccupation with sex to save him.
And now, after turning Clinton, the predator, into the Good Father, Wolf will try to turn Gore, a good father, into more of a predator.