Maureen Dowd (Artwi, Wikimedia Commons)
Maureen Dowd has never been more than
a political gossip columnist, which certainly explains her celebrity status in the traditional media. On
Sunday she once again revealed her pettiness, demeaning President Obama by calling him "Barry." The title of her column:
Sleeping Barry Awakes
It's common for newspaper headlines to be written by anonymous staffers, but the column itself includes this:
Now Obama offers his own version of the split-personality presidency: Do we get Energizer Barry or Enervating Barry?
It's all a play on the title "Sleeping Beauty," which is supposed to be cute and clever to whomever finds Dowd's shallow facsimiles of insights to be cute and clever. But even if Dowd offered any real insights it's still demeaning. And it calls into question whether she ever belittled the president's predecessor by calling him "Georgie" or something similar. As the publisher of this blog recently explained:
You know
it's used in a clear racial manner by the teabaggers, so I think that yes, it DOES cross the line into "approaching racism" that I'll consider bannable.
Why the hell would you want to do it anyway? At BEST it's a gratuitous insult.
When I was a kid, I was called "Marky" by my family, to differentiate between me and my father, also named "Markos".
If you call me that now, it's an insult. I'm an adult, I've chosen my name, don't diminish me by using my childhood nickname. I don't know why you'd want to do that to Obama, particularly since that childhood name is now used in a racist fashion by the Right.
Maureen Dowd has attempted to diminish the president by using his childhood name, but by so doing she has only revealed herself as diminished. She's supposed to be a serious columnist for a serious newspaper but here she veers very close to racist teabagger territory. At BEST it's a gratuitous insult. And that's being very generous.