She is the epitome of Hillary Hatred, Gore emasculation and Obambi. She drips with condescension, almost always toward Dems.
Today, she defines “purism” as favoring impeachment, because according to her, impeachment will make Dems lose. As with everything, she treats that as a foregone conclusion:
You can argue that impeachment, morally and constitutionally, is the right thing to do. But you also have to recognize that, historically and politically, it is not the right thing to do because it will lead to disaster.
It’s not possible to believe, according to her, that impeachment may be right morally, but also right politically, because that conflicts with both her lack of wisdom and imagination and her knee-jerk tendency to call Dems stupid and weak. Will impeachment lead to political disaster? Not necessariy, but it’s much more likely it will if Dowd and her gang of heathers repeat it enough, just like they repeated that Mueller was disastrous. [Diary work in progress: How did News Causes Coverage Become Coverage Causes News?]
The comments to the diary supporting Dowd are primarily about Stein/Nader type of purity, and I totally agree with them, but that wasn’t Dowd’s point. Being pro-impeachment or pro-impeachment inquiry is not “purism.” Certainly not yet.
I’ve been monitoring Dowd for years. In 2014, she used the occasion of Robin Williams’ death to bash Hillary Clinton for voting for the war.
No. I’m not kidding. She really did, writing:
So when I think of Williams, I think of [late writer] Michael Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.
Dowd omits that Kelly was a huge Iraq hawk, so under her logic, Kelly killed himself. But Kelly was a macho guy and Hillary was evil incarnate, so Dowd made him the "missing link" between Williams and Hillary in her bizarre free association. Well, here's what her BFF Kelly wrote in September 2002 about Al Gore's speech against a war with Iraq:
Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.
So Hillary was evil for voting for the war. But Kelly was a saint, despite viciously attacking opponent Gore for opposing the war.
At the time, I wrote:
Dowd is a woman with a severe problem, who has no business writing op-eds for the New York Times, or even celebrity news for People, or breed news for Modern Dog. The first thing that came to her mind after thinking about Williams and Kelly was Hillary's war vote.
Think of how deranged that is: What was the first one that comes to mind after Robin Williams died? Not Williams' genius or his depression or the tragedy of his death, but Hillary. And as to the war, not Bush, not Cheney, not even Saddam, but Hillary.
And she’s a plagiarist: Susan Gardner, here, 2009.
Maureen Dowd, Pulitizer Prize winner. Today. New York Times:
“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
Josh Marshall. Blogger. Last Thursday. Talking Points Memo:
“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
Why do I care about this? Because Dowd is a gossipy version of Tom Friedman, and his column last week about how Dems need to run from left policies or candidates was widely distributed and even quoted to me by progressive friends. And don’t get me started on Frank Bruni.
These Times and other people are not your friends, no matter how much one column seeks to support your view.