Sunday, June 29, 2008

A New Low In Punditry

MoDo in the New York Times today (here)...

It’s hard to fathom why Obama should be mau-maued into paying off the debt that Hillary and Bill accrued attacking and undermining him, while mismanaging the campaign and their nearly quarter-billion-dollar war chest so horribly that one Hillaryland insider told The New Republic that it bordered on fraud.
This Free Dictionary link explains that the verb "mau-mau" (I didn't know it existed either), means "To attack or denounce vociferously, especially so as to intimidate."

So apparently Dowd is telling us that the Clintons threatened Obama into helping Hillary to dig out of her financial hole?

Proof? Anywhere in sight? Hello??

Or does the individual who is perhaps the most vacuous of the Times' celebrated pundits mean to conjure images of a Kenyan uprising against the British in the 1950s, reminding us once more of Obama's race (with The Free Dictionary also describing mau-mau as "the sound of the voracious gobbling of a hyena")?

And as I pondered all of this sick absurdity, I also read a letter by fellow columnist Gail Collins defending Dowd and, by extension, criticizing Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt for his "assault" on Collins' "sister" columnist...

The sharpness of her wit makes her commentary particularly painful to those who are on the receiving end. That’s also why so many readers love her and exactly what The New York Times pays her to do.
Oh yes, I just love to endure Dowd's relentless, almost mechanical rehashing of every real or imagined political banality that she happily foists on us twice a week (how many more ways can she spin the "his Venus, her Mars" narrative?), leaving it to the reader to dig for any nugget of reasonable, coherent thought that may exist amidst all of her tripe. How that makes my day.

And I am ever so grateful to Collins for reminding my of that (who no doubt was mau-maued by Dowd into writing a letter in her defense).

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