Dowd Report

Alliteration Alert At The Airport

2012-01-29T04:04:00.000-08:00

Tension on the Tarmac
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 28, 2012

Our Miss Maureen loves her some alliteration, starting right from the titillating title. Some days she tries to fit in as many fanciful phrases as she can. She starts by waxing nostalgic for the days when Clintons were campaigning.

But No Drama Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.

Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.

But it's not until the middle of the missive that she really builds up a head of steam. Check out these cheeky chestnuts:

But Hillary did not like it, feeling she was being held in place and patronized, even “manhandled,” as her aide put it to a reporter.

Having rehashed a Hillary Clinton anecdote, Dowd turns to the newer tempestuous contretemps at an airport, the one with Arizona governor Jan Brewer.

The toxic dominatrix of illegal immigration, the woman who turned every Latino in her state into a suspect, was flustered and gesticulating at the president as he put his hand on her arm to chill her out.

Culminating in this colorful collage:

After his brouhaha with Brewer, dubbed “the dust-up in the desert,” he became a hero to the Hispanics he had gone West to court. They loved seeing their Cruella de Vil get dressed down.

Try saying any of those phrases three times fast. But it doesn't end there. The going is just getting good.

Everything is breaking Barry’s way, as Mitt and Newt rip into each other in vicious ads and debates like alligators going after house pets.

Romney was tutored in Florida by Brett O’Donnell, a new debate coach. Too bad he can’t find a conviction coach.

O’Donnell manned up Mittens and taught him how to pummel Newt in “moments of strength,” as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls them.

The alliterative lilt is perhaps the most underestimated of Dowd's rhetorical reaches, but when she strikes her stride, nobody can hold a candle to her cadence.

Mitt's Favorite Things

2012-01-14T13:53:00.000-08:00

Mitt’s Big Love
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 14, 2012

Recently an internet mash-up featured clips of Mitt Romney cut into Jule Andrews singing "A Few Of My Favorite Things" from A Sound Of Music:

Well, it seems there is a reason for doing so. As Maureen Dowd reports:

Romney recoiled from ’60s counterculture and was “proudly square” as he went from seeing “The Sound of Music” with [future wife] Ann to avoiding the Grateful Dead at college, Kranish and Helman report.

And while he isn't on the stump telling tales of his youthful varmint hunting, it's clear the one thing he loves more than firing guns is firing people.

A Prayer For Kevin

2011-12-28T06:32:00.000-08:00

Once a year, Maureen Dowd turns her column over to her very conservative brother, Kevin. This year the story had a touching preamble:

After a random blood test last summer, my brother learned that he had a 20.3 centimeter malignant tumor in his kidney, struggling to burst out like the creature in “Alien.” With the guidance of the saintly Dr. Jerry Groopman, and the brilliance of the Sloan-Kettering surgical team — the exuberantly blunt Paul Russo, the mystically serene Manjit Bains and the calmly proficient Gerald Soff — Kevin survived to enjoy Christmas with his wife, Ellen, his three sons and his 15 crèches.

I hope he enjoys many more.

Raising Cain

2011-11-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

Cain Not Able
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 1, 2011

Maureen Dowd is always at her best when there is a whiff of sexual scandal in the air. It's what won her her Pulitzer after all. So the Herman Cain scandal is right up her alley. And this affair has her pining for prim and proper alliterative Austen novels.

It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.

Which allows her to put her twist on one of the most famous opening lines in the English language (a gimmick she used on another politician back in 2008):

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.

And she elaborates the analogy further by placing the actors with the characters:

The Herminator was just a raffish passing fancy, like Mr. Wickham, a place for Republicans to store their affections while they try to overcome their aversion to Mitt Romney’s Mr. Darcy.

The eighteenth century landed gentry lived by a strict moral code and Dowd gives us an update useful in the 21st:

It is never right for any boss, especially the president of the United States, to mess with an intern, even if she’s the aggressor.

But she says that this particular tale is not a bodice-ripping potboiler, it is something far more pedestrian.

It is the most hackneyed story in Washington — another powerful man who crossed the line and then, when caught, tried to blame the women.

And our Maureen has too much sense and sensibility to let anyone get away with that.

Gargoyles In The House

2011-07-30T18:15:00.001-07:00

Tempest in a Tea Party
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 30, 2011

Maureen Dowd invokes the name of a 1990's animated series featuring long dormant creatures who are awakened, but cannot be controlled, by an evil mastermind hell-bent on world domination.

Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes.

Let's hope Boehner can control these gargoyles better than Xanatos was ever able to.

Pardon Her French

2011-02-14T07:40:00.000-08:00

Simply the Worst
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 12, 2011

While the rest of world was fixating on the revolution in Egypt and its ramifications, Maureen Dowd was amortizing her purchase of Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs. About the unrepentant former Defense Secretary, she had this to say:

As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award.

Running that French phrase through the astoundingly incompetent Babelfish translator gets the English abomination of "I regret nothing not." Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun takes issue with her lack of translation talent saying:

If Maureen Dowd is going to use French in her column on Rumsfeld, you would think she could consult with somebody who knows the language, or at least Google the Edith Piaf song.

To which he links to the famous Edith Piaf song.

This is not the first time Dowd has alluded to the French chanteuse's oeuvre. Back in 2008, she referenced "les imbeciles de regime cowboy" (pidgen French for 'idiot cowboy administration') when she said:

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Note that the phrase is used slightly differently then. Suitably pedantically, The Iconoclast at the New English Review diagrams the error:

It was the first month, or possibly first week, of first-year Freshman French. For her howler today -- "Je Ne Regret Rien Pas" -- was wrong in not one but several different ways. It was wrong as to the spelling of the verb, and even more embarrassingly wrong with the pleonasm of the negation: no "pas" is necesary, and the verb regretter requires a first-person singular "regrette" -- so that if she were writing correct French, the line attributed to the man she condescedingly calls "Rummy" would read "Je ne regrette rien."

Somewhere there is a French teacher at Catholic University hanging her head in shame while Edith Piaf spins in her grave.

Rummy And Poppy

2011-02-05T18:18:00.000-08:00

Blame, Not Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 5, 2011

Parsing the psychodrama of the Bush Dynasty is a long-lasting obsession of Maureen Dowd and a new memoir by Donald Rumsfeld adds new fuel to the fire. Maureen has a soft spot for George I with nothing but disdain for the his more hot-headed son.

As she sees it, Rumsfeld has the obverse opinion. Rummy is envious and disdainful of George H. W.:

Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. {snip} No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for.

Meanwhile, W. hero-worships the rough-hewn Rumsfeld, giving him a Rude Name® and all:

The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest. {snip} W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness.

And this is where Rumsfeld forms a hinge in Dowd's working thesis that the W.'s actions are all predicated on resolving his deep-seated daddy issues.

Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.

Rumsfeld shares one other attribute with the president who saw an invasion of Iraq as a way to right perceived weaknesses.

The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt.

If only he and the last president he served had been more right rather than so certain.

Welcome Back

2011-02-05T03:52:00.000-08:00

It seems we at Dowd Central weren't the only ones that missed Ms. Dowd.

Where ever you were, partying with Charlie Sheen, skiing with Marc Mezvinsky, or just enjoying some well earned rest, we are just glad you are back.

Easy For You To Say

2011-02-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Bye Bye, Mubarak
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 1, 2011

Which of these three tongue twisters from today's column would be hardest to say three times fast?

The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies...

...stanch the uncontrolled surge...

...the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers.

And just to prove that we have the real deal back after a month long absence from the pundit page of the Gray Lady, Maureen throws in a patented Dowdversion®:

Cleopatra’s Egypt was modern in ancient times and Mubarak’s was ancient in modern times.

Maureen, you maniacal maven, we missed you.

Marilyn Monroe, Bookworm

2010-10-20T03:28:00.000-07:00

Making Ignorance Chic
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 19, 2010

Maureen admires a certain dumb blonde:

The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.

She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems.

What’s more, she read some of them, from Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400 books.

A list of those books as well as lots more pictures of Marilyn Monroe reading, or pretending to read, can be found at the Booktryst blog.

Included in the list are:

297) American Rights: The Constitution In Action, by Walter Gellhorn

This is a book I doubt Christine O' Donnell is familiar with. Perhaps the current crop of political airheads, blonde or otherwise, can learn a few things.

Mean Girls

2010-10-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Playing All the Angles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 16, 2010

We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama.

Really nothing more to say.

Deja Vu Diplomacy

2010-03-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

In reading Maureen Dowd's dispatch today from Saudi Arabia, I had the strongest sense of deja vu as the image of a NYT columnist discussing peace initiatives sent my mind reeling back to 2002 when the Mustache of Understanding was making the circuit of oil shieks.

Thomas Friedman	Maureen Dowd
An Intriguing Signal From the Saudi Crown Prince Published: February 17, 2002	Arabia: Inshallah, Obama Published: March 6, 2010
I took the opportunity of a dinner with Saudi Arabia's crown prince, and de facto ruler, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, to try out the idea of this Arab League proposal.	“[Obama] said all the right words in his speech,” said Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister. “But the implementation took traditional roads.”
So I asked, What if Mr. Sharon and the Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire before the Arab summit? "Let me say to you that the speech is written, and it is still in my drawer," the crown prince said.	Actually, the president didn’t say all the right words in his speech. He created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs.
As for the "axis of evil" and reports of a possible U.S. military strike against Iraq, the Saudi leader said: "Any attack on Iraq or Iran should not be contemplated at all because it would not serve the interests of America, the region or the world, as there is no clear evidence of a present danger. Iraq is contemplating the return of the inspectors, and the U.S. should pursue this because inspectors can determine if Iraq is complying with the U.N. resolutions."	If anyone deserves to be paranoid, of course, it’s Israel. But Israel can’t be paranoid because paranoia is the mistaken perception that people are out to get you. Asked about the possibility that Israel could attack Iran with its new drones, Prince Saud said dryly: “Talk about changing lifestyle. I think this would change lifestyles at once, forcibly.”

Next week: Maureen Dowd shares the wisdom obtained on her taxi ride back to the airport.

Ford and Food

2010-02-07T03:21:00.000-08:00

A Scrubbed Toe in the Race
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 6, 2010

While not one of her more common extended metaphors, sometimes Maureen Dowd gets the munchies. She starts today's nugget with some scene setting.

Between bites of an egg-white garden omelet at a bistro in his Union Square neighborhood, Harold Ford Jr. defended himself on pedicures and flip-flops.

She interviews him and he protests just a little too much that he is just a common Joe despite getting limosened to Morning Joe.

"It’s so unfair how it’s been characterized. I eat at places like the Coffee Shop more than I eat uptown.”

We had stopped in the Coffee Shop before deciding that, despite its greasy-spoon name, it was a hub of hip, too noisy for an interview.

Just to fact check the hipster claim here is the New York Magazine capsule review of the diner doppleganger:

Even though it carries a high risk of poor service and unpleasant encounters with attitudinal (but often pretty) people, The Coffee Shop sometimes seems unavoidable. When it comes to the Union Square area, this loungey pseudo-diner’s varied, inexpensive menu and sidewalk seating make it one of the best casual options in the neighborhood. There’s hardly ever a seat at the bar, which serves up surprisingly good drinks (including milkshakes and mojitos); and there’s usually a wait for a table at peak times, so plan to hang out on the corner of 16th and Union Square for a bit if you go.

Sounds like the kinda place a pretty boy Senatorial aspirant would hang out. As for cheap, perhaps it is by Manhattan standards but the Barbequed Chicken Sandwich with a low fat cilantro lime mayonnaise goes for $10.95.

And while she uses the word 'slick' elsewhere to describe Ford, Maureen comes up with a more culinary comparison.

But he has a buttery way that suits brash New York. He charms everyone, from waiters who drop cutlery to customers who drop into his conversation.

And she finishes with a cryptically ambiguous vignette.

The guy at the next table was staring at Ford’s plate. “The garden omelet,” Ford said, with a grin.

Real men don't eat quiche but aspiring senators that get mani-pedis can definitely scramble some eggs.

Betwixt and Between

2010-01-30T20:05:00.000-08:00

Camus Fired Up
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 30, 2010

One of Albert Camus's works is translated into English as either Betwixt and Between or The Wrong Side and the Right Side. The latter would seen to be appropriate for the recent upbraiding President Obama gave congressional Republicans.

In today's post-mortem of Barack's foray into Baltimore (where yours truly spent a half hour stuck in traffic as the motorcade went by) Maureen Dowd gives us a double dose of Alliteration Alerts™:

He may lapse back into his Camus coma at any moment. But on Friday he dropped the diffident debutante act and offered, as he did at the State of the Union, some welcome gumption.

And if that second phrase sounds familiar, it's because she originated the phrase in May of 2008:

Obama is acting the diffident debutante, pretending not to care that he was given a raspberry by a state he will need in the fall.

And while it is a stretch to call it true alliteration, we do get a plethora of p's in this passage:

When Peter Roskam of Illinois complained that they’d been “stiff-armed” by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the president promised to bring the Republican and Democratic House leadership together for more play dates.

Say "promised Presidential play dates" three times fast.

And Maureen liked the show so much, she suggested making it a regular series.

Obama’s advisers must wish they could do this every week for the cameras.

Perhaps NBC can give them a slot at 10 p.m. I understand they have some dead air to fill.

The New One

2010-01-27T04:26:00.001-08:00

Bringing Sexy Back
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 26, 2010

The One	The New One

gloomy populism	sunny populism
Ivy League cool	Cosmo hot
a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats	an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans
48-year-old, 6-foot-1, organic arugula	50-year-old, 6-foot-2, double waffle with bacon
plastic and hidden	warm and accessibly all-American
6-foot-5 body man Reggie Love	“American Idol”-star daughter, Ayla

Happy Birthday!

2010-01-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

Maureen is 58 years young today. Thanks to NPR for reminding me.

Maureen Versus The Church

2009-11-23T09:15:00.000-08:00

Nearly a month ago, Maureen Dowd took Pope Benedict and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy to task for her perception of the treatment of nuns as well as women in general. And she did it in her inimitable style. Here is but one example:

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Needless to say, this did not sit well with Church leaders. Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, took issue with a great deal of recent bad press coverage, including Dowd's piece, and submitted it as an over-the-transom Op/Ed piece. When the Times rejected it, he published an expanded version of the screed on his blog (how very high tech of them). While it takes shots at a lot of targets, here is the part directed against Dowd personally:

Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription — along with every other German teenage boy — into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

Yikes. To call Maureen Dowd, a product of parochial schools and Catholic University in her native DC, an "anti-Catholic...nativist" is nothing short of reprehensible slander. This tone was captured on many Catholic blogs including this bit from NRO's Kathryn Jeal Lopez:

The Benedict whom Maureen Dowd scorns speaks a different language than the New York Times typically does. But it’s a liberating one — much more liberating than the tired and angry gender politics that offers little hope to the anxious men and women of our time.

About the only person to come to Dowd's defense was Kelly Fincham of Irish Central:

Dowd's crime? She had the temerity to question why women religious — nuns — are still treated as second-class citizens by the Church. She could have widened the discussion to ask why the Church treats all women as second-class citizens, but she confined it to nuns, saying the Vatican was trying to herd this elderly population back into their "old-fashioned habits and convents."

She pointed out how nuns, for the most part, were ministering to the poor and vulnerable, while a plague of pedophilia ran unchecked through the Church.
{snip}
Dolan calls Dowd's column "anti-Catholic," but what on earth is anti-Catholic about asking the same questions that women have been raising in the Catholic Church for generations — if not centuries?

Why are women second-class citizens in the Church? Why can't we become priests? Why can't priests be married?

And how can the Archbishop of New York accuse Maureen Dowd of damaging the Church, when the greatest damage ever inflicted on the Church has been done from within — by its own male priests?

The drumbeat reached Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor (read ombudsman) of the New York Times who has been very critical of Dowd in the past. His verdict is that she was well in the realm of valid punditry.

Dowd said the issues she raised went to what she sees as the pope’s extreme conservatism and his judgment. “Should I blandly express outrage at the church continuing to treat women as second-class citizens?” she asked. Bland is not what Dowd does. I thought she was well within a columnist’s bounds.

Appealing further up the chain, Hoyt in an online item gets Andrew Rosentahl to explain what an "opinion" piece is allowed to do.

While columnists must adhere to The Times’s high standards of factual accuracy, they are allowed great latitude in characterizing events, people or issues in a way that expresses an opinion. They are free, for example, to say that they believe that the Catholic Church’s hierarchy treats nuns unfairly, even if the members of that hierarchy deny it. They are not even required to include that denial in their columns. Columns are not required, or intended, to be fair and dispassionate accounts of events. They are by nature one-sided. Columnists may find it useful to give the opposing views on any position they take, or they may not, and it’s entirely up to them.

A columnist can be tough, acerbic, playful, joyful, angry, chagrined, outraged or anything else — within the general bounds of decency that are embodied in the values of The Times.

Maureen is definitely most of those. Since this controversy is still raging a month after the original item, it is clear that she rattled some cages. And perhaps they need to read some of those Bible verses about motes in eyes or turning the other cheek, or perhaps most of all, going and sinning no more.

Oh Really?

2009-11-11T02:09:00.001-08:00

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 11, 2009

Maureen Dowd picks up the pitchfork and goes after greedy bankers once again.

“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.

“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”

Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”

And she goes goes and takes the CEO of Goldman Sachs (or Goldmine Sachs as she calls it later) to task on ethical and spiritual grounds.

Whether [Lloyd Blankfein] knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.

Which also gives us the Crossword Clue Of The Week®. According to Wikipedia,concupiscence is

selfish human desire for an object, person, or experience.

This is strong theological concept she uses perhaps to rebut the many Catholic critics of her recent column about the Church's treatment of nuns.

And just to prove she paid her dues in CCD, she makes one last allusion to a Bible story.

And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

She thinks that maybe it is time to make some changes among the moneychangers.

Seeing Red

2009-11-08T06:16:00.000-08:00

Ballet’s Mean Streets
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 7, 2009

It's been a long time since we had a really good Movies With Maureen® night at the cinema. But today, Ms Dowd has made up for lost time.

Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.

One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.

But that is the first of many movie allusions yet to come. She warms up with veiled references to Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick, fitting in truly terrible pun in the process.

There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting.

She invokes Martin Scorsese, the source of her titular reference, to bolster her high opinion of The Red Shoes.

Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation.

Maureen then moves onto a colorfully named flick featuring a fellow ginger.

In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange.

And since she got an interview with Scorsese for this column, she carries the color motif into his movies.

It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t).

So if your Netflix queue needs refreshing, you could do worse than to take a few tips from the cinephile of the Op/Ed page. Just make sure the hue on your television can capture all that red.

Maureen Playing Games

2009-10-30T03:53:00.000-07:00

Oval Man Cave
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 27, 2009

Since Maureen doesn't golf, she has this challenge:

Since the president is finally willing to let women in on the games, I offered up my own challenge: Scrabble. I’m curious about what X and Z words the smarty-pants Y chief executive can come up with.

There might even be $10 in it for you, Mr. President.

Never has an invitation for a board game looked sexier. I'm in.

Ratting on Ratzi

2009-10-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Nuns’ Story
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 24, 2009

There is no love lost between lifetime Catholic Maureen Dowd and the current Vicar of Christ in Rome.

In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Her particular beef is with the treatment of nuns who dare question the increasingly reactionary orthodoxy of The Church.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

She contrasts this Inquisition (and nobody ever expects the Spanish variety) with the rather light wrist-slapping sexually straying male clergy endure.

The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)

She accurately assesses the recent overtures to ultra-conservative breakaway Anglicans as appeals to anti-feminism and homophobia.

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

In the age-old doctrinal debates over the celibacy of the priesthood and the ordination of women, Dowd clearly sees what the current Church position is.

Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.

And that, ladies, is a dealbreaker.

Dowd Defends Dave

2009-10-07T21:22:00.000-07:00

In her column today, Maureen Dowd defends workplace hanky panky:

Office romances abound in life and art (“The Office” has its interoffice wedding this week), and sometimes young staffers are attracted to the boss, and vice versa.

Anybody shocked? I didn't think so. 'Nuff said.

Dowd Call Kettle Brown

2009-10-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd has decided enter the national writer sweepstakes to see who can eviscerate the latest Dan Brown thriller the worst. Her thesis is that rather than being a mind-blowing expose, The Lost Symbol pulls punches and doesn't go far enough.

His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate — as in Illuminati! — how the ultimate elite private boys’ club has conspired to shape the nation’s capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron. If the Masons are more intimidating than the Vatican, if Brown has now become part of their semiotic smoke screen, then all I can say is, God help us all.

Maureen does catalog the more salient features of Dan Brown's writing style, such as it is.

Over-reliance on italics.

Or as Brown, who is more addicted to italics than that other breathless Brown, Cosmo Girl Helen Gurley, might put it: What the hell?

Crappy romantic subplots.

Emotions are the one thing Dan Brown can’t seem to decipher. His sex scenes are encrypted. Even though Katherine seems like Langdon’s soul mate — she even knows how to weigh souls — their most torrid sex scenes consist of Robert winking at her or flashing her a lopsided grin.

Over-written metaphors

His metaphors and similes thud onto the page. Inoue Sato, an intelligence official investigating a disembodied hand bearing a Masonic ring and iconic tattoos that shows up in the Capitol Rotunda, “cruised the deep waters of the C.I.A. like a leviathan who surfaced only to devour its prey.” Insights don’t simply come to characters: “Then, like an oncoming truck, it hit her,” or “The revelation crashed over Langdon like a wave.” And just when our hero thinks it’s safe to go back in the water, another bad metaphor washes over him: “His head ached now, a roiling torrent of interconnected thoughts.”

Adjectivitis.

The author has gotten rich and famous without attaining a speck of subtlety. A character never just stumbles into blackness. It must be inky blackness. A character never just listens in shock. He listens in utter shock.

Anti-climactic non-endings.

In the end, as with “The Da Vinci Code,” there’s no payoff. Brown should stop worrying about unfinished pyramids and worry about unfinished novels.

More curious is how Maureen Dowd drew the short straw on reviewing this review-proof turd. My guess is that no self-respecting critic would touch it. Besides, who knows more about bad overwrought writing than the style mistress of the Op/Ed page.

Safire On Lingerie

2009-09-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

On Safire
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 29, 2009

In the list of conversations you really didn't need to be privy to, add the mental image of Maureen Dowd discussing ladies' undergarments with the late William Safire:

“There’s a word here [in the Starr Report] I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”
I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.
Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”
He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”

Maureen also waxes nostalgic over the good times she had with the former Agnew speech writer. She admired his way with words, even the four-letter kind.

Married to the gorgeous English rose Helene, he was a man who loved women; his novels, even the one about the founding fathers, were full of zesty sex scenes.

And if those two quotes weren't enough to make you reach for the brain bleach, try not to picture Baba Wawa in a negligee after reading this:

He told me the story of how when Barbara Walters worked for him at the famous New York P.R. company of Tex McCrary, back in the “Mad Men” era, he wanted to loosen up Barbara, who was very serious. So one Christmas he gave her a sheer black shorty nightgown with matching panties.

And now we know where she gets her affinity for alliteration and bad puns as she adds just one more TMI moment about the toilet arrangements on Murderers' Row.

When I became his “colleague in columny,” as he called me, we shared a bathroom, and I teased him for being the one who kept hair spray there.

William Safire was a wit and wordsmith who will be missed. Especially by Maureen who has done as much to abuse the English language as he did to illuminate it.

Dowd And Bruni On Food

2009-09-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

If you ever wanted to listen to a former New York Times food critic discuss the ins and outs of the restaurant business, tonight is your night. The talk is being moderated by Maureen Dowd at 7 pm at Politics And Prose in DC.