Winning the Lottery

I find myself flabbergasted by Maureen Dowd's column today. I choose to view this column like a lottery. Even if the odds are a million to one, if you buy a million tickets, chances are you'll win once. That describes Maureen Dowd's relationship with sensible conclusions. Sooner or later, she just stumbles upon them by accident.

OF TOP HATS, TOP KILLS AND BOTTOM FEEDERS by Maureen Dowd

It’s unnerving, disorienting. 

Why do crappy writers insist on starting columns with bullshit sentences like this? No, this does not draw me deeper into the article saying “OMG!!! WHAT IS UNNERVING AND DISORIENTING?!?! AND WHY DID SHE USE A COMMA INSTEAD OF A CONJUNCTION?!?!” The ambiguity of the pronoun doesn’t make me feel like I need to know what she’s talking about. The evasion of grammatical conventions does not make me think that her opinion must be important; it just makes me think she’s a crappy writer.

A particularly noxious blend of helplessness, fear and fury that washes over you when you 

Don’t try to impose universality by using the second person, you hack. (And yes, I am allowed to use the second person.)

realize the country has again been dragged into a costly and scary maelstrom revolving around acronyms you’ve never heard of. 

This is another absolutely awful sentence. Not only does it use the passive voice, but…wait a minute…WHAT?!?!

This is Maureen Dowd.

As in, “Maureen Dowd: New York Times’ resident water-carrier for the DNC.” (That’s how her business cards read at least.) She is a beacon of the modern feminist movement and a progressive of the first order. This woman has cultivated an archetypal image of herself as a member of the intellectual elite of the left—a real-life Carrie Bradshaw! (I died a little bit inside by making that reference.)

She names four acronyms over the course of the column, which hardly seems as overwhelming as she implies: CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligations), CDS (Credit Default Swaps), MMS (the Minerals Management Service), and SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission).

CDO and CDS are financial instruments, which is to be expected. Incidentally, they both refer to roughly the same thing with differing degrees of specificity, but Dowd isn’t worried about the details. The particularly odd part is that she lists both the MMS and SEC, federal regulatory agencies. Dowd was initiated into the liberal elite by swearing on a copy of John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that she would never, ever, under any circumstances fail to promote the need for expanded regulation. She was forced to kneel at the altar of FDR and proclaim that massive Alphabet Soup spending initiatives were the main jumpstart to the troubled economy that pulled the nation out from the depths of the Great Depression.

And yet, here Dowd is, sounding like a Tea Partier, evoking the question of why we have regulators at all when they have proven to be massively incompetent?