Playing All the Angles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 16, 2010
As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery.
Don’t writers know how to start a column anymore? The past progressive tense grates.
There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona,
Sentence composition really isn’t her thing.
speaking at the dedication of
...alternately, “dedicating”
a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River.
We're one sentence in, and I already wonder if she has editors. Suggested rewrite: “Towering 890 feet of the Colorado River, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer dedicated a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada.”
As the politicians
Just one politician, from the information provided until this point. I’m beginning to lose faith in this story’s dedication to historical fact.
droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown,
Even the inanities in this column are suspect. Someone as pasty as Maureen Dowd—and she is pasty indeed—understands that the reason for noting northern European heritage in the context of sun exposure is the inability to properly tan. Far from turning a “toasty brown,” Dowd and whiteys (like me) go from pale to “lobster red” without any noticeable intermediary. But then she’d have such a hard time making a skin tone joke about Native Americans.
I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest
As the governor and, by extension, the leading law enforcement officer in the state of Arizona, believe me, she’s got people to handle small fry like you, Maureen.
and I would have to run for my life across the desert.
Yes, because running yourself to exhaustion in the Arizona desert without water or supplies is far preferable to simply showing a drivers license.
She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.
Those of us who aren’t raving lunatics refer to Governor Brewer’s decisions as “enforcement of the law.” Let’s also not forget that this law passed through the Arizona legislature and enjoys overwhelming support in the state.
We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls,
I’ll give you 2:1 odds Maureen Dowd refers to her high school torment and finding solace in a copy of The Bell Jar tucked under her arm.
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.
Minus a Sylvia Plath reference, I’m still going to count that as a win for me. (Oh, and Maureen Dowd was pregnant. Pass it on.)
These women — Jan,
[Brewer, AZ Governor]
Meg,
[Whitman, CA Senate candidate, former eBay CEO]
Carly,
[Fiorina, CA Gubernatorial candidate, former Hewlett Packard CEO]
Sharron,
[Angle, NV Senate candidate]
Linda,
[McMahon, CT Senate candidate]
Michele,
[Bachman, MN Congresswoman, overall amazing person]
Queen Bee Sarah
Rush Limbaugh has been referring to Nancy Pelosi as a “Queen Bee” for no less than four years. Even Jayson Blair wasn’t this obvious in his plagiarism. Anyways, she’s referring to Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska (in case you watch VH1 or something equally horrifying).
and sweet wannabe Christine —
[O’Donnell, DE Senate candidate]
have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama.
Whether they’re mistreating the help
I’m fairly positive that this is a reference to Meg Whitman, who paid housekeeper Nicky Diaz Santillan $23/hr (Which, if you do out the math, is just less than what I make, for completely unskilled labor).
or belittling the president’s manhood,
To be fair, he does a bang-up job on that one all by himself.
making snide comments about a rival’s hair
Is one of these women running against John Edwards? Wait a minute! This column is four months old! http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/06/carly_fiorina_doesnt_get_a_pas.html
or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show,
I’d agree that it was an irrelevant cheap-shot, except that this is in reference to Chris Coons, who spent $53,000 of taxpayer money on a men’s fashion show. In a campaign almost exclusively about government excess, I would argue that O’Donnell would be doing the citizens of Delaware a disservice by NOT pointing this out publicly. It is precisely the absurd, lavish expenditures liberal Democrats specialize in.
the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite
Are their opponents not contemptable?
and Cool with Cold.
All of these women, with the possible exception of Fiorina, are extremely personable and approachable. The kicker for Dowd is that most (Palin, Bachman, O’Donnell, and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, foremost among others Dowd ignores) are flat-out hot.
They are the ideal nihilistic
Just throwing out insults isn’t exactly the scathing wit we ought to expect out of the newspaper of record. Dowe doesn’t know or care about what the words she’s using mean. Republican women are some of the most principled, belief-driven people out there. They’re the focus of this column exclusively because they do stand for a belief structure: conservatism.
Cheerleaders
Is this sexist, or does Dowd get a pass because she’s in the in-crowd with the feminist establishment? Wait a minute…this is starting to sound like high school, alright.
for an angry electorate.
Seated next to Brewer at the bridge dedication was Harry Reid, the slight,
Read: gangly, gaunt, withered.
mild-mannered,
Read: gutless, unassertive, beta male.
70-year-old Senate majority leader who has wandered into the surprise fight of his career — a race where the fur is flying.
All I can think of are really inappropriate jokes about Nevada prostitutes. I’ll refrain.
“Man up, Harry Reid,” Sharron Angle taunted him
They don’t give 15 yard penalties in Senatorial campaigns, Maureen.
at their Las Vegas debate here Thursday night.
That’s not an idle insult, coming from a woman who campaigns at times with a .44 Magnum revolver
How does challenging a man’s sexuality relate to gun ownership? Unless Dowd is making some very tenuous gun-as-phallus references, this one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
in her 1989 GMC pickup.
This one does make sense. The bitter clingers love guns, bibles, and pickup trucks no less than three presidential administrations old.
With casino red suit and lipstick, Angle played the Red Queen of the Mad Hatter tea party, denouncing career politicians and ordering “Off with your head!” and “Down with government benefits!”
What is it with liberals and flat-out making up examples of violent conservative rhetoric?
Even sober and smiling beneath her girlish bangs, the 61-year-old Angle had the slightly threatening air of the inebriated lady in a country club bar, tossing off outrageous statements and daring anyone to call her on them.
Only Maureen Dowd would find a drunken braggadocio in a country club threatening.
The debate between the former boxer
Remember the High School wrestling team? Remember the pipsqueak that weighed 86lbs and couldn’t out-wrestle a squirrel, but the team kept him along in hopes that the other team didn’t have someone that small and they could pick up a cheap win by forfeit? That was Harry Reid, except in amateur boxing.
and the former competitive weight lifter,
Is this supposed to be emasculating for Reid or effeminizing for Angle?
the soft-spoken Mormon and the outspoken Christian,
Note for Maureen Dowd: by recasting the same thing you just said in a different light, you don’t present a multitude of angles succinctly, as you are clearly hoping. Rather, you just show that you can’t make a good editing decision and are grasping at straws.
was a source of fascination because the rivals perfectly represent the two caricatures of the midterms: The Washington incumbent and master of back-room deals who’s been around forever and lost touch with people
Is this supposed to be an endorsement?
versus the wacky new-breed Tea Party challenger who’s hiding from and hating on the press, spouting a lot of weird stuff and vowing to do what Barack Obama didn’t: Shake up Washington.
Well, to be fair, Obama did shake up Washington, if only by transposing Chicago on top of it.
The senator began the debate with a gentle reminiscence about his mother, who took in wash from the brothels in scruffy Searchlight, Nev.
Angle could have told the poignant story of her German immigrant great-grandmother who died trying to save laundry hanging on the clothesline in a South Dakota prairie fire, which Angle wrote about in her self-published book, “Prairie Fire.” But instead the former teacher and assemblywoman began hurling cafeteria insults. “I live in a middle-class neighborhood in Reno, Nevada,” she said. “Senator Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C.”
It’s a valid criticism; Reid whiffed when asked to explain how a career politician spend a few decades in Washington as a public servant and became vastly wealthy.
Reid did not man up enough to mock Angle’s nutty assertion that Shariah law exists in Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex. (a town that hasn’t existed since 1975). But he did rebut Angle’s inane contention that health insurers should not have to cover anything,
Health insurers, like all insurers (and, indeed, all companies), best serve the public when they operate in the free market. If insurers don’t cover anything, they won’t retain enough customers to survive; if they cover too much, their costs will outpace the market price for coverage. Angle’s assertion that health insurers should not have to cover anything is an assertion that the market—and by extension, consumers—should have the right to determine the range of products covered through basic market pricing mechanisms.
talking about how important it was to be covered on mammograms
Most men would disagree with the importance of mammograms in their health coverage.
and colonoscopies.
Yes, I don’t think I’ll ever forget Harry Reid taking us all through a virtual tour of the rectum.
“If you do colonoscopies,” he said, “colon cancer does not come ’cause you snip off the things they find when they go up and — no more.”
There it is. If that doesn’t pucker you up, I don’t know what will.
“Well,” Angle replied tartly, “pink ribbons are not going to make people have a better insurance plan.”
I agree with Angle. I’m very well of breast cancer. I’m very much against it. Now leave the NFL alone.
Angle has been pressing the case, underwritten by Karl Rove’s operation and other conservative groups that have made the majority leader their No. 1 target, that Reid must be punished for being in a socialist triumvirate with Nancy Pelosi and President Obama.
If we had a ballot to punish Pelosi and Obama, we would. (Pelosi is in such a gerrymandered district that it would take a scandal involving literal human trafficking victims being caged in Pelosi’s congressional offices to unseat her.)
In the debate, she went for the jugular, asking him how he became “one of the richest men in the Senate” after coming from Searchlight “with very little.”
Which Reid didn’t really answer.
Reid, who cloaks his ambition and brass knuckles under a mousy facade, looked as if she had slapped him. He called her “my friend,” but clearly did not think of her as his “pet,” as he unfortunately dubbed Chris Coons, the Delaware opponent of the bewitching Christine O’Donnell.
Unfortunately? Try hiariously.
He said that was “really kind of a low blow,” adding that he had been a successful lawyer before becoming a pol,
Which is about as plausible as Reid being a real honest-to-goodness boxer. The man spent all but about 2 years of his adult life as a professional politician.
and “did a very good job in investing.”
Read: “I can get rich off the stock market, but the idea of putting a fraction of social security retirement accounts there is dangerous, risky, and extreme.”
After the debate was over, Angle scurried away and so did I — in a different direction. I was feeling jittery again.
Are you really going to bookend this crapfest with the past progressive? This is just lazy.
If she saw me, she might take away my health insurance and spray-paint my locker.
This sort of fear of self-reliance must be exhausting, much like reading this article.
I get it when Democratic men get uncomfortable around women. Some men are simply afraid sexual rejection. But Dowd’s channeling of her massive insecurities is a new one to me. Someone get this chick a shrink.
No comments:
Post a Comment