Maureen Dowd has a column up that will surely raise some eyebrows in the sycophant wing of the American press corp. Dowd’s act is getting a little stale as she has reached the point where men no longer find her attractive. Women can carry off the coquette act into middle age, but then it starts to get a bit creepy. She has managed to carry it off into late middle age by mostly staying off TV. That way she can pretend to look like her head shot from twenty years ago. Her brand of snark is part southern matron, part campus feminist and part progressive toady.
It takes real talent to pull off, but not a dazzling IQ, which is why she has always stuck with the cheap shots and barbs. She was also smart to play the right side of the street. By staying in the liberal camp and shooting out, she always had plenty of defenders. Like it or not, America is a liberal country with a ruling class firmly committed to the progressive faith. Dowd built a career polishing the liberal totems and mocking the Left’s enemies, real and imagined.
That’s why her column is interesting. It’s a shot at the Clintons dressed up as a hit piece on David Brock.
I’LL pay for this column.
The Rottweilers will be unleashed.
Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.
Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.
Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.
The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.
Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight.
Squabbling competing factions helped Hillary squander a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in 2008.
As Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick chronicled, the nasty dispute spilled into public and Brock resigned last week from the board of a pro-Clinton “super-PAC” called Priorities USA Action — whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager — accusing the political action committee of “an orchestrated political hit job” and “the kind of dirty trick I’ve witnessed in the right-wing and would not tolerate then.”
He should know.
The fever swamp types have never forgiven the Clintons for the 1990’s. They got some revenge in 2008 when they rallied to Obama and carried him to victory over Hillary. But, there’s a reason the Roman Emperors usually killed off their political enemies. The Clintons will not go away and now their crowd is threatening to take over the party again. The Left would love to find an alternative to Hillary, but Fake Indian is unlikely to run and the other options all have the wrong skin color and genitalia.
Still, the Left can’t embrace Hillary and that’s what this Dowd column shows. The irony here is that she was a Clinton toady for eight years. Dowd has always been nimble about avoiding intra-cult politics that have condemned others to non-personhood. Juan Williams is still in counseling over his excommunication. Maybe she is just losing her touch or maybe the fanatics in the cult are organizing a stop Hillary movement. I don’t know, but I do know stories like this one are not coming from the vast right-wing conspiracy.