Free Republic

Libs think Bain Capital is Mitt Romney’s Achilles heel. In creating more than 100,000 jobs at just 3 of the 77 companies Bain Capital was involved in during his tenure as CEO, Bain had to pull the plug on a factory or two. This means some people are unhappy with Bain Capital and face it, some of them are unionists. Some conservative bloggers worry about those ads even before anyone films them. It is the old Doctor Smith cries of “we are doomed” from Republicans, RINO and Tea Party alike. How can we nominate a candidate who is not perfect?...

Sacred underwear, baptizing holocaust victims, gods of their own planets. When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on...

Whether Bill Clinton is being mischievous or helpful is never entirely clear. But the former president often manages to show the current president just how the game should be played. When Barack Obama was languishing by the phone in July, yearning to hear from John Boehner on the elusive Grand Bargain, the Big Dog advised blowing off the obstructionists in Congress and invoking the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling. Clinton will often forcefully — and feelingly — frame the argument for Obama policies that would help the working class in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as...

WOW, what a relief. The president was strong and House Republicans were conciliatory. There was only one teensy-weensy problem: The president is weak and House Republicans are obstructionist. Congressional Republicans, heeding polls indicating that their all-out assault on President Obama was risky, finally tempered their public comments after the jobs speech on Thursday and stopped acting like big jerks. Obama, heeding plummeting polls and beseeching voices from his despairing base, finally deigned to get tough. In the capital of political tactics, it was just another fine day of faking it. The president’s supporters had a single reaction to the fiery...

ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.” On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game. ... Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as...

The president was in "Afternoon of a Faun" mode, a rural deity playing on his panpipes in the woods. Then, suddenly, he stood very still as he sensed electoral danger. The president looked breezy in khakis and white shirt. But he seemed to tense up as Emily spoke. "So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn't move the bar on us," Emily said. "And it seems, especially in the last year, as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust...

Bill O'Reilly thinks the only thing that can save the Obama presidency is the extremism of the Tea Party followers in Congress. And he's right. Maureen Dowd compares Obama to Jimmy Carter today in her Sunday New York Times column, clearly overwhelmed by the job, bowing to Republican demands at every turn, out of his depth. And she's right. Both leading Irish American columnists essentially agree that the only thing that can save this ineffectual president is the extremism on the right . The two leading Irish American voices (pictured together at an Irish Central/Irish Voice event above) rarely agree...

HE was born this way. Bi. Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary. Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

US officials have blamed Britain for an embarrassing fiasco in which an impostor met Afghan and Nato officials before it was discovered he was not the Taliban leader they thought he was, according to sources familiar with the incident. It was revealed this week that the man – understood to be a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta – was masquerading as Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the second highest-ranking official in the Taliban. He attended three meetings in Kabul. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported today that people familiar with the con – as she described it...

We had a feeling we'd spoken too soon when we labeled James Stokoe's out-of-nowhere release of 100 amazing unpublished pages from Murderbullets one of the few remaining "WTF moments" of 2010. Within a matter of hours, our minds have been blown again by a compellingly absurd new Benjamin Marra comic book called The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd: A Work of Satire and Fiction. As the title and distinctly 1980s alterna-comix-esque artwork suggest, the book is indeed a depiction of the divisive New York Times columnist as a buxom action heroine with a gun in her garter and a...

So true to character, Maureen Dowd weighed in on the election, and got it wrong. See, she believes the vote wasn’t about Obama, it was about gullible voters. She writes that Republicans “were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite “normal,” too Communist, too radical, too Great Society.”

It’s the Year of the Woman, all right. In a bad way. Some of the women running in high-profile races are not my cup of Tea. And some of the male candidates could be part of the Little Rascals’ He-Man, Woman-Haters Club. The misogyny reached its zenith outside a Rand Paul debate in Lexington, Ky., on Monday night when a group of Tea Party toughs roughed up a woman from MoveOn.org because she wouldn’t move on. In a campaign season when many men — and women — are taking harsh stances that could hurt women, a chivalrous voice has at...

Girl Talk October 21, 2010 by Ben Crystal Girl Talk Pity poor Maureen Dowd. How awful her life must be, carrying the psychic scars of indignities suffered during adolescence so far into her twilight years. Try to forgive her embittered rant against the girls who gave her a hard time in high school. Appearing in Sunday’s issue of The New York Times, Ms. Dowd offered us heathens “Playing All the Angles;” a housecat-swipe of her claws at her teenage tormentors. Well, their proxies, at least — Mo never knew girls like Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell in high...

TRENDING: Palin no fan of Maureen ‘O’Dowd’By: CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney October 19th, 2010 09:40 AM ET (CNN) –- Sarah Palin is shrugging off a recent column from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd - or rather Maureen “O’Dowd” - in which Dowd called Palin the “queen bee” of mean girls. "That's so funny, because I don't think I've ever met that gal, Maureen Dowd - O'Dowd - whatever the heck her name is,” said a laughing Palin Monday in an interview with Fox News. I don't think I've ever met her, and I don't think - she probably...

This is rich: Maureen Dowd is aggrieved because Republican women are insufficiently demure. The grand dame of the Gray Lady, whose columns are distinguished not by their blindingly clever policy insights (her research is confined to taxi cabs in Manhattan) but by her own particular brand of nasty armchair psychology (not to mention plagiarism), is beside herself: 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,...

As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery. There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River. As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state. We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up...

It’s not a good narrative arc: The man who walked on water is now ensnared by a crisis under water. One little hole a mile down on the ocean floor, so deep it seems like hell spewing up its sulfurous smoke, has turned the thrilling saga of “The One” into the gurgling horror of “The Abyss.” (Thank goodness James Cameron, the director of “The Abyss,” came to Washington Tuesday to help the administration figure out how to cap the BP well. What’s next? Sending down the Transformers and Megan Fox?) With as much as 34 million gallons of oil inking...

President Spock's behavior is illogical. Once more, he has willfully and inexplicably resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they know he gets it. Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down. The pattern is perverse. The man whose presidency is rooted in his ability to inspire withholds that inspiration when it is most needed. He's spending the holiday weekend in Chicago when he should...

Maureen Dowd and Kathryn Jean Lopez. Washington D.C., Apr 8, 2010 / 08:27 pm (CNA).- Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, responded to Maureen Dowd's latest column attacking the Church, calling the the New York Times writer's piece more sarcastic than substantial and offering her own opinions on the state of the Church amidst the sex abuse scandal.On Tuesday in the New York Times, Dowd, who calls herself “a Catholic woman who makes a living being adversarial,” hurled numerous complaints against the Catholic Church, criticizing how she feels women are treated. Dowd first targeted celibacy, calling it...

I was tempted to turn my abaya into a black masquerade cloak and sneak into Mecca, just hop over the Tropic of Cancer to the Red Sea and crash the ultimate heaven’s gate. Sir Richard Burton, the 19th-century British adventurer, translator of “The Arabian Nights” and the “Kama Sutra” and self-described “amateur barbarian,” was an illicit pilgrim to the sacred black granite cube. He wore Arab garb and infiltrated the holiest place in Islam, the Kaaba, the “center of the Earth,” as he called it, in the Saudi city where the Prophet Muhammad was born. But in the end, it...

Maureen "I need to get laid so bad I'm shaking" Dowd tried to be her typical leftwinger snark, and she dreamed how a conversation between President Obama and former Vice President Cheney would have gone. She wasn't anywhere as snarky as Keith Olberman, and thus she fails at the lowest level. Further, she was (as usual) completely off in her facts and perceptions. I re-did Vice President Cheney's responses to be more accurate. If Maureen doesn't like it, too bad. If it gets me a Worst Person in the World award from some psuedo news twerp on MSNBC, then woohoo....

It has been quite a journey for Ted Olson. He’s gone from being the conservative lawyer who helped crown W. by winning the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, to being a lesbian. “Maureen,” he told me in his gravelly voice, “one of the biggest lesbian groups in this country told me I’m already an honorary lesbian.” (snip) Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn’t realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable....

In her op-ed piece today, entitled Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool, Maureen Down simply eviscerates President Obama for his cluelessness in handling the panty bomber fiasco. Here’s how it starts: Our president came down from the mountaintop. He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew. We are under attack. There is evil in the world. Yemen is a...

Our president came down from the mountaintop. He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew.

Janet Napolitano and I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Eve together.

As my brother Kevin headed off to Christmas Eve Mass in the Maryland suburbs, I asked him how he thought the first year of Barack Obama had gone. He didn’t have to pray long over that one. “Fine,” he replied, “if you like unmitigated disasters like the Hindenburg and the Redskins season.” If it’s Christmas, it must be time for my conservative brother to take over my column and turn it a blazing shade of red. So without further ado, here is Kevin unplugged, offering a perspective from “the real America,” as one of his favorite Republican philosophers, Sarah Palin,...

Of course, the subtitle of Sarah Palin’s book is “An American Life.”Because she is the lovely avatar of real Americans — ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing, common-sense, good, ordinary, real Americans. If you are not living an American life, you are, to use a Palin coinage, living “bass-ackwards.”(snip) I approached reading her book with trepidation, worried I might learn that I am not a real American, dang it, just another dreaded, jaded “enlightened elite.”

"They were both elegant and entitled swans, insulated in guarded enclaves, obsessed with protecting and promoting the Brand. Then trouble trespassed into their privileged worlds and both responded the same foolish way." "They presumptuously put themselves beyond authority and, despite all the public relations support on earth, broke the first rule of scandal: Don’t stonewall. Admit your mistake before others piece together the embarrassing facts. Reflexive clampdowns don’t work in an era when privacy is passé and when some media outlets are out there giving cash incentives for true confessions and fake reality." (snip) "Even if Desiree thought Congress was...

Michaele and Tareq Salahi finally actually got invited to an exclusive Washington gathering. But they’re not sure they want to accept. It is, after all, an invitation to Thursday’s Congressional hearing into their Night of Living Dangerously, the notorious White House party-crashing incident.

Spoken like a man who probably hasn’t dug a ditch, wouldn’t dig a ditch, wouldn’t know a ditch if he hit one in the road. On This Week Sunday Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, one of the Sunday morning “wizards of smart” (thank you Rush Limbaugh) thinks he has a great idea to stimulate the economy: another WPA program. More infuriating than his cavalier attitude toward working Americans, or rather, out of work engineers, accountants, actuaries, manufacturers, etc, is his remarkable admission, right at the top that not only didn’t the first stimulus do the trick, but the second...

At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his team. Sipping a glass of water, the president offered special gratitude to the woman on his right. “I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.” The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled. In the back of the room, back where they were parched,...

Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by the Obama inner circle. Writing in Politico, Elizabeth Drew called it “the shabbiest episode of his presidency,” saying that it had caused people who had helped Obama rise to question whether he would behave in as classy and non-Clintonian a fashion as they had hoped. It is especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election — and given that we all now know someone...

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin. She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls. The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax. “And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive...

had a four-hour dinner once with Rush Limbaugh at the “21” Club in Manhattan, back in the days when I was still writing profiles as a “reporterette,” to use a Limbaugh coinage. He was charming, in a shy, awkward, lonely-guy way. Not a man of the people. He arrived in a chauffeured town car and ordered $70-an-ounce Beluga, Porterhouse and 1990 Corton-Charlemagne. But he was not a Neanderthal, though he did have a cold and blew his nose in his napkin. He talked about Chopin’s Polonaise No. 6, C.S. Lewis and how much he loved the end of the movie...

snip.... •On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care,...

The Nuns’ Story By MAUREEN DOWD October 24, 2009 WASHINGTON Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda. Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom. Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church. Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism...

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd must have woken up on the far-left side of the bed Tuesday given the number of prominent conservatives she chose to abuse in her article published Wednesday. In "Daisy Chain of Cheneys", Dowd went after former Vice President Dick Cheney, his two daughters Liz and Mary, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, former Vice President Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, and OF COURSE George W. Bush. This was really quite a venom-dripping hatefest even for Dowd (h/t Jennifer Rubin):

When he heard the Nobel Peace Prize shocker on Friday, Bill Clinton went into one of his purple rages. He picked up the phone and dialed the one person on earth who would be as steamed as he was. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Maureen Dowd Go to Columnist Page » Related Times Topics: Nobel Prizes Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (204) » CLINTON: Hey, man, it’s me. This thing is plumb crazy. Can you believe it? W: No way, Jose! CLINTON: First that prig Carter. Then that prig Gore. And now...

Of all the poisonous, ugly, and intellectually vapid controversies ginned up in my lifetime, the current breakout of St. Vitus’ Dance over the “racist” opposition to Barack Obama may be the most egregious. Al Sharpton tells CNN’s Larry King that decent and racially sensitive Americans shouldn’t let a small minority make health care into a “racial issue.” Someone in the control room surely yelled, “Cue the laugh track!” ... ... Maureen Dowd of the New York Times hears Rep. Joe Wilson shout, “You lie!” And her instinctive response is: “Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in...

When asked by former Judge Andrew Napolitano, an Italian-American, where in the Constitution it authorizes the federal government to regulate the delivery of health care, S.C. Representative James Clyburn had this to say: How about you show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this? Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air directed at Judge Napolitano: How about you show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this, Guido? But Clyburn’s shocking disrespect...

Maureen Dowd's latest column makes me realize we need a new category of award to recognize those whose senses are so finely tuned, that they can detect massive, lethal doses of radioactive racism completely undetectable by normal humans. The name of the award is inspired by Neil Young's song "Southern Man," penned years after the civil rights violence, when he toured the South looking for signs of change. Many southerners at the time were proud of the progress they could see all around them. But that's not what Old Neil saw and heard. All that this Canadian could see on...

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind. Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The woman who was prematurely counted in is out. And the woman who was prematurely counted out is in. Goodbye, Sarah. Hello, Hillary. In their vivid twin performances Sunday — Hillary on “Meet the Press” in Washington and Sarah at her farewell picnic in Fairbanks — two of the most celebrated and polarizing women in American political history offered a fascinating contrast. Hillary, who so often in the past came across as aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing, was confident and comfortable in her role as top diplomat, discussing the world with mastery and shrugging off suggestions that she has been disappeared...

Let's dish. And a delicious dish it is. A stew of race, the New York Times, media hypocrisy and double-standards. All inadvertently stirred by the lovely and talented Times columnist, the white female Maureen Dowd. You know all those fevered editorials they churn out over there at the New York Times editorial board? Like, for instance, the hot fury published on June 30 wonderfully titled "Firefighters and Race." In this jewel the Times editorial board makes its displeasure plain in the very first sentence, huffing that the Supreme Court decision in favor of the New Haven firemen has "dealt a...

You can’t judge a judge by her cover. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place. A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up. After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.

Hilarious takeoff of Dowd's "secret palin diary" column that came out on the NYT yesterday.

Much has been said about Maureen “I wanted to weave the idea into my column” Dowd’s latest take-down of Sarah Palin (“Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.”) Her hit-piece is a self-parody. Instead, of seriously critiquing the wisdom or folly of Palin’s controversial decision to step down from the governorship, we get child-like sentences on spec like this: "On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an...

What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska's governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall. The assassination of Sarah Palin - by media. For those who didn't pay attention, Mrs. Palin's unexpected stratospheric rise as a national political figure threatened the media's preordained presidency of Barack Obama. In light of how the Obama machine took down Hillary Clinton, which unsettled many feminists who believed 2008 was their...

Andrew Breitbart takes on the elitist media, specifically the three female "feminists" who have been on the trash Sarah bandwagon from the beginning, and he does it with gusto: What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska's governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall. The assassination of Sarah Palin - by media. For those who didn't pay attention, Mrs. Palin's unexpected stratospheric rise as a national political...

Sunday, July 05, 2009 Palin-Basher Liz Trotta: Palin Is Inarticulate and Undereducated... Used Her Looks to Get Ahead-- Maureen Dowd is Smart & Funny (Video) Sick. Liz Trotta, an east coast Palin-hater, attacked Sarah Palin again today. Trotta said Palin Palin has given the media "lots of raw meat" and is "inarticulate and undereducated" and hadn't accomplished anything. Trotta said Palin "brought the attacks on herself." She also agreed that Palin was "wacky and nutty" and only got ahead because of her looks. And, to top it off, Trotta said Maureen Dowd's latest disgusting hit piece on Palin was well...