Free Republic

For many years, reality was out of vogue with Republicans. They ignored the reality of Iraq and Katrina, of Pakistan and Osama bin Laden. When confronted with their colossal carelessness around the globe and here at home, their mantra was, as Rummy put it, “Stuff happens.” Now reality, in all its messy, crazy, funky glory, has flooded the party, in the comely, crackling form of Sarah Palin. Unable to stop the onslaught of wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaska wilderness, McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt offered caterwauling reporters a new mantra: “Life happens.” Indeed,...

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick. So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin. Sheer heaven. It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of...

...Dowd may have unwittingly summed up her conundrum in a July piece, in which she remarked to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, "It seems a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys." (For the record, Stewart scoffed at her notion, asking, "Are you kidding me?") Sorry, but Dowd's references to Obama as Beanpole Guy, Barry and No-Drama Obama seem to be forced attempts at humor... For her part, Dowd can occasionally appear to cross the line from sarcasm to meanness. She recently wrote about McCain: "John looks in the mirror and sees his face marred...

Did presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign plant a fake story accusing itself of campaign finance irregularities, in order to portray itself as victims of right-wing allegations about the campaign’s successful Internet fund-raising? In a July 8 2008-article "Bogus Dowd Column spreads quickly" PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, reported that blogs and chain e-mails were spreading a Maureen Dowd New York Times column that claims the Obama campaign got suspicious contributions from Iran, Saudi Arabia and China. "But the column is a fake," reports PolitiFact. The New York Times also disowned the...

The headline on the conservative blog, Townhall, stormed: “Book to Smear First Lady’s Sex Life.” Radar magazine proclaimed: “On the gossip front, the novel doesn’t disappoint,” adding that its steamy and lurid scenes were “sure to send the White House into a fury.” MSNBC.com called the sex scenes “too graphic to reprint.” The cover of this fantasy version of Laura Bush’s life, “American Wife,” is alluring, a woman’s shapely figure in a white gown, with white opera gloves and a diamond ring. The author is not Anonymous, or Eponymous or Pseudonymous, yet there is the air of a “Primary Colors”...

Hillary and Bill are busy updating their enemies lists. And Obama is racking his brain trying to figure out where to stash his erstwhile rival. If a President Obama put her on the Supreme Court, of course, we would have the infinite fun of hearing Bill rant about how Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts were dissing Hillary. It’s good news for Obama that Hillary’s out of the race. But it’s also bad news. Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of...

...Democrats are coming around to the point Jay Rockefeller made 10 days ago after introducing Obama in West Virginia: “Democrats always make a mistake by nominating people who know everything on earth there is to know about public policy. I introduced both Al Gore and John Kerry at their rallies. They knew all the policies, but people didn’t connect with them. You don’t get elected president if people don’t like you.” Despite Bill Clinton’s saying it was “a bunch of bull” that his wife should drop out, Democrats are trying to sneak up on Hillary, throw a burlap sack over...

While the cool cat’s away, the Hillary mice will play. As Barack Obama was floating in the pool with his daughters the last few days in St. Thomas, some Clinton disciples were floating the idea of St. Hillary as his vice president. She can’t win without him, said one Hillary adviser, and he can’t win without her. They’re stuck with each other. It’s one of my favorite movie formulas, driving the dynamics in such classics as “A Few Good Men,” “The Big Easy” and “Guys and Dolls”: Charming, glib guy spars and quarrels with no-nonsense, driven girl, until they team...

Voters try to figure out who they trust to have life-and-death power over them, but there’s so much theatricality and artifice in campaigns you can get a false impression of who someone is. And you never know who they will become once they move into the insular, heady womb of the White House — or how they will be buffeted by the caprice of history, and the randomness of crises. The press tends to swallow campaign narratives of sin and redemption, hard lessons learned. After giving up drinking and becoming Texas governor, W. had supposedly changed from an arrogant, obdurate,...

Suddenly, everyone was in the mood for love. Would the scream team turn into the dream team? After Thursday’s Democratic debate, CNN’s Carol Costello said there were “heart palpitations” and “ripples of joy” in the glittery Kodak Theater audience at the idea of a Hillary-Obama or Obama-Hillary ticket, after he was gallant with her and she laughed gaily with him. How could Hollywood not fall in love with Hollywood’s favorite plot? After lots of sparking and sparring, the couple falls into each other’s arms in the last scene. The would-be matchmakers didn’t seem to know that in Hollywood, couples who...

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes. A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?” Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t...

Title only. If you had any doubts that Maureen Dowd is um... "struggling" with mental "issues"' read on...

The Des Moines Register decides to hold a tie-breaking debate with the two Democratic front-runners. WASHBURN: Senator Clinton, I’d like you to start us off by explaining why your campaign has been getting down and dirty with someone so clean and articulate? CLINTON: I apologized to Senator Obama. I absolutely did not authorize or condone the remarks made by one of my co-chairs in New Hampshire about my distinguished colleague’s youthful indiscretions. If primary voters don’t care that he did “a little blow,” then my goodness, why should I? Even if he had packed a straw full of the white...

When I was a kid, we used to drive on the Beltway past the big Mormon temple outside Washington. The spires rose up like a white Oz, and some wag had spray-painted the message on a bridge beneath: “Surrender Dorothy!” It did seem like an alien world, an impression that was enhanced when we took a tour of the temple and saw all the women wearing white outfits and light pink lipstick. Of course, it was no more scary than scowling nuns with long rulers preaching about the virgin birth, the Holy Ghost and the hideous fates that would befall...

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” Nietzsche said. “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” We’re gazing into the abyss all right, and Blackwater is gazing back. Besides having an army for hire, brave kids who are paid to fight so that most Americans are not personally touched by war, we have the real mercenaries. And they’re a spooky cadre, careening outside the laws of Iraq, the United States and the military. President Bush continues to preach that we must defeat the “dark ideology”...

“This process is not going to serve her well,” one said, adding: “She’s going to be essentially saying, ‘Elect me president after I’ve spent the last 16 years in your face. And you didn’t like me much when I was there last. Give me eight more years so I can be a presence in your life for 24 years.’” Others do not underestimate her relentlessness. As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, once told me: “She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really,...

Posted Friday, December 7, 2001 Key West paper drops Maureen Dowd after readers complain Elizabeth Halbe writes to MediaNews: "My local paper, the Key West Citizen, has been running columns by Maureen Dowd on a weekly basis. While always well written and full of pointed humor, they have drawn (of course) the wrath of some ultraconservative readers. Today the Citizen printed a reader's call insisting that since she is a 'liberal extremist' her column be dropped from our paper, followed by an editor's note that Dowd's column is being discontinued in January." Halbe wants an explanation, and MediaNews called ...

I would defy anyone to label Maureen Dowd by party affiliation or ideology. I've known her and worked closely with her for 20 years and I can't tell you the answer to either one -- Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times What would be worse: that when Times editorial page editor Rosenthal claims not to know Maureen Dowd's politics he's not being honest -- or that he is?Today's Times contains a long column by Rosenthal responding to reader questions. Here are annotated highlights in addition to the Dowd rib-tickler: The news report produced by the news...

Ann Coulter - Women We Would Like to see in Burkas Women We'd Like To See... In BurkasAnn CoulterDecember 6, 2001FEVERISH, ANGRY MAIL poured in from bitter Manhattan termagants in response to a Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times about the "hunks" at Ground Zero. Dowd had ruefully noted that feminism "has done a back flip" since women "now ogle the macho men they once spurned." The letters weren't complaining about the wild double standard that allows a woman columnist for a major newspaper to objectify men – calling firemen, for example, a "sizzling accessory." No, the bitter ...