Free Republic

We have the starchy guy — tall, handsome, intelligent and rich, with a baronial estate — who’s hard to warm up to. And we have the spontaneous guy, who’s charming and easy to warm up to — until it turns out that he has an unsavory pattern with young women and a suspect relationship with facts. It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick. It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade...

Maureen Dowd, channelling a new liberal narrative, argues that at least Romney is not an anti-intellectual dunce like Rick Perry, and to prove her point, she returns to Perry’s college transcripts. To the coastal elite, college grades are always proof of intelligence and legitimacy: “Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,� said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force. “His other D’s,� Richard Oppel wrote in The Times, “included courses in the principles of...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

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. The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is...

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.... Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”: I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat, Won’t know exactly what I mean by that. I mean so altruistically moral I never take my own side in a quarrel.

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...

Do the overhyped and overpaid coulmnists at the New York Times have editors ? Do they have someone who says "Let's back that up with some facts, Krugman" ? Do they have someone to say "Ann Coulter is right! Frank Rich really is a woman trapped in a man's body" ? Most importantly, do they have someone who says "Maureen! You're an opinion journalist, not a middle age cheerleader for the Democrat Party" ? They do now. That person is moi, your Friendly Neighborhood Right Wing Extremist. Below is a column by Maureen Dowd, edited by yours truly. This is...

JENKINS: You can hear your fans yelling for you. Did you think it was going to get this big, that this movement was going to have the impact that it has had? PALIN: Absolutely. We know the impact is going to be greater come November 3rd because people then will be focused on the 2012 election and the need then for a more aggressive movement to stop what President Obama is doing to this country when it comes to killing jobs with all the policies that he is so engaged in that make absolutely no sense for America. What I'm...

- Catholic Exchange - http://catholicexchange.com - Time to move on, MaureenPosted By Genevieve S. Kineke On October 17, 2010 @ 11:02 am In Feminine Genius Blog | 1 Comment Maureen Dowd [1] has brought her cattiness to new heghts (depths?) by snarking away at the women who have succeeded in connecting with a wide swath of American voters. No matter what one’s political stripe, one must acknowledge that there is a down-home connection for many who are weary of high taxes, politicisation of the classroom, and constant barriers thrown in the path of average families. For them, tea party-type candidates...

I used to enjoy reading Maureen Dowd. I think she has a way with words and at times she even promotes thinking outside of conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, those columns are few and far between. Reading her column in the Sunday New York Times irritated me. I guess that’s her specialty — irritation. I remember once after I’d left the White House I mentioned one of her columns to a friend and the friend said, “You know, you don’t have to read that stuff any more . . . you graduated.” But I’m a news junkie; I can’t help myself. Kind...

Maureen Dowd's pen strikes again. The woman who has made a fortune out of cocktail-party cattiness has decided, this week, to aim her eternally-adolescent barbs at attractive Republican women -- the ones making mincemeat out of their feminized Democrat-male opponents. Reading her latest self-revealing scream, I couldn't help feeling sorry for little Maureen, still tormented after all these decades. Likening "mean girl" Republican women -- "Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine" -- to those who picked on her in high school as "grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend,...

Imagine a movie: Maureen Dowd is seen thrashing around on her bed, clearly in the grips of a gruesome nightmare. When she awakes, it is not to relief but to the horrifying discovery that reality is worse than anything her fevered brain had conjured. That is the sense of hopelessness, desperation and depression in which Dowd drowns in her New York Times column of today. The piece is one long lament, as Dowd decries the Dems' fate. Not only are they on the brink of losing--they are losing to opponents who are not merely wrong but "the worst" and "insane."...

At the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, the sojourning President Obama bought a few books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. It was for his daughter, but it may have also conjured a sweet memory for the beleaguered president. Only a couple of years ago, when he was campaigning, Obama inspired comparisons with the noble lawyer Atticus Finch. Now, after flipping about on some hot-button issues, most recently the plan for an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero, he’s more likely to be painted by disillusioned supporters as Atticus Flinch. The bookstore gave the...

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...

Sex and the single Kagan. That's what the nomination of Elena Kagan is all about for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who just this past week offered her take on the controversy surrounding the nomination of the elite leftist from Princeton and Harvard to the Supreme Court. Kagan is single and a woman, and men -- especially those who are conservative and occupy the nation's less financially blessed zip codes -- "are threatened by more successful women." And again, the spinning spinster of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, headquarters of the Times and ground zero for the media elite,...

From: Joe Biden [info@barackobama.com] Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 9:38 AM To: Obama supporters Subject: A reason to smile. Folks — This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe. Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’s a girl’s girl. Just try dragging...

I don't write about Maureen Dowd simply because she rarely offers anything worthy of serious, intellectual discussion. I don't claim any sort of high intellect for myself, of course, and don't necessarily claim to be able to thoroughly judge the work of the deepest of thinkers but Dowd's work is like the old saying about pornography in as much as when it comes to stupid prattle I know it when I see it. Breaking my own no-Mo-Dowd rule, though, her April 10 column must be singled out as a prime example of just how silly, inconsequential, and, well, stupid Mo...

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women. I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders. How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination? I was puzzling over that one when it hit...

holding the New York Times accountable   By Phil Lawler | March 31, 2010 11:46 AM "It doesn't seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin," writes Maureen Dowd, in another of her toxic columns for the New York Times.Well, Maureen, the Church wouldn't be answering charges this week if irresponsible journalists weren't making unsupported claims, and writing vile columns based on smirks and cheap shots. It's not "spin" when you try to clear the record after newspaper reports have muddied it. "Spin" is when you churn out opinions without basing them...

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...

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...

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,...

WASHINGTON The Maverick’s buck stops here. John McCain is no longer the media’s delight and his party’s burr, bucking convention with infectious relish. The man used to be such a constructive independent that some of his Republican Senate colleagues called him a traitor. Now he’s such a predictable obstructionist that he’s in the just-say-no vanguard with the same conservatives who used to despise him. On Tuesday afternoon on the floor, Senator Mitch McConnell, who contemptuously fought McCain’s campaign finance reform bill all the way to the Supreme Court, oozed admiration toward his Arizona colleague, as McCain did yet another grandstanding...

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,...

While one can agree or disagree with Maureen Dowd's portrayal of Goldman Sachs and other bankers (column, Nov. 11), her statement that "the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple" potentially raises one of the classic themes of anti-Semitism linking Jews and abhorrent money-lending practices. However unintentional, Ms. Dowd's invoking the New Testament story to illustrate our current financial mess conjures up old prejudices against Jews.

Timothy Dolan came to town with a hammer in his hand. Of course, it wasn’t really much of hammer: just a little tappity-tap kind of thing, a tack hammer with a bright blue head, which he used it to rap on the door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of the traditional ceremony for the installation of a new archbishop in New York. That was back on April 15, the Wednesday before Easter. In the six months since, Archbishop Dolan has done hardly any public hammering — until now. On Oct. 29 he used the archdiocese’s website to publish a...

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism. Dolan used his blog last Thursday on the Archdiocese of New York's Web site to rail against the Times a day after the paper refused to print his critique as an op-ed piece. He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have...

Where is Tom Hanks when you need him? Something sinister is happening in the Catholic Church, at least according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. And the way she writes about it, it reads like the beginning of a treatment for a Dan Brown extravaganza. Her plot, you see, is just that absurd. Dowd was convinced that Catholic religious sisters were unhappy when she was in the fifth grade, and she remains adamant. She writes: “Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are.” I can’t speak for “the formidable...

There is no better temperature gauge of the Left’s derangement syndrome — the object of the hatred is irrelevant — than the New York Times’s liberal op-ed columnists. So when Maureen Dowd goes into full-rant mode over Liz Cheney (and her political-consultant sister), you pretty much know the object of the next spasm of liberal venomous paranoia. And as it usually is, the rant is more revealing of the ranter than the intended victim... READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

Congressman Joe Wilson’s “You Lie!” charge against President Barack Obama has elicited a curious response from various figures – that Wilson’s action both comes from and evidences racism. Perhaps New York Times’ Maureen Dowd made the most provocative allegation while former President Jimmy Carter couldn’t resist the opportunity to top it off with his own contention that racism underlies many whites’ criticism of President Barack Obama. This is not to ignore similar utterances from such less relevant voices as Janeane Garofalo that restate the racist charge with no support other than an attitude of arrogant certainty. These very accusations cover...

Angry. Bitter. Desperately trying to avoid irrelevance. Clinging to past glories. The average American, the beleaguered taxpayer in the age of Obama? No, welcome to the world of Maureen Dowd. Dowd is the signature columnist for The New York Times and Cardinal Richelieu to the King Moe (a dynastic line that includes Larry and Curly) of its publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. Dowd faces a new information age in which readers continue to turn their backs on her and her employer of 26 years, leaving a shrinking readership of aging elites from academia, politics and media. Her readers are disappearing...

Check out this parody of Maureen Dowd's Joe Wilson column. [NOTE: It is a copyright violation to copy and paste this post in its entirety, so please click on the link to read it.]

Nasty piece of work, Maureen Dowd. In the Barack Obama-worshipping New York Times over the weekend, she insinuated that Congressman Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during the presidential address was inspired by racism: 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! “Boy”, of course, is how...

Discourse: The reaction to the congressman's outburst shows what happens when you judge this president by the content of his character. In a post-racial presidency, charges of racism are the new last refuge of scoundrels.When Joe Wilson, the decorum-challenged South Carolina Republican, reacted to President Obama's assertion that there was nothing in health care legislation giving coverage to illegal aliens by shouting "You lie!" he knew, as his critics ignore, that there was nothing requiring proof of citizenship either. A nonpartisan Congressional Research Service study found that the House health care bill at that moment did not restrict illegal immigrants...

Here is video of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs yesterday on with CNN's John King. King asked Gibbs if Obama agreed with the New York Times' Maureen Dowd that many of those opposing ObamaCare are doing so because Obama is a "black President." Gibbs disagreed with Dowd: "I don't think the President believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin." Yet, Obama's pack of enablers in the media just keep saying this. It was a theme all weekend, because they are desperate to dismiss all opposition as just being from the fringes of society. We'll...

MAUREEN DOWD'S New York Times columns used to be fun. Whether you agreed with her or not, they were witty and incisive. Sometimes they were even insightful. But recently, many readers are asking the same question as a letter writer to the Denver Post: "What has happened to Maureen Dowd lately? . . . she is no longer informative, clever or entertaining, just childish and vindictive." The truth is, Maureen Dowd hasn't changed; the times have. She's always been a formulaic writer, but the formula has never been less appropriate (and therefore more conspicuous) than it has since September 11,...

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 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 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 outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts. The congressman, we learned,...

As soon as I started covering Barack Obama, I knew he was going to be trouble. Not Global Trouble, like W. and Dick Cheney. Or Hanky-Panky Trouble, like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Or Tedious Trouble, like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis. He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust. It’s an irritating pattern. Not as puerile as Bill Clinton’s pattern of wasting time...

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming...That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Aging Maureen Dowd cannot seem to help herself when it comes to Governor Palin. It was first thought of as irrational envy. You have a strong, intelligent, attractive, self-made, non-Ivy League educated, happily married, mother of five verse a wrinkled old shrew. Her continued attacks are more then comical and it seems she is now fixated on Governor Palin. Mark Finkelstein, of NewsBusters, describes Maureen Dowd quite accurately: Nothing like a presidential assassination metaphor to spice up an otherwise insipid Sunday column . . . Churning out yet another anti-Sarah screed, Dowd descended to this today [emphasis added]: "At the...

"Gryphen" a/k/a Alaska blogger Jesse Griffin, decides apparently at random to unload on Trig Palin again: Sarah Palin has used this heartrending diminutive prop with such careless abandon, that even people who once supported her are embarrassed at her apparent disregard for the well being of this baby. Leaving behind all of the questions about Trig's parentage, the question we must now ask ourselves is how well is he currently being cared for? I believe that many people have very powerful concerns for this child. We see him trotted out when Sarah wants to make a political point, or create...

"Gryphen" gets an extension on his 15 minutes of fame courtesy of the New York Times columnist: Palin is still obsessed with the blogosphere, which recently lit up with a rumor -- started by a fellow mavericky Alaskan, who also no longer has his job -- that she and Todd were Splitsville. Excuse me, Ms. Dowd, but is Palin "obsessed with the blogosphere" or is it the other way around? And don't you share that obsession? Furthermore, ma'am -- speaking of "Gryphen" a/k/a former Anchorage kindergarten teaching assistant Jesse Ray Griffin -- is it the usual practice of the New...

Here is video of New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd talking this morning with MSNBC's Willie Geist about her column today in which she compared Gov. Sarah Palin with Richard Nixon, calling her a "bizarre babe-at-large." Dowd, in her usual snarky way, said she "loves Sarah Palin," because she's the best story ever for a jounalist. Dowd said she believes Palin could win the GOP Nomination in 2012 because "she plays to people's darker impulses." Maureen Dowd is the classic Eastern Liberal, who has no idea what average Americans are like, or how they think. She spends her life belittling...

The one-two punch thrown by Democrats and their counterparts in mainstream media have probably cost Alaska the governorship of Sarah Palin. Sarah has provided two reason for stepping down as Alaska's governor: 1) The money she and the state have had to spend defending against 15 ethics complaints, all dismissed, and 2) The endless attacks against her spouse and children by Democrats, the media and those in pop culture. Politics is officially a rich person's sport -- so long as you are rich enough to defend yourself against a string of baseless complaints you can stay. Also, the children of...

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...

If, somehow, by the grace of God...or in this case...by the grace of NOW...these two were...just...maybe...able to combine their DNA (again to the well of mad science, he goes!), the results would be astounding.

No one understands me. It’s like I’m speaking some Eskimo dialect or something. Andrea Mitchell follows me all the way to Kanakanak Beach and I get a French manicure and set up this huge photo op for her, even though she spooked the salmon. Todd and me are in our cool fishing bibs. Piper’s helping out on the boat. It’s an amazing day that shows how our Creator favored my beloved Alaska, gatekeeper of the continent, and makes a great shot for all the network reporters up here to milk. This progresses me away from my image as some kind...