"Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed—the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core." —Hey! Maureen Dowd wrote something I like! (Or, you know, maybe one of her friends sent it to her in an email or something. But close enough!)
"The students memorize all they can, usually in 15-minute stretches of tedious silence. Then they spill their memory to recall, say, 120 random words in exact order. (That is roughly the length of this article to the end of this sentence, but with the words shuffled.) Or maybe they will try to match 159 unfamiliar names to photos of strangers, or recall 227 exact words, capital letters and punctuation of a poem read for the first time. Those are, after all, the national records held by members of the Hershey memory team." —These students at Hershey High School in Hershey, Pennsylvania are very impressive. Of course, from what [...]
"As soon as I started covering Barack Obama, I knew he was going to be trouble," writes Maureen Dowd in her Times column today. "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-"
And then, and then. It is, oh my God, essentially the same Maureen Dowd column Maureen Dowd always writes. You could pretty much diagram this column and have a do-it-yourself Maureen Dowd kit. In [...]
Thank heavens: Leon Wieseltier did not lead Maureen Dowd astray. Plagiarism-wise, at least.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd does not like Twitter. You are probably already aware of this fact. They have probably already tweeted the fuck out of it over in the Twitterverse. The jokes, as they say, write themselves, even at a maximum of 140 characters.
But so what? I mean, why should Maureen Dowd have to like Twitter?
It’s easy to look at our media industrial complex and forget that its members were once young and hungry, that they had to hustle, grease sources and report stories within an inch of life. One can imagine these scrappers delirious just to see a byline buried on B4 or, God forbid, a sidebar. They sammy glicked their way through the newsroom. No one exited the womb a star.
Even so, these people seem to exist only in the ever-present. We see Juan Williams as Hannity’s graying foil—who sold out for the change in Roger Ailes' pocket—but not the guy who, in 1987, churned out a gorgeous profile of a [...]
I thought Maureen Dowd was on vacation all summer. But I was just forgetting to look. Now I'm glad about that.
Which helping hands co-wrote The Maureen Dowd Collective's insane, 2003-era rant against Anna Wintour this weekend? We're thinking the high dudgeon screaminess sounds like Alessandra Stanley and Frank Bruni cracking themselves up after a few drinks. (Though Bruni is probably too busy to pitch in on her column right now, what with his book tour.) Plus we're assuming her assistant did the reporting. ("I dunno, call Andre Leon Talley and whoever else one calls usually. Surprise me! Then quote… um, Keith Kelly-he's still alive, right?") But you know: could have been anyone (amped up on a few hits of nitrous) really. Anyway, someone give this funny lady and [...]
Tom Scocca: I go away for a weekend and Maureen Dowd gets caught plagiarizing? Choire Sicha: You went away for a weekend? That's so unlike you! Tom Scocca: We can't all have a house on Fire Island. Choire Sicha: That island is only so wide, after all. But yes! You turned your back and suddenly Maureen Dowd is in the Scandal Of The Century Of The Moment. Tom Scocca: Albeit sort of a listless scandal, it seems, thanks to the we're-all-dead-who-cares cloud hanging over Romenesko these past many months.
"I never liked him. He seems sort of unpleasant and uncomfortable." —Bill "Smog" Callahan, in the (subscription-only) New Yorker, on Bob Dylan, who is having a tough week in the press. This kind of blows my mind. I mean, sure, I guess Dylan can come across that way. Like, his personality. It's been noted before. Lou Reed once said, "If you were at a party with him, I think you'd tell him to shut up." But still, he's the best at what he does, and it hurts me a little to hear other songwriters snipe like that. Though when Maureen Dowd (and/or whichever one or more [...]
Maureen Dowd went to Saudi Arabia and all she got was this hilarious slideshow of photos of herself in different outfits. (Oh and a big piece in the August Vanity Fair.) I LOVE IT. It's just like Sex and the City 2 except 1. no galpals and 2. at least MoDo pulls out a notebook sometimes. I clicked through every picture two times! Actual caption of the photo seen here: "Dowd and friend on the outskirts of Riyadh. 'It's funny,' she writes, 'to see how many people have named their camels Barack."
My God! New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani was apparently just too lazy to not use her favorite word – "limn" – today, while she was obviously pitching in to write her share of the column that appears in the New York Times under Maureen Dowd's name. GET IT TOGETHER, DOWD-BORG.
Maureen Dowd picks up a funny little correction today, as her weekend column lifted a paragraph from a blog. And we do mean "little"!
