Sunday morning with MoDo

MoDo's mamma says it's okay because he was a POW

It's Sunday, so Crazy MoDo gets to emerge from the attic long enough to share her latest symptoms with the world. Today it's Too Much of a Bad Thing New York Times 08/24/08.

Today, MoDo decides that it's disturbing to her that McCain's grand POW story is starting to get so old than even some of the press corps are griping about it. Yes, she's kinda-sorta criticizing McCain today. But the mental processes she puts on display are kooky as ever, though she manages to be less incoherent when she talks about McCain than about Obama or the Clintons.

Her point seems to be that McCain's campaign is trying to work his POW experience for sympathy in ways that don't make much sense to her press corps colleagues. It's become so obvious than even some Big Pundits are beginning to notice.

But for MoDo, it's mainly about sex. Here's how she opens her column:

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them "long-tailed rats."

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.

I figured, given her stringent moral standards, that her great affection for McCain would be dimmed.

"So," I asked her, "what do you think of that?"

"A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants," she replied matter-of-factly.

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

Now, none of that reported conversation makes much sense to me. Given her recent track record for accuracy, we shouldn't assume that she's reporting the interchange accurately. It may be one of those conversations she hears in her head.

But since she's obviously reporting it as one of her Mamma's great insights, it's noteworthy in a couple of ways for what it says about MoDo. One, her mother was a big McCain fan. And apparently didn't care in the least about the fact that he "cheated" on his first wife. In that, Mamma would be pretty much like every other Republican. And you have to wonder if MoDo, despite her reputation as a liberal, doesn't hold Mamma's views on politics in as high a regard as she does her views on sex and prison. Which is the second thing: MoDo reports it as one of Mamma's insights she herself shares.

But it's one thing to say that because a person had some trying experience like's McCain now-fabled time as a POW, that it makes them a somewhat more sympathetic person. But MoDo tells us she herself has regarded that POW time as "a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card" for McCain Of The Many Houses, a free pass that in Mamma's words means he gets to "do whatever he wants".

Does only time as a prisoner-of-war provide a person such a free pass in MoDoWorld? Or does regular prison time for larceny or burglary or whatever also count? It's really not clear from her reported conversation with Mamma.

The real self-revelatory part - if her symptomatic ranting can be said to be revealing to anyone but medical professionals - is that she viewed the Great American McCain's POW time as an excuse to ignore faults of the kind that she notices in other politicians. That is, faults on the things she considers important, like their sexual conduct throughout their lives. Or whether he correctly remembered the date of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" song.

Don't get me wrong. Partisan nit-picking is fun. But it's very clear in Sunday's column that even when she's looking for nits on a Republican, her methodology is still flaky.

And in the end, what devastating insights does she give us about the bold Maverick? Well, he didn't remember what year "Dancing Queen" was popular. And, hey, maybe he slept around a bit on his first wife eons ago, but he was a POW, so MoDo's Mamma says that's okay.

At that rate, she would have to write about one thousand columns like this to accumulate the number of slams at McCain to equal those she made at the Clintons in her last Sunday's single column alone.

Oh, and she makes this thoroughly clueless observation:

The Kerry Swift-boat attacks in 2004 struck down the off-limits signs that were traditionally on a candidate’s military service. Many Democrats are willing to repay the favor, and Republicans clearly no longer see war medals as sacrosanct.

Here in the real world, of course, the Democrats haven't done anything remotely comparable to the Swift Boat Liars for Bush attack on Kerry's war record. And the press corps here in 2008 is giving credibility to the lying crackpot white supremicist Jerome Korsi and his trashy book about Obama.

Tags: maureen dowd