MoDo on Cheney and Bush

Maureen Dowd is back from vacation as of this past Wednesday. Not surprisingly, a couple of weeks off haven't improved the quality of her journalism much.

In An Extremist Makeover? New York Times Online 01/10/08, she tut-tuts over the failures and misdeeds of Dick Cheney and George Bush. Now that conventional wisdom has decided they are failures, long after a majority of the country had decided so, MoDo's on board, too.

It would have been nice if she had caught on to their shortcomings a bit earlier. Like when she was merrily trashing Al Gore during the 2000 campaign and John Kerry in 2004. As Dave Neiwert wrote over two years ago in Here comes the flood Orcinus blog 06/13/06:

What sparked the rise of Web-based political communication like the blogosphere was the behavior of people like [Maureen] Dowd. When she was named to one of the Times' cherished columnist slots, she replaced the estimable Anna Quindlen, a dependably thoughtful voice of liberalism. Dowd, in contrast, has operated more in the mode of a gossip columnist with snippy, personality-driven journalism that often becomes simply trite; while the Times' conservative columnists in the late '90s were singleminded in their pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, Dowd chose more often than not to chime in on their side, and likewise was a happy participant in the "Al Gore is a weakminded liar" theme that played out in 2000.

With that kind of voice representing "liberals" in the New York Times - and folks like Joe Klein and Pat Caddell showing up on cable TV to represent the "liberal" side - it's not the least surprising that genuine liberals felt the need to begin speaking up. Otherwise, their voices were not going to be heard. The blogosphere and Webzines became an effective way for that to happen. [my emphasis]

MoDo's is still the gossip columnist. In her weekend column, she writes:

In the past week, I’ve twice been close enough to Dick Cheney to kick him in the shins.

I didn’t. It’s probably a federal crime of some sort. But a girl can fantasize. I did, however, assume the Stay-away-from-me-you've-got-cooties stance that Jimmy Carter used when posing with Bill Clinton at the presidents' powwow in the Oval.

I guess I missed that special Carter stance. It just looked like a routine dignitary photo to me.

MoDo's column on the failings of Dick Cheney is not devoted to the question of legal accountability. After massaging her endless Clinton obsession for no apparent purpose other than to do just that, she talks about the cool party she attended:

The second time I crossed paths [with Cheney] was Thursday night, at a glitzy party at Cafe Milano for Brit Hume, stepping down as a Fox anchor. It required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they've unleashed on the world.

“My conscience is clear," Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he’s interviewing people for his memoir.

Woodward was stunned. "I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was ‘by indirection, two or three steps removed,’ " Woodward told me afterward.

Someone less entranced by the mores of the Beltway Village might have asked those three gentlemen some substantive questions, e.g., are you concerned about being prosecuted over the torture policy? MoDo explains without shame how she avoided them. But MoDo couldn't ruin a perfectly nice glitzy social evening honoring a sad excuse for a journalist from FOX News by trying to do some actual reporting. Apparently even former Bush court historian Bob Woodward managed to ask Rummy some kind of question.

Plus, MoDo's Woodward quotation doesn't make sense. The Secretary of Defense is not a military commander. He's the senior civilian officer at the Pentagon.

To be fair to Woodward, though, this is MoDo quoting him. And the whole dumb quote is silly anyway. It would have been newsworthy if Rummy had said he was tormented by guilt over his key role in the torture policy and in ginning up a phony case to go to war in Iraq. The fact that he says he has a clean conscience is scarcely news. Why would Woodward or MoDo consider that something to stun someone into speechlessness?

And this is the cream of our national press corps. It explains a lot about why the country is in the state it's in at the moment.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press