#Maureen Dowd

[porterdavis]

Yep

"If people don’t know by now that Trump tried to overthrow the government he was running on Jan. 6; if they don’t know that the MAGA fanatics breaking into the Capitol, beating up cops and threatening to harm Pelosi and hang Mike Pence were criminals, not “patriots” and “hostages,” as Trump risibly calls them; if they don’t know that Trump created the radical Supreme Court that is stripping women of their rights, then they don’t want to know, or they just don’t care."

Maureen Dowd, NY Times

[literaryspinster]

I hope this book changes things, I’m just so tired of being a Black woman into sci fi and fantasy because more often than not I feel punched in the face by the things I choose to give a chance to. Even Titans, which is in many ways my happy place (seriously, Kory Anders is my favorite depiction of a Black woman superhero ever and I’m so very very grateful for her), couldn’t get it completely right at first because of fucking Boris 😒

[contemplatingoutlander]

Maureen Dowd very clearly depicts what a clown show Congress will become if the Republicans take over the House and/or the Senate.

Here are some excerpts:

Are we ready for our new Republican overlords?

Are we ready for an empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Are we ready for a pumped-up, pistol-packing Lauren Boebert?

“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”

The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”

The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.

And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.

As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”

Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.

Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.

And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.

Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority. [...] Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.

People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.

These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage. [...] To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.

”Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.

Heaven help us.

[tomorrowusa]

« Trump was like a blender going at full speed with the top off, goop splattering everywhere. »

— New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describing Weird Donald Trump's bizarre news conference last week where (among other things) he claimed that his rallies have more attendees than Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

Just to clarify, this is what the National Park Service says about what was formally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It was the largest gathering for civil rights of its time. An estimated 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, arriving in Washington, D.C. by planes, trains, cars, and buses from all over the country. [ ... ] With that many people converging on the city, there were concerns about violence. The Washington, D.C. police force mobilized 5,900 officers for the march and the government mustered 6,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen as additional protection. President Kennedy thought that if there were any problems, the negative perceptions could undo the civil rights bill making its way through Congress. In the end, the crowds were calm and there were no incidents reported by police. While the March was a peaceful occasion, the words spoken that day at the Lincoln Memorial were not just uplifting and inspirational such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, they were also penetrating and pointed.

The 1963 march was way bigger than Trump's 06 January 2021 mob of coup crazies. Unlike the 2021 Trump attempted coup, no law enforcement officers were killed or injured by the civil rights marchers.

[dd-is-my-guiltypleasure]

"David Duchovny and Maureen Dowd in Conversation"

[soitsashowpodcast]

ep. 131: You went with Faye Dunaway in Network. // And Maureen Dowd "come hither" pumps.

This episode is going to make our ratings bigger than Watergate! Rory is taking her fashion inspiration from another 1976 movie and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. What is the legacy of the classic Network? What about Maureen Dowd’s pumps say “come hither” (if anything)? And what do these inspirations mean for a journalism panel Rory is participating in? You know we won’t stay in the dark any longer on these questions—we’re as mad as hell we don’t know, and we’re not going to take this anymore!

We Wholeheartedly Recommend: Midnights by Taylor Swift (2022), Regular Show (2010-17)

Other pop culture we ref: Mommie Dearest, Sunset Blvd., George Clooney, The Godfather, Hamilton, The Hunger Games, John Oliver, Don’t Look Up, Tommy Hilfiger, A Streetcar Named Desire

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MORE ABOUT NETWORK

TCM entry

“101 Greatest Screenplays,” WGA.org (2006)

“Network Turns 40: Here Are 3 Ways It Changed How We Understand News Media,” IndieWire.com (2016)

“The 'Outrageous' 40-Year-Old Film That Predicted the Future,” BBC.com (2016)

“The 1976 Film Network Is Meant to be Satire, Not a Playbook for News Hosts,” Vox.com (2017)

“Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominees: Who Contended for a Performance of Only 139 Seconds?” GoldDerby.com (2021)

“Network's Dialogue Didn't Leave Any Room for Error,” SlashFilm.com (2022)

“Network Got It Right: The Legacy of a Scorching Satire,” VanityFair.com (2022) 

“John Oliver Refers to NFL’s Monday Night Football as ‘Primetime Programming Where People Kill Themselves for Entertainment,’” HollywoodReporter.com (2022)

MORE ABOUT MAUREEN DOWD

Maureen Dowd’s biography, NYTimes.com

“1999 Pulitzer Prize Winners,” Pulitzer.org

“The Scandal-Chic Sales Pitch,” TampaBay.com (via The New York Times, 1998)

“Liberties; Monica And Me,” NYTimes.com (1998)

“Monica vs. Maureen,” Salon.com (1998)

“Who’s That Girl?” Archive.VanityFair.com (1998)

“‘Ditsy, Predatory White House Intern,” Slate.com (2014)

[nicklloydnow]

“On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania put on a pathetic display on Capitol Hill when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment.

It depends, they all said. Penn’s Elizabeth Magill offered a chilling bit of legalese. “It is a context-dependent decision,” she told Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from upstate New York.

(…)

It’s hard to be on Stefanik’s side, given that she epitomizes the grotesque transformation of the Republican Party to an insane Trump cult, but she was right to pin down the prevaricating presidents.

Citing a Washington Free Beacon report, Stefanik noted in The Wall Street Journal that Harvard has cautioned undergraduates that “cisheterosexism” and “fatphobia” helped perpetuate violence and that “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as abuse.

When Stefanik asked Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying, Gay said it could, “depending on the context.”

(…)

“I think the inability of these individuals to articulate a simple, straightforward answer to what should have been the easiest question in the world was mind-boggling,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “It’s like a hurricane of hate in the last few months. You ask yourself, how is this happening? Now we know.” He added, “The truth is that these presidents are not committed to free speech. They’re committed to favored speech. They selectively enforce the codes of conduct when it works for them or their friends in the faculty lounge.”

Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal, has an essay on antisemitism in the next issue, echoing Greenblatt with a complaint about the “selective empathy” that made kaffiyehs “cool.”

(…)

“The culture on campuses is a culture of oppressors and oppressed. Israel is now Goliath and no longer David — though God knows it has mortal enemies capable of the most astonishing savagery. The Jews were long ago stricken from the rolls of the oppressed because they are seen as white and privileged. We are a culture which loves victims and worships victimization and gives great moral authority to victims, but we don’t treat all victims equally.”

(…)

I think this is still America. But I don’t understand why I have to keep making the case on matters that should be self-evident.

Why should I have to make the case that a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?

Why should I have to make the case that we can’t abandon Ukraine to the evil Vladimir Putin?

Why should I have to make the case that a young woman — whose life and future ability to bear children are at risk — should not be getting persecuted about an abortion by a shady Texas attorney general?

Why should I have to make the case that antisemitism is abhorrent?”

[justwatchmyeyes]

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

Maureen Dowd

[cannabisbusinessexecutive]

John Hickenlooper Talks Cannabis, Congress and Maureen Dowd's Infamous Edibles Trip

“Rescheduling to Schedule III is good…but it’s not perfect.” As governor of Colorado from 2011 to 2019, John Hickenlooper saw cannabis reform quickly snowball into full-blown legalization. Almost three years into his first term as a United States senator, he is getting accustomed to a much slower pace. Although initially opposed to legalization, Hickenlooper came around while governor — and went…

[porterdavis]

Quote of the Day

After all those years spent prosecuting the Five Families in New York, Giuliani surrendered himself to the lamest mob boss there ever was: Don Trump.

Maureen Dowd

[eggtrolls]

discussing changing the email on the family NYT account because my dad is terrible at forwarding emails and Hentrolls (mother) said no we can't do that, your father uses that email to communicate with Maureen Dowd

what

'oh, he emails Maureen Dowd all the time.'

does Maureen Dowd respond????

'sometimes, yes. that's why she's his favourite columnist.'

[tomorrowusa]

Trump is no victim. He creates victims. Trump is the first former president subjected to a special counsel investigation into whether he masterminded a coup attempt.    That's mind-blowing, especially since he's running for president again.

Maureen Dowd at the New York Times.

Investigations into Trump’s criminal and tax-evading activities are just getting started.

[dhaaruni]

“I was a woman of great power, and now I’ll be a woman of great influence."

[cleoselene]

No.

[mariacallous]