DIRECT FROM THE CHERRY ORCHARD! Diane Ravitch keeps toying with facts. It’s time for her to go:
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2011
Just this side of insane: Wow! Someone at the New York Times can look at an iconic photo from the integration of Little Rock’s Central High and offer this astonishing caption:
“In 1957 in Little Rock, Ark., the shirtwaist became a symbol of stoic resistance in a battleground over segregation.”
On-line, that caption has been cleaned up (click here). But in our hard-copy paper, the fact remains—to someone at the New York Times, the Little Rock Nine are remembered today for making a type of fashion statement! That said, Maureen Dowd’s new column is crazier still—goes even farther in helping us see the soul of a truly deranged “journalistic” upper class.
For years, it has been fairly clear that Dowd is just this side of crazy. Today, she shouts this fact from beginning to end. As she starts, she quickly descends into her familiar old world—the world of broken-souled gender obsession, with broken old boy/girl tropes drawn straight from the 1950s:
DOWD (3/23/11): They are called the Amazon Warriors, the Lady Hawks, the Valkyries, the Durgas.
There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war. And there is something positively predictable about guys in the White House pushing back against that story line for fear it makes the president look henpecked.
Dowd is back to her compulsive portrait of the “delicate” Obama—the former “diffident debutante,” who today may look a bit “henpecked.” By paragraph 6, she is quoting Rush Limbaugh on the subject; two grafs later, she is stroking herself and purring to think that Rush is “on the same side” as fearsome Samantha Power. Her piece is disordered from its start to its end. Might this be the height of her lunacy?
DOWD: When President Obama listened to his militaristic muses, it gave armchair shrinks lots to muse about. As one wrote to me: “Cool, cerebral president chooses passion and emotion (human rights, Samantha, Hillary, Susan) over reason and strategic thinking (Bob Gates, Tom Donilon). Is it the pattern set up by his Mom and Michelle—women have the last word?”
Good God. Most “journalists” play the armchair shrink without explicitly endorsing the process. Not Dowd! She’s proud to quote an unnamed amateur friend, who quickly wonders if the Libya bombing comes to us straight from Obama’s late mother. And yes—at one point, Lady Dowd even finds a way to bring Obama’s daughters in. But then, Dowd has always been like this—as have her inane friends.
From beginning to end, Dowd’s piece is just this side of insane—but see if your favorite “career liberals” tell you! (See if you hear it on Hardball! See if Joan blurts the truth!) You live in a world where one of our most famous journalists has been bat-crazy out of her gourd for years. But inside the halls of Versailles, the great gods Career and Advancement hold sway. Editors wave Dowd’s lunacy into print; the other denizens frolic and play. When they see photos of the Little Rock Nine, they think about the fashion statements those brave high school students were making.
Go ahead—look around today! Maureen Dowd is out of her mind. See how many folk tell you.
