The Biden candidacy leak and Clinton hatred

First, yes, such a thing as Clinton hatred exists, and not just among wingnuts.

Maureen Dowd

One primary residence it occupies is 620 Eighth Avenue in New York City, where, since 1992 (if not earlier), a bottled redhead op-ed columnist has maintained an intense hatred for All Things Clinton.

As lined out in detail by Politico, Joe Biden became, in essence, "his own leaker" to the New York Times about his possible presidential campaign. And, that bottled redhead, Maureen Dowd, took the bait and ran.

Per Politico and others noting this might undercut the image of Biden's emotional authenticity, I thought at the time of the leak that Biden's angling for the presidency was a bit creepy, on using emotions over his son's dying. Now, there's this add-on. The general public may not take note, but Democratic insiders will. This is starting to sound like the 1998 plagiarizer Biden. (And, as for me? This makes me, if anything, less likely to vote for Biden than Clinton. Not that I'll be voting for either one any time soon, either in Dem primaries or the general.)

Beyond that, not just in leaking in general, but in going straight to Dowd, Biden knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that Dowd bats vaguely liberal, is at "the paper of record," and has a lot of Democratic inside baseball followers. It was quite coldly calculating. Hell, maybe the dying Beau suggested it, Joe?

But, let's go back to MoJo Dowd.

As for her? The venom oozes. Here’s a sample:

Two controlling superstars with mutable hair and militant fans, married to two magnetic superstars who can make a gazillion an hour for flashing their faces and who have been known to stir up trouble. 

A pair of team captains craving a championship doing something surreptitious that they never needed to do to win. 

It turns out Tom Brady and Hillary Clinton have more in common than you would think.

This reminds me of a girls’ high school PE locker room fight, where the women fight more viciously than the men ever would.

Then, there’s the political bank shot that follows:

Many Democrats fret that she seems more impatient than hungry, more cautious than charismatic. They are increasingly concerned that, aside from the very liberal Bernie Sanders, who could be approaching his ceiling in the early states, there is no backup if something blows up.

We can’t have Bernie … so who?

She says Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been asked … and passed.

She them moves on from him to casually name drop the Vice President of the United States.

I seriously think the only thing that will satisfy her is the death of Bill and Hillary Clinton, or at least Hillary. Given that Biden, as Senate Judiciary chairman, made a total hash of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, somewhat throwing Anita Hill, and totally throwing other would-be but uncalled witnesses, under the bus, to do Biden a solid is anti-feminist.

As for Joe Biden? He's a lawyer; he knows the legal disbarment from using the unimpeachable words of a dying man, which is exactly why he included Beau's alleged "stop the Clintons at all costs" comments.

Note that I said "alleged." Beau Biden was a dying man, now dead; he can't be impeached or cross-examined to ask if he actually said that. Convenient, no?

For that matter, and to riff on Maureen Dowd, how much does Joe himself dislike the Clintons? Even if he doesn't run, he's stuck a nice shiv in the backs of both, and his hint of running put at least some Clinton fundraising on hold.

I'm sure he has no especial love for Bernie Sanders, but he could be hoping this helps Martin O'Malley.

MoJo Dowd writes a sensible, serious column?

Yes, and the lunar eclipse tomorrow will be a blue moon.

Seriously she writes about wondering whether DADT repeal will have any significance for the possibility of a gay president.

I called Barney Frank, assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic. He wasn’t. “It’s one thing to have a gay person in the abstract,” he said. “It’s another to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a gay presidential candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two men kissing.”

She gets other insights, too, from other people.

You know, if she'd write something like this once every three months, even, people wouldn't call her out so much on all her crap.

But, she doesn't.

Needed: White House "Director of Black Outreach"

First director? Shirley Sherrod.

“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon, “ said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black lawmaker so temperate that he agreed with an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday by Senator James Webb of Virginia, which urged that “government-directed diversity programs should end.”

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” Clyburn told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Damn, when did MoJo Dowd learn how to write a real op-ed?

MoJo Dowd now can't even SPELL right

In talking about her childhood-start crush on vampires, she spells the first name of Bela Lugosi (what other "Bela" could it be?) as "Bella."

MoJo Dowd: Dumber than usual?

Either that, or she's as bought-off as the other inside-the-Beltway/inside-the-Corridor journalists she defends for going to Joe Biden's journos' meet-and-greet.

Interesting that she talks about "cold French fries" as not being able to buy off DC mouthpieces, but not a word about how "hot insider access" actually can, and does, do the same.

David Brooks, possibly his dumbest ever

Is this "stupidest column week" at the New York Times? Earlier this week, Tom "My Head is Flat" Friedman may have outdone his usual inanity.

Now, it's David Brooks with a double whopper in the same column.

First, Brooks claims to be a "centrist," then he blames Team Obama for starting a "war" of big government vs. small government, conveniently ignoring Medicare Part D, TARP, off-budget war spending and all the other BushCo big government moves.

Kevin Drum has more on the second half of the issue, the Obama started it angle.

On the "centrist" issue, maybe in Boboland, or else in Faux News/Tea Party worlds, but in the reality-based community, David Brooks is nowhere near being a "centrist."

The scary part, if something really is in the Times' op-ed drinking water? Mojo Dowd's worst-ever column could be lurking just around the corner.

Our man Karzai laughs at us

In a rare actually good, and not just snarky, column, Maureen Dowd notes how much egg Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai put on U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' face, and by extension, President Barack Obama's. The column goes on to talk about his work in the greater Middle East in general.

It takes a bitchy woman to know one

Maureen Dowd, with no sense of self-irony in this, talks about how Sarah Palin has grabbed the political bitching title from Hillary Clinton

Dowd cracks Sarah Palin’s diary

Snark value aside, I’m not at all shocked that one hellcat would go after another like this. Give it a read, though. Maureen Dowd is both spot-on and has hit her Peter Principle groove.

MoJo Dowd actually makes a bit of sense – and Friedman

And, her column about humor-challenged Obamiacs (especially, I say, the “What White People Like” types), juxtaposes nicely with Tom Friedman also actually making sense, for him, about Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Both dip their toes a bit into ethnic issues.

Dowd:

“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.

And Friedman, deserving a longer excerpt:

But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.

As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Well, maybe it’s an advance when NYT columnists have gotten past political correctness enough to wonder out loud about these things.

Obama pander to Hillaryites flops

Like the proverbial blind pig and acorn, MoJo Dowd halfway makes sense in talking about the Obama-Clinton Unity-fest. Here’s the clueless line from Obama:

As Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears.

As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella (Lewis) tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears.

The line may have been funny 50 years ago, to society at that time, when uttered by a third-party in comparing Ginger Rogers to Fred Astaire.

In the first-to-second person, by Obama, at least as written out, it sounds like a lead balloon.

Of course, we have one humonguous hypocrisy alert by Dowd, for actually trying to appear to care about a woman’s issue.

For more, see my Hypocrisy alert tag.

Required reading for Amy Sullivan about ‘the black church’

Washington Post column Eugene Robinson, often underappreciated, makes clear there is no such thing as “the monolithic black church.”

(Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s) basic point — that any attack on him is an attack on the African American church and its traditions — is just wrong. In making that argument, he buys into the fraudulent idea of a monolithic, monocultural black America — one with his philosophy and theology at its center. …

The reality of the African American church, of course, is as diverse as the African American community. I grew up in the Methodist church with pastors -- often active on the front lines of the civil rights movement -- whose sermons were rarely exciting enough to elicit more than a muttered "Amen." They were excitement itself, however, compared with the dry lectures delivered by the priest at the Catholic church around the corner. And what I heard every Sunday was nothing at all like the Bible-thumping, hellfire-and-damnation perorations that filled my Baptist friends with the Holy Ghost -- and even less like the spellbinding, singsong, jump-and-shout sermonizing that raised the roofs of Pentecostal sanctuaries across town.

That said, Robinson also gets to the “throwing under the bus” line, which some white liberals, under the guise of calling it “overused,” seem to think is taboo.

Robinson says, clearly, that Wright threw Obama under the bus and it was time for Obama to return the favor.

Can white liberals who aren’t so skeptical be a little less PC at times?

Meanwhile, MoJo seeks new levels of inanity by comparing The Really Angry Black Man and Sort Of Angry Black Man. I don’t know if she saw all of Obama’s “denounce Wright” speech, or read the transcript; it’s clear that, like much of the MSM, she didn’t do that with Wright.

Would this make Maureen Dowd a ‘self-hating woman’?

Her critique of Hillary Clinton’s “shoulder-pad feminism” (good thing she didn’t write about feminine-pad feminism could almost serve as a parody on how to write an actual op-ed column. Bob Somersby is surely right on this one; MoJo has a stockpile of anti-Clinton hate she’s still venting. Perhaps the still bitterly single MoJo (and what’s with wearing black motorcycle boots to one of Obama’s campaign events in Dallas, Miss Red) is venting out of jealousy.

And, on the specifics, I don’t know if that was Josh’s intent, and he does get bashed by readers claiming he is both pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton, but his particular comments do seem to imply he thinks the “press hates Clinton” idea isn’t quite so true.

Dateline: Maureen Dowd and New York Times editorial deceit

A “Dateline: Kerry, N.H.” tag on a column about Hillary Clinton potentially crying her way to election loses a lot of objectivity and ethical credence when it was actually filed from Jerusalem about the obesity crisis.

Meanwhile, the column itself engages in psychobabble pseudo-analysis below even her normally vapid and puerile standards.