Braniacs for President (and Columnists) 2008!

To all three loyal readers out there, you may have noticed my hiatus. This past week, I flew to California to attend the wedding of a good friend from college and to spent some time with the parental units since I don't get to see them much seeing as how the entire continent divides us. I have been woefully oblivious of the news except for the Rosie/Elizabeth dust-up on The View (my mom watches the show and is, therefore, intrigued by this broohaha) and the lost whales in the San Fransisco Bay. I don't fault myself too much for being an un-knowledgeable citizen shirking my civil society responsibilities; after all, this is why there is vacation.

But, alas, vacations are not always truly vacations. In the process of waiting for one of my committee members to call me back about a paper that I am writing, I looked up what was going on in the world at the Washington Post. Luckily for me, today is Eugene Robinson's column in the post. For all of you who have never read his work, I believe that he is one of the smartest columnists in America and often writes about stories that other columnists ignore or writes about the more "common sense" angles of stories that other columnists treat as "horse-race" analyses.

Today, Robinson chose to write about the buzz surrounding Al Gore's run for office. Rather than focusing on Al Gore's weight as a factor about whether he would run, Robinson &mdash shock of all shocks &mdash decided to focus instead on his intelligence. I mean why would any one want to focus on that? Unfortunately, because intelligent people will have a difficult time getting elected:

Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.

While the entire column is worth the read, here is the part that I found particularly important:

Leave aside the question of whether Gore is even thinking about another presidential run, or how he would stack up against the other candidates. I'm making a more general point: One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades.

When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.

Huh, what an interesting concept...It would also seem to apply to columnists in the nation's papers of record &mdash too bad Eugene Robinson doesn't have the same notoriety as Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman.

UPDATE:While Maureen Dowd certainly deserves much criticism, I must also be fair and acknowledge that she has a very intellegent and well-written column [sub. required] this week on why President Bush can no longer be trusted on the war in Iraq.

Maureen Dowd: High School 'Queen Bee'

What does Maureen Dowd do when she wakes up in the morning? I mean, seriously, her latest column is about how Al Gore can't win because he is to fat (not to mention she repeatedly ignores the fact that he has said that he isn't running, that she cites no sources - even ones that might not be credible or anonymous - that indicate that Gore is running, or that the only information that she actually cites is an interview with Diane Sawyer which she watched on her T.V.

For those of you who don't want to pay to see the NYT article, here are the particularly "interesting" parts of the column:

"I'm not a candidate," he told Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America." "This book is not a political book. It's not a candidate book at all."

Of course, his protestation was lost given the fact that he was sitting in front of a screen blaring the message "The Race to '08," and above a crawl that asked "Will he run for the White House?"

That stupid Al Gore, I mean he goes from losing the 2000 election because of his brown suits to not being able to tell network executives not to put "Race to '08" when he is doing an interview on their network. Oh, but, wait!!! He does tell them on the show, for the next line in Dowd's column is:

He is so fixed on not seeming like a presidential flirt that he risks coming across as a bit of a righteous tease or a high-minded scold, which is exactly what his book is, a high-minded scolding. He upbraided Diane about the graphics for his segment, complaining about buzzwords and saying, "That's not what this is about."

So, one would think that Dowd would think that this was the right thing to do, but, no, actually she continues:

Diane was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: "Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, 'If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he's running.' Lost any weight?"

That poor Diane, just trying to do her job as a reporter and this man, Al Gore who obviously can't be trusted because he lied about inventing the internet and being the inspiration for "Love Boat", is now trying to not not run for President while not not not having a discussion about real political matters while not running for President which is why he shouldn't have the crawl beneath his name but not supposed to say that because he's not running for President. Make sense?^[1]. So how does Al respond?

Laughing obligingly, he replied: "I think, you know, millions of Americans are in the same struggle I am on that one. But look, listen to your questions. And you know, if the horse race, the cosmetic parts of this -- and look, that's all understandable and natural. But while we're focused on, you know, Britney and KFed and Anna Nicole Smith and all this stuff, meanwhile, very quietly, our country has been making some very serious mistakes that could be avoided if we the people, including the news media, are involved in a full and vigorous discussion of what our choices are."

He explained to James Traub of The New York Times Magazine that TV induces a sort of national trance because the brain's fear center, the amygdala, receives only a fraction of electrical impulses from the neocortex, and couldn't resist lecturing about the amygdala -- "which as I'm sure you know comes from the Latin for 'almond.'"

Huh? If Dowd isn't going to be a real reporter and schedule an interview with Gore herself (shock! why should she do that?), then she can at least listen to what he says on the boob tube. Oh, but she is too busy recounting what another reporter told her (seriously, why is she on the Times's payroll). And, what was her purpose in bringing up this conversation with Mr. Traub? So she could discuss a separate conversation she had with Mr. Traub:

Mr. Traub said that, as he followed the ex-vice president around, the Goracle was "eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn't know when his next meal will be coming."

That's right! We can't vote for Al Gore -- he's too fat! The only image that comes to mind is the high school popular girl who whispers behind people's backs loud enough so everyone can hear, "Do you know what she did last night..." or "I heard that he ate, like, an entire cow last night". So, you heard it from her lips: Britney broke up with KFed, Anna Nicole Smith died and Al Gore is too fat to be President. And this is the New York Times!!!

Oh, and in case you are interested (Dowd, playing the role of "Mean Girl", lowers voice and audibly whispers): "That Barack, he's too skinny. I mean, God, I would rather vote for Rudi, he's soooooo much cuter and more manly:"

Barack Obama is as slender as an adolescent and exercises constantly, but he still sometimes seems strangely tired on the campaign trail.

I'm glad that the nation's paper of record has such high political discourse.

[1] I would like to note that this confusion is not due to selective quoting. Every quote to this point is taken from subsequent paragraphs in the column.

Maureen Dowd is on Notice

Several weeks ago, I posted about Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a homophobic epithet. Wobblie noted in the comments that Bob Somerby had written about how Maureen Dowd was also complicit in painting Edwards as a "breck-girl" on at least five different times (repeating an insult slung by the White House press office). Since then, Dowd has also gained noteriety for writing (behind subscription wall) about John Edwards' hair cut and how Michelle Obama is emasculating her husband.

Hilzoy has written a couple of posts on Dowd's ability to play into the "Democratic men are wimpy and not 'man' enough to be President" while always relieving herself the responsibility of making these claims. She always says that she is simply reporting what "others" are thinking. I mean, she has no problem with these men, but others might, so she just wants to "report" it so that they can plan accordingly (as if no one knew that this was the standard screed about Democrats as if none of us remember how the entire RNC convention in 2004 was about how John Kerry wasn't "manly" enough [1].

Beyond calling Democrats "pretty boys" and aiding and abetting the Coulters and Cheneys of the world, today she is blaming Tenet, Colin Powell and Democrats for the war:

If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.

It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naive president into invading Iraq with junk facts.

General Powell counted on Slam Dunk -- a slender reed -- to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage the Cheney office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public.

It's also worth noting that, in a previous column, Dowd reverts to her criticism via "gender" analysis of Tenet: "Slam Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy’s guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi."

While I have no problem blaming Tenet for the disaster and agree with the CIA officials calling for him to accept blame for what happened donate half his royalties to the servicepeople wounded and killed in Irag; and Colin Powell certainly went the UN even though he really wasn't comfortable; and the Democrats were far too timid in the run up to the war; but I think that Dowd has selective amnesia that her own paper and Judith Miller also contributed. Or for that matter, that the President lied to the nation! I hope she keeps criticizing Tenet, but for goodness sake, can we stop blaming "timid Democrats" and start blaming "lying Presidents"?

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[1] This is when she's not making stuff up.