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Editor's
note: Maureen Dowd was in attendance at the AEI dinner.
 ack in the glorious
1980s when I interned at the National Journalism Center in Washington,
Stan Evans would always
tell aspiring scribes about the waterbug analogy. So many reporters
only skim along the surface, he would explain, repeating all the
conventional wisdom without doing the hard work of diving deep into
the details, where the great journalists go to educate the public.
Without dehumanizing the lovely lady, Maureen Dowd is a waterbug.
Wait, the Dowd crowd might protest, she's just a columnist, not
a reporter. She's expected to dazzle us with her writing chops,
and make lots of Hollywood analogies, and generally be cute. She's
a wit, a wag, a nag, but she's not going to do hospital-bed interviews
with Bob Woodward.
This
morning, the target of Dowd's surface-to-airheads missile was
Clarence Thomas, who received an award at an American Enterprise
Institute dinner last night. (Not that Dowd was there, necessarily
— she usually sends some young guy to crash parties in her
place.) "There is nothing like stealing a presidential election
to put a little wind in a guy's sails. After 10 years in the shadows,
after a mute decade on the bench, Clarence Thomas had a black-tie
coming-out party last night The Garbo of the Supreme Court talked.
And talked. And talked. And what Justice Thomas said was pretty
bellicose." (In contrast to the current Bush love-bomb strategy,
Thomas said civility is not much of a principle if our principles
are cannibalized.)
Waterbug boo-boo number one: There's a wee difference between staying
quiet in Supreme Court oral arguments, and never speaking in public.
Justice Thomas may not try to match Anita Hill in network interviews,
where the Katie Courics fawn and faint, but he speaks in public
fairly regularly, as any C-SPAN junkie could tell you. Most recently,
he explained the Supreme Court to students shortly after the Bush
v. Gore decision. In 1999, he made a standing-ovation appearance
at the Media Research Center's "Dishonor Awards" dinner, where he
accepted an "award" on behalf of black leftist Julianne Malveaux,
who had used those civility-plagued airwaves of PBS to proclaim
that she hoped Mrs. Thomas would feed the justice lots of eggs and
butter so he'd die young of heart disease. Thomas assured the crowd
to whoops and cheers that his doctor said his cholesterol levels
were very good.
Dowd also ignores where Thomas speaks loudest and deepest, in his
written opinions for the Supreme Court, but the waterbugs don't
waste precious minutes reading things when they can recycle ten-year-old
impressions gleaned at the knee of Nina Totenberg.
Then Dowd reached the bottom of the insult barrel for her primary
thesis: "The hourlong speech was so self-pitying and
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feminism is about as thoroughgoing as her journalism.” |
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self-aggrandizing
that it evoked comparison to Bill Clinton's defense for pardoning
Marc Rich, when he said that it was easy to say no and took courage
to say yes. Yesterday was bracketed with celebrations of two men
who had history's most humiliating Senate hearings over tangles
with female subordinates and sex-harassment charges."
Waterbug boo-boo number two: Has there ever been a facile comparison
more ridiculous than this one? Both men were charged with sexual
harassment, so why bother to distinguish between the one who had
a People's Court trial on daytime TV with no legal standards
of evidence, and the one who paid $850,000 and surrendered his law
license for five years? Why bother to distinguish between the man
whose alleged harassment target was compared to Sojourner Truth
and Harriet Tubman, versus the man whose target was compared to
Daisy Dogpatch and Penthouse centerfolds? Many more things
separate Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton rather than conjoin them.
For expert analysis of Thomas, Dowd reaches for an august academic
journal: "As Ebony magazine recently wrote of Justice Thomas:
'Why does it appear that he consistently votes for issues supported
by racists and archconservatives, and opposed by…almost all
blacks?'"
Waterbug boo-boo number three: When the current regime of racial
preferences is compared with the principle of color blindness, of
employment and contracting decisions based on merit rather than
skin color, ignore that principle, and suggest that color blindness
is "supported by racists and archconservatives." Dowd will find
no "racists and arch-liberals" in the NAACP or the Congressional
Black Caucus. That would require a few headache-inducing moments
of balancing the ideological poles and considering the bellicosity
of Maxine Waters, or the aforementioned Malveaux.
Dowd concluded by smiting Larry Thompson, a Thomas friend slated
to serve under John Ashcroft as Deputy Attorney General. She claimed
he "played a particularly unsavory role during the Senate hearings
as the member of the Thomas defense team designated to bolster the
ludicrous notion that Ms. Hill may have suffered from a rare mental
disorder known as erotomania--the 'nutty and slutty' defense." She
quotes from a Thomas-bashing book (!) called Strange Justice
by liberal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson that Thompson
suggested they undercut Hill's polygraph test results with the suggestion
of erotomania.
Waterbug boo-boo number four: There's no doubt that Thompson will
be grilled on this subject by Senate Democrats to see if Mayer's
and Abramson's reporting stands up. But their book is riddled with
errors (not to mention regular mentions of the "far right," the
"conservative fringe," and the "redneck" opponents of Saint Anita).
In a 22-page evisceration of the book (he called it a "hoax") in
The American Spectator, David Brock noted even Nina Totenberg
wouldn't go as far as Mayer and Abramson did to suggest Thomas suffered
from a porno-mania of sorts.
Abramson and Mayer claimed a man named Frederick Cooke "saw Thomas…standing
with a triple X videotape entitled The Adventures of Bad Mama
Jama." But later in the book, a note on page 330 read: "Reached
on two separate occasions, Cooke would neither confirm nor deny
the account." Brock even noted that Nina Totenberg told him "Cooke
wouldn't talk to me, so it wasn't a story," and also that the owner
of the video store supposedly supplying Thomas with porn videos
was "scuzzy, not reliable." In July of 1995, when Abramson faced
callers on C-SPAN trying to question the book's reliability, she
refused to try and defend it.
Dowd has relentlessly stood in Anita Hill's corner and thrown stones
at Justice Thomas, unlike her daisy-plucking consistency on Bill
Clinton (I love him, I love him not, I love him). Her feminism is
about as thoroughgoing as her journalism.
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