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the principle that some things can't be said too often, let it be
said once again: Maureen Dowd's column is becoming
one of the worst in the business. Tim
Graham rapped her for terminal shallowness last week on NRO
after she blasted Clarence Thomas for his AEI speech. Dowd wouldn't
know a political principle if it showed up on the menu at Elaine's
or The Palm between the almond-crusted salmon and braised lamb chops.
So, she predictably found Thomas's call for courage in the pursuit
of an ideas-based politics mystifying and gauche. Her latest effort
— on
Sunday — criticizes George W. Bush for bombing Iraq, supposedly
in a reverse-Oedipal compulsion to vindicate his father.
Now, there are plenty of plausible grounds for knocking last week's
raid: as a bootless and destructive act of American belligerence,
or as another act of symbolism that will never succeed in dislodging
Saddam, or as something in between. But Dowd's charge is laughably
unsophisticated and dumb. Bill Clinton launched a similar raid at
the beginning of his administration. Was he too trying to vindicate
George Bush? "If the Bush name was tarnished by leaving Saddam in
power, W. can fix that," Dowd writes. Well, actually he can't fix
that. At least not by bombing a handful of SAM sites. This is what
unites Bush's first Iraqi raid with Clinton's initial one: they
both are the product of a policy of wishful thinking, an unwillingness
to undertake the hard work to achieve the goal — deposing Saddam
— that is so fervently hoped for.
But Dowd would never make a criticism along these lines. Because
it involves policy. It might mean learning some facts
and trying to analyze them in a coherent and sustained
way. It might, in other words, entail argument, something
Dowd amazingly manages to avoid despite writing a couple of columns
a week. Instead, she postures and engages in Jesse Jackson-style
word play. Her columns are often just high-toned, artful limericks,
toying with oppositions that she pairs into riffs that sometimes
— as with her Bush piece on Sunday — take up most of a
column.
They go something like this: "Maureen Dowd once wrote contentless,
snarky columns about Bill Clinton having sex.
| “She
has no substantive anchor and ends up following the conventional
wisdom the way ayatollahs follow the Koran.” |
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Now she writes contentless, snarky columns about George W. Bush
not having sex. "She used to write slashing columns attacking Bill
Clinton's critics, when everyone else in the media was too. Now
she writes slashing columns attacking Bill Clinton, when everyone
else in the media is too. "Her precious wordplay and pop cultural
references used to be tiresome. Her precious wordplay and pop cultural
references are still tiresome."
Go on like that for 800 words and you essentially have a Maureen
Dowd column. I hate to say it, but it is almost more worthwhile
reading Paul Krugman. At least he has ideas. All Dowd has is attitude,
which means that she has no substantive anchor and ends up following
the conventional wisdom the way ayatollahs follow the Koran. This
is advice one hopes never to have to give anybody, but…she
should read a Brookings policy paper or a Heritage backgrounder
every now and then. It won't happen, of course. She not only lacks
ideas, but seems to have no interest in acquiring any, which would
cramp her (often quite marvelous) style. It's a shame: Maureen Dowd
sure can write, she just can't think.
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