The Dullness of Dowd
Maureen Dowd’s column is becoming one of the worst in the business.

February 20, 2001 3:25 p.m.

n 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. 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 of 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.