Thursday, March 17, 2005
Who is Maureen Dowd?
"If 'The New York Times' is liberal, then I'm Sean Hannity", the liberal lawyer told Fox News yesterday, as host Bill O'Reilly buried half his head in a hand and strained, successfully, to maintain poise and continue the interview.
Which was admirable professionalism on the part of O'Reilly. Many in Fox's audience are well aware of the steadfast denial of bias parroted in defence of the Bush is Bad News and MSM, even as the same defenders ruthlessly employ the Stalinist tactic of accusatory projection of their own ills. Still, it's jaw-dropping stuff when you actually witness someone trying to recite the doggerel with a straight face.
Underlined by the appearance on US TV last night of fanatical NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, equivocating in response to the Comedy Central host's question of whether she hated the Bushes. She said she reserved words like hate and animosity for use in her personal life.
I'd believe that. That she has a lot of room for such words in her personal life, that is.
She doesn't strike this observer as a particularly solid individual, the kind who might, for example, be able herself to withstand even a fraction of the public abuse she dishes out to Republican figures.
Even if such abuse was fair and not angry verbiage, as it appears to be in most cases. Why someone of her low credibility level occupies breathes front page oxygen at a major newspaper is a mystery to me. Since Bush was elected there have been numerous occasions that her apparently bigoted (and never ending) attacks on Jewish neo-conservatives, the President, Messrs Cheney and Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and other high-ranking Republican figures have attracted attention.
But the attention centres around the intensity of the muck-raking, combined with the fact of its placement at the NYT. The attention doesn't appear to have emanated from the actual plausibility of the writer's political opinion.
Hence to me, she has hardly been worth commenting on. In fact, I wouldn't want to disturb her position. I regard her as something of an asset to non-Democrats.
Now what did that lady, the O'Reilly guest, say about that relative shrinking wall-flower, Sean Hannity ...?
