Queen Everything

 by Molly Ivors

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Maureen Dowd. You sit down twice a week and ruminate about feng shui or getting your chakras read or how hot you think Barack is and how that meanie old Hillary won't go away, or how Bill got oral sex this one time and wasn't it great because you got a Pulitzer for that!

It's a helluva living, you have to admit. All you had to do to stay on the gravy train was sneer at girly democrats and reminisce about your dad and do your level best to keep the status quo shallow, focused on image rather than policy. To be sure, there was a sense of forced outrage about it all, but you contributed to the kneecapping of an American president, the belittling of his would-be heir, and the elevation of the functionally retarded scion of a family with decades-long connections to genuine evil, a man who had done more to destroy America domestically, internationally, and globally than anyone could have imagined, but hey! it was all in good fun.

There were flashes on conscience in there, flashes which brought you a book contract, but some nights you knew, as you lay awake at 3am, that your relentless trivialization of the national conversation was directly responsible for the state you parodied in your book.

Still, you got paid for it, and well. If this isn't what Pinch wanted, you wouldn't be pulling down the big bucks, after all. You may even have convinced yourself, now and again, that you were providing some kind of public service.

And then tell me how you can possibly excuse yourself from culpability for a system in which actual reporting is outsourced to barely-English speakers.  If you hadn't successfully ridden the wave of trivialization that demeaned real reporting, maybe people wouldn't think press releases and webcams were an acceptable substitute for feet on the ground. This didn't come out of nowhere, Maureen. Look in the mirror.

Comments

[Ruth]

That mirror draws you in by trick answers, like you're the Fairest. Forget about Balanced.

When hits at WaPo are described in their yearly tally as indicators of 'popularity', which ignores the number of critiques readers/commenters try to imbed on the register of public opinion, the writer can imagine her trivia is worth attention. If the measure were taken in papers sold, a rapidly diminishing number, those pundit aspirants might be held to a higher standard. Wish it would happen, but the editors are as guilty as their pets of trivial mentality.

[Virginia]

Hey, it's humor! Can't you liberals take a goddamned joke?????

(It's supposed to be funny, right? I can't tell anymore.)

[DrDick]

Can we send MoDo to the Hague for crimes against humanity? I know we will never get the fortunate son and prince of darkness there, but can't we at least have MoDo. And little Tommy "Suck on this" Friedman.

[dave™©]

A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.

God doesn't love me THAT much...

[billy b]

That's great, Molls.

I get the same feeling reading one of Dowd's columns that I do when watching an old Jerry Lewis movie.

[julia]

I've always said there was one thing that would get the Times Op Ed page to feel a real concern about the damage done by keeping unsustainable business models going by casual outsourcing.

I guessed this was going to be it.

[julia]

and that said, given what I've read about the cultural imperatives in Bangalore, I suspect that fellow's columns about President Obama will have a slightly different focus.

[cosmic tumbler]

MoDo lives in a dollhouse. Her columns are the fantasy ramblings of an 8-year-old. Her presence as a "liberal" in the OpEd section of the NYT, so diminished the intellectual integrity and status of that editorial body that they were recently able to hire Billy Kristol as a "conservative thinker" without blinking an eye. Dowd and Kristol are incompetent hacks that do not represent an honest debate between liberals and conservatives in this country. And, of course we all know that little Tommy-Suck-On-This is the literary equivalent of a fop.

Molly, thanks for the breadth and clarity of your summation.

[marindenver]

I have been literally unable to read MoDo's "commentary" for years due to the painful feeling of the rush of brain cells out into the powerful intellectual vacuum created by her "musings." Thank you, Molly, for being our Joel McHale and reading them so we don't have to! But please, for your children's sake, don't expose yourself any more than is absolutely professionally necessary!

I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.

There is a goddess!

The guy in Bangalore probably doesn't give a rat's ass about presidential blowjobs.

His English probably isn't good enough to come up with Ariel's excruciatingly juvenile plays-on-words.

[Jemand von Niemand]

Spot on, Molly.

Dowd -- Feh.

[stillonmt]

Course you have to like the last sentence of the online version of the column.

[Kaleberg]

Apropos her recent column "A Penny For My Thoughts": they overpaid.