by Molly Ivors
Stoopid voters, screwing up MoDo's nicely planned column! How dare you! She's been working for months to recast Hillary Clinton as the she-Cheney, and every time there's a caucus or a vote, we keep fucking it up. Naughty voters!
Gah, let's just hope she doesn't get out her patented Debate Dominatrix Rubber Bustier for the occasion.
Yes, Ariel's growing increasingly desperate to besmirch both of the major Dem candidates with every weapon she can possibly muster, and the terms are getting, well, goofy as hell. I may have to give up this line of work if this keeps up, because it's a little like picking on Ann Althouse: when she's that batshit, it's almost mean.
But I have committed for at least a bit longer to revealing this particular shallow, divisive, and damaging form of psychosis, and so I shall.
In today's freaky installment, HRC has become the Queen of Darkness:
I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.
Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.
Because, you know, it's not like she has policies or leadership or anything like that. No, because this is her psychodrama, it must by definition be their psychodrama as well.
But what's concerning me now is her lens shifting to Senator Obama, an intelligent and gifted public servant who genuinely seems to have tapped into something valuable in our body politic. But MoDo cannot see him as anything other than Baby Stewie in an Oedipal spat with bossy and oh-so-deserving-of-abuse Mother Lois. Her desire to cast him as a quixotic newbie--though she appears to be rooting for his Parsifalian, Galahadian quest, if only because she hates Hillary so much--belittles him, and sets up the New Meme: The Naif in the Woods, in Way over his Head. The shorthand for this rhetorical poison pill is "Prince Barack," which she's been using more often these days. Today, she points to the same medieval structures without invoking that term specifically, but her meaning is clear.
The relentless Hillary has been the reticent Obama’s tutor in the Political School for Scandal. He is learning how to take a punch and give one back. When she presents her mythic narrative, the dragon she has slain is the Republican attack machine. Obama told me he doesn’t think about mythic narratives, and Tuesday night in Chicago he was reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”
But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.
Jesus fuck. Fuck you, Maureen. Honestly.
Part of me thinks that she's just trying to calculate her way back to another Pulitzer: if she can manipulate and destroy the candidates now, she can pick who she gets to smear for the next eight years, who's likely to provide her with better fodder for her own peculiar brand of commentary. But I admit, I cringe from the cynicism such calculation would imply. To apply those terms to her writing career means that fresh material means more to her than human lives. So I ask: Are a million dead Iraqi kids worth that lactation comment, Mo? How about the 40K walking (and sometimes not walking) wounded young of our own nation? It's okay because Gore wore a brown suit and consulted with Naomi Wolff instead of you, right? And what harvest will this flurry of shallow analysis precipitate? Nuclear War in the Middle East? Modest swimwear on the beaches, courtesy of President Huckabee? Maybe 0% taxes on unearned income, because, you know, the wealthy are just such darn nice folks? And free jello molds for all!
My point all along has been that MoDo, in dealing in the most meaningless and shallow terms, makes all the Dem candidates unelectable. And look where she's focusing her eyes and pen. Don't let her do it to another Democratic candidate. She needs to be put out to pasture somewhere she can use her gifts. Joan Rivers is getting pretty long in the tooth, maybe E! needs another red carpet catty bitch. That'd be an excellent job for her. But she absolutely must stop fucking up the country from the Op-Ed page of the NY Times.
After all, MoDo, the next Gorgon head might be your own.