by Molly Ivors
Not Bitter™
MoDo today confesses a love for a bizarre form of fiction, which
seems to tell us a lot about her worldview.
Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there’s something eerie going on in this race.
Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.
Umm, yeah. Maureen knows all about demi-human creatures: there's one in her bathroom mirror every morning. And her living dead exes in the attic make moving a real trick. (Wow, that was obscure.)
She continues her fine tradition of calling Hillary Clinton a life-consuming succubus from hell, while simultaneously sneering at Obama for not smoking, exercising, eating right, and, his greatest crime in MoDo's book, not smacking women around either literally or figuratively. (She must really like Olbermann, who, as Somerby notes here, has, shall we say, a pattern of such behavior.) (h/t Susie.) No, the continued presence in his life of Hillary shows that he's not Dowd's version of a Real Man™. Maybe if he smoked Marlboros?
Oh, they'd probably be Lights.
Obama, she claims, has clearly been stung by the elitist label she (with her ubiquitous “starlet” designation) and others have attempted so desperately to affix to his back. Look, Maureen. A biracial kid raised partly by his grandparents is not a member of The Elect. I have issues with Obama, but he's good public servant, a very smart guy, and will be an excellent president.
This isn't about bowling or eating jello molds—activities I suspect Ariel herself doesn't indulge in much anymore. This isn't about how many suits he owns or pairs of shoes. (I for one, am supremely comfortable that Maureen's closet has, shall we say, certain aspects in common with those of Imelda Marcos and Carrie Bradshaw.) It's not about him calling you people out on your shitty coverage, like the debacle of the ABC debate, and the elevation and insertion of bullshit memes. (I shudder to think what my old pastor would say about me, were he asked.) He's done it, he's right to do it, it's not “wry whingeing” to note it. (As, I should note, it was not when Senator Clinton did it—and she's still paying the price, as per the Somerby link above.) Spin it all you want, but we out here sweating over feeding our families and filling our oil tanks and keeping our power on are not impressed with your imaginings of what you think he must be thinking. Sometimes a waffle is just a waffle, after all.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of MoDo's obsession with minutae is the grudging respect she seems to be developing for Hillary Clinton, who, in her reading, has transformed herself into a truck-stop-waitress-cum-mother-confessor for the masses. She doesn't sleep, she doesn't exercise, she eats chips (two-handed!), she takes shots both literal and figurative, she does not quit. She's “energetic, focused, and beaming.” Of course, she's also a life-consuming succubus from hell, so there's that.
Obama,
on the other hand, is “wan,” “gauzy,” “whiny,”
disdainful, “fatigued,” and “unable to disguise being fed up
with the slog.” (Oh, c'mon. Who isn't, at this point?) People on
the road tell him to sleep, to have a drink. MoDo says he's “lost
his pizazz” even giving a speech in “an uninspired setting—a
gas station.” Clearly, Maureen has missed the last six months: for
many of us, gas stations are areas of high drama these days,
wondering where our banks have set the random cap on how much gas
we're allowed to buy. (A month ago, it was $55. Yesterday, $75. Why
are we not calling this rationing, again?) Were Obama to choose to
speak outside a Sam's Club, with individuals carrying out their
corporationally limited bags of rice, I'm sure she'd also be annoyed, and mention how elites don't eat carbs.
Wankerific Joe Klein accidentally told the truth the other day when he noted that the qualities pundits think necessary for the presidency may not be the ones the people think are important, or even the ones necessary to do the job. Not that we needed to hear that: we who have been living under the Reign of Prince Have-a-Beer-Withability know the punditocracy is full of crap. But they make opinion, they set narratives, they advance memes. Maureen—and Joe, actually—are doing more than any Clinton to make Obama unelectable: they're impugning his character, ignoring his record, and focusing on the least of our issues. Just like they did to her.
And don't think we haven't noticed.