Invidious Schadenfreude

This blog shed no tear when Romney went down.   The primary campaign was farcical, unworthy of a national party;  the choice of an unrepentant financial speculator to lead the nation out of a crisis caused largely by financial speculators, the opposite of what was needed; his consorting with truly unsavory characters like Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelman should disqualify him from public office of any sort; and the general-election campaign was vapid and full of half-truths and lies.  But today’s NYTimes column by Maureen Dowd  was a worse than unworthy response.

“Mitt Romney is the president of white male America,” she chortles  -- bringing this white male, who relentlessly opposed him throughout, up short.    

She doubles down:  “Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House,” and so on in this vein.  Nothing is said about what really justified a vote against him -- his Etch-a-Sketch emptiness, his dizzying swivels on health care,  his economic illiteracy, his pandering to the forces of science-denial, his courting of the most rightwing factions in Israel, egging them on to war --  rather, it is his sex and his race that are held against him.  “In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core….” 

(In the print edition  this satisfying phrase -- the Bobo equivalent of the ‘sixties epithet Male Chauvinist Pig -- was promoted to a subhead as well: “Listen closely and hear the death rattle of the white male patriarchy.”)

Can you imagine if a columnist were to publish such a column, but with the races and sexes reversed? As, calling Obama the President of the "Black House"?

The queasy-making performance is not unique for that columnist (and I’m not picking on small fry here -- she was awarded a Pulitzer, and this particular column rates as today's Times "most e-mailed"):  she was among the most acidulous in the vile and Harpies-like pursuit of Bill Clinton.

[Update]  I don't normally read Ms. Dowd's column, but a glance at the readers' comments to today's column suggests that she is not much easier on Obama than on Romney.  Our President finds a better defender in the sagacious Robert Caro, mentioned here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/11/making-best-of-bad-bargain.html

[Further update]  Now really curious, I surfed the Net a bit, and landed on this:

Virgin "Mega"-store in Union Square slowly has decreased its book selections down to four basic categories comics, porn, pop culture and gay.

For whatever reason (okay, it's obviously the title) Maureen Dowd has been shelved under "Gay & Lesbian Interest". 

The title alluded to turns out to be a book she wrote, Are Men Necessary -- an ideological echo of the self-pleasing feminist (or rather, onanist) slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”.  Still, it’s an amusing title -- stylistically, it echoes the James Thurber satirical classic, Is Sex Necessary -- and I would certainly begrudge nobody their bit of satire, no matter how over-the-top.  But apparently her pen is filled, not with giggle-juice, but bile, as witness this review by an Amazon reader

Dowd has absolutely nothing useful or interesting to say. I think her book is summed up by the 'pink change purse' that she gave to a young friend that says 'BOYS ARE STUPID, THROW ROCKS AT THEM.' Leaving aside the utter obnoxiousness of this (think of an item of clothing that read 'Blacks are stupid, throw rocks at them', "Jews are stupid, etc.') the sentiment truly explains her problem. She wants to throw rocks at a certain group of people and thinks that in spite of this, they should be interested in or attracted to her (or women of her sort). Wake up and smell the coffee, Maureen! You don't need evolution to explain why you haven't been able to get married. Maybe men are dumb, as you endlessly say in this book, but they are sure smart enough to stay away from rock-throwing women. Ooof!
P.S. I am a female Yale graduate. I've been happily married for 23 years, so its not being smart that is the problem. I have three sons who I am raising to stay away from women like Maureen!

In short, it would appear that the tart-tongued Ms. Dowd is (word-of-the-day for you here)  a misandrist (mirror-image counterpart of the misogynist). 

~

For a negative answer to the question, "Are Men Necessary?", click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/notice-of-de-commission.html