One of the things I love about Maureen Dowd--among the as many that I find aggravating, is how, resistant to the conventional wisdom of anti-intellectualism in politics, she manages to not only rhapsodize at length in highly referential language, with the kind of academic and literary heft that could benefit greatly from footnotes (and lots of them) but that she does so with the same biting, highly sexualized air of the most offensive and effective Republicans. She's a devilish man-baiter, and a diligent disciplinarian of the meek Left. In a national moment when the term milf is thrown around capriciously--I take this quite seriously, she is Empress Milf. The very definition. That she can carry that dusty volume of Stendhal Al Gore dropped in a mud puddle back in 2000, or that her impressions of Obama's then-emergent victory over Clinton in the Democratic primary led her to an analogy to Strauss' opera, Der Rosenklavier, prompts frustration, envy, and utter nerdout infatuation.
I do wish she wasn't so complacent with the gulf between her own articulate command of the canons of the West and a greater sense of indifference, or even vilification from a Right-goaded America--then again writing for The New York Times she knows her audience. But who among us can't share that frustration. And even as it chafes, the notion that anyone among us in her choir needs to hear those sermons for the gospel, when all we really care about is the song, is both delusional and counterproductive.
That said, fellow-choir singers, I find her synopsis of our gripping financial crisis highly gratifying. Be a good, blushing pinko like me and buy today's New York Times:
Republicans, who have won so many elections painting Democrats as socialists and pinkos, have now done so much irresponsible deregulating and deficit spending that they have to avoid fiscal Armageddon by turning America into a socialist, pinko society with nationalized financial institutions and a financial czar accountable to no one and no law.
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