(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
Yes, I am beginning to think along her lines, but it is not easy being Obama. Ralph Nader called things eight or nine years ago, and both parties are somewhat the same when realities of lobbiests and foreign affairs loom.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html?em
Showing posts with label dowd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dowd. Show all posts
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Dowd, Oh Dowd!
Op-Ed Columnist
Pharisees on the Potomac
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 18, 2009
Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.
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They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.
Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?
No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.
Loverboy Mark Sanford’s career continued to go south last week as news organizations exposed his two-faced tactics on travel expenses. When he ran for South Carolina governor in 2002, he attacked the Democratic incumbent for “lavish spending” on hotels and planes. Once elected, he asked state employees to bunk together in hotel rooms when they traveled and chastised staffers who spent more than the $208 federal rate.
But, as Politico reports: “He routinely billed taxpayers for high-end airline seats, racking up more than $44,000 on business and first-class tickets. He often stayed in pricey hotels that far exceeded the rates he imposed on other state employees.” On a trade mission to China, Sanford spent $12,000 on business-class tickets, leaving aides in economy for about $1,900.
The religious boardinghouse in Washington where Sanford sought succor from fellow conservatives, where he agonized to pals about his tango with the enticing María, is also back in the news. Affiliated with a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship — which also sponsored Bible study and prayer circles attended by Hillary Clinton when she was a senator — the pious dwelling is becoming a tourist attraction, a monument to Republican hypocrisy.
The C Street house, as the flag-flying brick rowhouse near the Capitol is known, serves as a residence and Bible study retreat for many Christian conservative lawmakers. But it looks as if what these guys were praying for was a chance to get lucky.
John Ensign, the Promise Keeper who broke all his promises, resides there. As The Washington Post reported, Senator Tom Coburn, who lives there, had an emotional meeting about forgiveness at the house with Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress. (Forgiveness plus bribery can often do the trick.) Coburn says he would not talk to a court or the Senate ethics committee about the episode because he was counseling Ensign partly as a doctor. (Coburn is an ob-gyn.)
Last week, The Associated Press revealed that the estranged wife of a former Republican congressman, Chip Pickering of Mississippi, had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit seeking damages against her husband’s gal pal, a wealthy former college sweetheart named Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd.
The suit charges that as a lawmaker, Chip used C Street as a divine love nest. “Ultimately,” it says, “Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her.”
Republican hypocrisy fell flat at the Sotomayor hearings. After railing all week against the “empathy standard,” as Senator Jeff Sessions called it, the Republicans tried to play the empathy card by calling in two New Haven firefighters, one white and one Hispanic, who were on the losing end of Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling. Wearing their dress uniforms, the pair told their heart-tugging tales of studying for an exam that got thrown out after they scored high. Frank Ricci, who studied hard to overcome his dyslexia, used his finger to trace under the words as he read his testimony.
But the Republican complaint against Sotomayor in that case boiled down to wanting her to be more activist. They were upset that she sided with elected officials and precedent rather than intervening to strike down a result that many people, including me, found unfair.
Sotomayor’s syntax was unfathomable, but the Republicans’ language sounded positively archaic: dire warnings against activist judges, when the conservative majority on this Supreme Court has ignored or upended precedent in a slew of cases.
Judge Sotomayor kept her feelings in check, while her white male Republican interrogators dissolved into whining about wanting to keep their guns and nunchakus and wishing they could get back some sway over what women do with their bodies.
If they are so interested in women’s bodies, maybe they should just move to C Street.
RecommendNext Article in Opinion (1 of 31) » A version of this article appeared in print on July 19, 2009, on page WK11 of the New York edition.
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Dowd -- Saturday Night Live Material
Hilarious, but "true?" Matches the best of Hunter S. Thompson and Justice Thomas and the prostitutes and sheep. (See earlier in my blog. Click on Hunter S. Thompson).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29dowd.html
Sunday, April 5, 2009
No Way to Categorize This Good Dowd Piece
A good read into the mind of Obama on a grey Sunday morning in Cincinnati:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/opinion/05dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/opinion/05dowd.html
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
A Red-Letter Day For Blogging!
Transcript!!!
Hank Greenberg and Meredith Whitney, Gretchen Morgenson and Carol Loomis!
Hank Greenberg and Meredith Whitney, Gretchen Morgenson and Carol Loomis!
Bernanke interrupts....
AIG!
Let me start with a personal insight: trading again after ten years (after all the investment advisors screwed up my money, why can't I do the same thing and have fun doing it?) I note that no sooner than my finger is off the mouse with a "market order" to buy GE it is "executed." Not a milisecond wait. Literally!
Suppose I had bought 10 million shares instead of 260 shares? Supposing I made a mistake on that 10 million shares.
In trading "slippage" happens. When it happens with big money, big bad things happen. More later. This may or may not be relevant to what follows.
AIG!
Let's start with the NYT's excellent interview with legal authorities:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/when-bonus-contracts-can-be-broken/
But I came into the kitchen 10 minutes ago because of such a wonderful first 1/2 hour of Charlie Rose just now (an hour delayed),
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/838
also on AIG.
The discussion was so important that it temporarily changed my view of Hank Greenberg from negative to possibly positive, and introduced me to at least one new hero: Carol Loomis of Fortune.
This Charlie Rose is so important that I am going to take my laptop and do a verbatim while rewatching the 1/2 hour (the other 1/2 hr deals with Pakistan). Then I will put it in below (above).
But first the incomparable Dowd on this topic!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/opinion/18dowd.html?_r=1
From that piece:
"Boiling mad that A.I.G. made more than 73 millionaires in the unit that felled the firm, Cuomo called the company’s counsel on Monday to demand that she stop payment on the checks. Cuomo was informed that the money had already been direct-deposited in the accounts of the derivative scoundrels with the push of a button."
Again:
"...[T]he money had already been direct-deposited in the accounts of the derivative scoundrels with the push of a button."
And Friedman, clumsy and unknowledgeable on financial matters, (he misdescribes credit default instruments of AIG, but so what) still highly relevant on this topic of AIG:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/opinion/18friedman.html
Leonhart chimes in, not so artfully:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/business/economy/18leonhardt.html
But Ah! Morgenson!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/business/18aig.html?ref=economy
"Even though A.I.G. finally disclosed the names of the institutions that received so much of the government money that was thought to be going to A.I.G., the idea that it took six months still rankles some market participants."
“'The system was undermined by asking the American people, under the veil of secrecy, to bail out one company when in fact they wanted to bail out someone else,'” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an authority in structured finance and a founder of R & R Consulting, a firm that helps investors gauge debt risks. “The prospectus for the bailout was not delivered to the people. And it was not delivered because if it had been, the deal would not have gone through.”
Let me start with a personal insight: trading again after ten years (after all the investment advisors screwed up my money, why can't I do the same thing and have fun doing it?) I note that no sooner than my finger is off the mouse with a "market order" to buy GE it is "executed." Not a milisecond wait. Literally!
Suppose I had bought 10 million shares instead of 260 shares? Supposing I made a mistake on that 10 million shares.
In trading "slippage" happens. When it happens with big money, big bad things happen. More later. This may or may not be relevant to what follows.
AIG!
Let's start with the NYT's excellent interview with legal authorities:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/when-bonus-contracts-can-be-broken/
But I came into the kitchen 10 minutes ago because of such a wonderful first 1/2 hour of Charlie Rose just now (an hour delayed),
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/838
also on AIG.
The discussion was so important that it temporarily changed my view of Hank Greenberg from negative to possibly positive, and introduced me to at least one new hero: Carol Loomis of Fortune.
This Charlie Rose is so important that I am going to take my laptop and do a verbatim while rewatching the 1/2 hour (the other 1/2 hr deals with Pakistan). Then I will put it in below (above).
But first the incomparable Dowd on this topic!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/opinion/18dowd.html?_r=1
From that piece:
"Boiling mad that A.I.G. made more than 73 millionaires in the unit that felled the firm, Cuomo called the company’s counsel on Monday to demand that she stop payment on the checks. Cuomo was informed that the money had already been direct-deposited in the accounts of the derivative scoundrels with the push of a button."
Again:
"...[T]he money had already been direct-deposited in the accounts of the derivative scoundrels with the push of a button."
And Friedman, clumsy and unknowledgeable on financial matters, (he misdescribes credit default instruments of AIG, but so what) still highly relevant on this topic of AIG:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/opinion/18friedman.html
Leonhart chimes in, not so artfully:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/business/economy/18leonhardt.html
But Ah! Morgenson!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/business/18aig.html?ref=economy
"Even though A.I.G. finally disclosed the names of the institutions that received so much of the government money that was thought to be going to A.I.G., the idea that it took six months still rankles some market participants."
“'The system was undermined by asking the American people, under the veil of secrecy, to bail out one company when in fact they wanted to bail out someone else,'” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an authority in structured finance and a founder of R & R Consulting, a firm that helps investors gauge debt risks. “The prospectus for the bailout was not delivered to the people. And it was not delivered because if it had been, the deal would not have gone through.”
Now, a partial transcript. I still do not know whether Hank Greenberg is blowing smoke up our asses...but his comments are interesting. "Meredith" is sensational!
(see above)
Now for Liddy's Washington Post Op Ed piece this morning.
And from BlogDredd Blog, we see that it was a Milken team that started AIG's credit default swaps years ago, well before Hank Greenberg left! So he was blowing smoke up our asses last night with Charlie Rose.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Dowd -- The Tracks of Our Tears
She's good, you know. Slice of Americana of last week, this time.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tracks of Our Tears
writePost();
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09dowd.html
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 8, 2008
WASHINGTON
I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.
Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.
I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.
He wondered how long she thought it would take the new president to scrape the government up off the floor. “Three years,” she replied authoritatively.
I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he thought about Jesse Jackson’s flowing tears at Grant Park, given his envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy. “I think the tears were real,” the bartender said.
And did he feel it would be better to refer to Obama as half-white and half-black, or simply black, they pressed.
“Black,” the bartender responded. “Because it means more.”
But one of the women insisted, shouldn’t we call the new president African-American instead of black? And wasn’t he really, really excited about Obama? The bartender gently explained he was not even a Democrat; he was a libertarian.
I saw a white-haired white woman down the block from me running out to strike up a conversation with a black U.P.S. delivery guy, asking him how he felt and what this meant to him.
I was starting to feel guilty. Every time I passed a black patron at a downtown restaurant or a movie or the Kennedy Center, would perfect strangers want me to ask how they were feeling? Or was that condescending and were they sick to death of it?
How would I know if I didn’t ask them?
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president. If you don’t count what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, that is.
But should we count it? Was Barack Obama the first or the second black president, or alternatively, the first half-white, half-black president?
I eagerly swung my front door open and joined the mailman’s conversation.
“Are you talking about the election?” I said brightly. “How do you feel?”
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
I grew up down the block from Fort Stevens, where Lincoln in his frock coat dodged the bullets of Jubal Early’s Confederate troops in the battle that saved the capital. It was a mostly black neighborhood. I’ve never seen the capital become truly integrated.
After the O. J. Simpson verdict, when black Howard University law students cheered, and during the Million Man March, led by Louis Farrakhan, a man who peddles racial and religious divisions, I wondered if we had lived and played apart for so long that we had lost track of how different our experiences and thoughts and perceptions of progress were.
President Bush was a divider, not a decider. And the city and the country followed his bunker mentality. After 9/11, the White House and Capitol were ever more blockaded, and there seemed to be fewer and fewer bridges across any of our divisions — racial, political, social and cultural.
But now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America’s poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president.
As Andrew Young told Stephen Colbert, “The world got so messed up nobody else wanted to really tackle it so then they turned it over to us.”
And we have images to share that are harmonizing, not polarizing — black and white students cheering and celebrating in front of the White House and the warm and fuzzy obsession about what kind of hypoallergenic puppy Sasha and Malia will get.
It’s cool that President-elect Cool has gotten everybody chatting, even if it’s awkward small talk. And it’s fun, after so many years of unyielding barriers, to feel sentimental.
“When suddenly CNN revealed its wall-sized announcement of the outcome, I experienced a blissful and unembarrassed rush of racialism,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic. “Only a hologram of Frederick Douglass would have excited me more.”
But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?
I’ll have to call my friend Gwen Ifill tomorrow and ask her how she feels about that.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tracks of Our Tears
writePost();
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09dowd.html
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 8, 2008
WASHINGTON
I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.
Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.
I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.
He wondered how long she thought it would take the new president to scrape the government up off the floor. “Three years,” she replied authoritatively.
I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he thought about Jesse Jackson’s flowing tears at Grant Park, given his envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy. “I think the tears were real,” the bartender said.
And did he feel it would be better to refer to Obama as half-white and half-black, or simply black, they pressed.
“Black,” the bartender responded. “Because it means more.”
But one of the women insisted, shouldn’t we call the new president African-American instead of black? And wasn’t he really, really excited about Obama? The bartender gently explained he was not even a Democrat; he was a libertarian.
I saw a white-haired white woman down the block from me running out to strike up a conversation with a black U.P.S. delivery guy, asking him how he felt and what this meant to him.
I was starting to feel guilty. Every time I passed a black patron at a downtown restaurant or a movie or the Kennedy Center, would perfect strangers want me to ask how they were feeling? Or was that condescending and were they sick to death of it?
How would I know if I didn’t ask them?
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president. If you don’t count what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, that is.
But should we count it? Was Barack Obama the first or the second black president, or alternatively, the first half-white, half-black president?
I eagerly swung my front door open and joined the mailman’s conversation.
“Are you talking about the election?” I said brightly. “How do you feel?”
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
I grew up down the block from Fort Stevens, where Lincoln in his frock coat dodged the bullets of Jubal Early’s Confederate troops in the battle that saved the capital. It was a mostly black neighborhood. I’ve never seen the capital become truly integrated.
After the O. J. Simpson verdict, when black Howard University law students cheered, and during the Million Man March, led by Louis Farrakhan, a man who peddles racial and religious divisions, I wondered if we had lived and played apart for so long that we had lost track of how different our experiences and thoughts and perceptions of progress were.
President Bush was a divider, not a decider. And the city and the country followed his bunker mentality. After 9/11, the White House and Capitol were ever more blockaded, and there seemed to be fewer and fewer bridges across any of our divisions — racial, political, social and cultural.
But now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America’s poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president.
As Andrew Young told Stephen Colbert, “The world got so messed up nobody else wanted to really tackle it so then they turned it over to us.”
And we have images to share that are harmonizing, not polarizing — black and white students cheering and celebrating in front of the White House and the warm and fuzzy obsession about what kind of hypoallergenic puppy Sasha and Malia will get.
It’s cool that President-elect Cool has gotten everybody chatting, even if it’s awkward small talk. And it’s fun, after so many years of unyielding barriers, to feel sentimental.
“When suddenly CNN revealed its wall-sized announcement of the outcome, I experienced a blissful and unembarrassed rush of racialism,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic. “Only a hologram of Frederick Douglass would have excited me more.”
But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?
I’ll have to call my friend Gwen Ifill tomorrow and ask her how she feels about that.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Dowd on Colin Powell
Yes, this Op-Ed piece expresses the subtleties which must be addressed. Thank God for Maureen Dowd. She has (appropriately) turned deadly serious.
Op-Ed Columnist
Moved by a Crescent
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22dowd.html
if (acm.cc) acm.cc.write();
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 21, 2008
Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”
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But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.
“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”
Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.
His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his family back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a smiling young Iraqi boy.
His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go,” Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”
In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.
Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.
The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.
He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”
Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.
“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”
Powell is dismissive of those, like Rush Limbaugh, who say he made his endorsement based on race. And he’s offended by those who suggest that his appearance Sunday was an expiation for Iraq, speaking up strongly now about what he thinks the world needs because he failed to do so then.
Even though he watched W. in 2000 make the argument that his lack of foreign policy experience would be offset by the fact that he was surrounded by pros — Powell himself was one of the regents brought in to guide the bumptious Texas dauphin — Powell makes that same argument now for Obama.
“Experience is helpful,” he says, “but it is judgment that matters.”
Op-Ed Columnist
Moved by a Crescent
comments
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22dowd.html
if (acm.cc) acm.cc.write();
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 21, 2008
Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”
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But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.
“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”
Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.
His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his family back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a smiling young Iraqi boy.
His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go,” Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”
In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.
Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.
The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.
He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”
Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.
“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”
Powell is dismissive of those, like Rush Limbaugh, who say he made his endorsement based on race. And he’s offended by those who suggest that his appearance Sunday was an expiation for Iraq, speaking up strongly now about what he thinks the world needs because he failed to do so then.
Even though he watched W. in 2000 make the argument that his lack of foreign policy experience would be offset by the fact that he was surrounded by pros — Powell himself was one of the regents brought in to guide the bumptious Texas dauphin — Powell makes that same argument now for Obama.
“Experience is helpful,” he says, “but it is judgment that matters.”
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Dowd
More good writing from Maureen Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist
After W., Le Deluge
Op-Ed Columnist
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 18, 2008
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
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The best of times because W.’s long Reign of Error is about to end.
The worst of times because, well, you know why.
In this season of darkness, as Charles Dickens described an earlier mob scene, I’m feeling as vengeful and bloodthirsty as Madame Defarge sharpening her knitting needles at the guillotine.
I even felt a little thrill go up my leg, as Chris Matthews would put it, when I heard that the Lehman Brothers C.E.O., Richard Fuld, got punched in the company gym after it was announced that the firm was going under.
I can’t wait to see the tumbrels rumble up and down Wall Street picking up the heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism.
Just when we thought executives of A.I.G., the insurance giant bailed out by taxpayers for $123 billion, had been shamed into stopping their post-bailout Marie Antoinette spa treatments, luxury sports suites, Vegas and California posh resort retreats, we were dumbfounded to learn that some A.I.G. execs were cavorting at a lavish shooting party at a British country manor.
London’s News of the World sent undercover reporters to hunt down the feckless financiers on their $86,000 partridge hunt as they tromped through the countryside in tweed knickers, and then later as they “slurped fine wine” and feasted on pigeon breast and halibut.
The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor — not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset — and spent $17,500 for food and rooms. The private jet to get there cost another $17,500, and the limos added up to $8,000 more.
In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.”
There were at least three New Yorkers bagging birds — Jeffrey Malkovsky, a senior director at A.I.G.’s Manhattan office, Hilary James, the general manager of the Bristol Plaza Hotel, and her friend, John Roberts, an A.I.G. adviser.
Who are these looters of our loot? The New York Times should follow up the excellent Portraits of Grief it did after 9/11 with Portraits of Greed.
Payback doesn’t have to go as far as the French Revolution. The grifters shafting us don’t have to shed blood, but they do have to give the money back. As far as these self-serving corporate con men and short-selling traders are concerned, off with their headsets.
John McCain wasted his last-chance debate Wednesday by trying to stir up faux class rage against Barack Obama with Joe the Unvetted Plumber instead of tapping into the real class rage the country feels over bailing out ungrateful financiers who gambled away the life savings of working people.
’Tis a far, far better thing that New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, did when he demanded that A.I.G.’s former executives who were trying to abscond with many millions in severance payments, bonuses and golden parachutes surrender the swag. He set a good example for the feds, who slapped Mr. Fuld in the face with a subpoena.
Cuomo got A.I.G. to instantly reverse itself and cancel 160 conferences and other events that would have cost more than $8 million, as well as give up information on compensation, bonuses and other payments to determine whether they were fitting. (How could they be?)
“We stopped a $10 million severance payment to Stephen Bensinger, the chief financial officer,” Cuomo told me Friday. “Just look at the words chief financial officer. There’s a phenomenon when senior management sees the corporation deteriorating and they concoct a version of looting the company to take care of themselves.”
Even Cuomo, who has been locked in battle with A.I.G. for a long time, was stunned when he learned of the British hunting folly. At first he thought it could not be true.
“That was our partridge hunting trip,” he said. “The partridge paid the ultimate price, but the taxpayer came close.”
He is using a state “claw back” law, which he says allows him to recover contracts and rescind payments if there was unjust compensation.
Great. Now can he find the $123 billion lost by A.I.G. that we now have to plug with taxpayers’ money?
Let’s hope that if Barack Obama becomes president, the first thing he does is keep his promise to make the junketeers come to Washington (preferably by bus or carpooling) and write the U.S. Treasury a check, after which he will fire them on the spot.
Heads must roll.
Op-Ed Columnist
After W., Le Deluge
Op-Ed Columnist
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19dowd.html
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 18, 2008
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
Post a Comment »
The best of times because W.’s long Reign of Error is about to end.
The worst of times because, well, you know why.
In this season of darkness, as Charles Dickens described an earlier mob scene, I’m feeling as vengeful and bloodthirsty as Madame Defarge sharpening her knitting needles at the guillotine.
I even felt a little thrill go up my leg, as Chris Matthews would put it, when I heard that the Lehman Brothers C.E.O., Richard Fuld, got punched in the company gym after it was announced that the firm was going under.
I can’t wait to see the tumbrels rumble up and down Wall Street picking up the heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism.
Just when we thought executives of A.I.G., the insurance giant bailed out by taxpayers for $123 billion, had been shamed into stopping their post-bailout Marie Antoinette spa treatments, luxury sports suites, Vegas and California posh resort retreats, we were dumbfounded to learn that some A.I.G. execs were cavorting at a lavish shooting party at a British country manor.
London’s News of the World sent undercover reporters to hunt down the feckless financiers on their $86,000 partridge hunt as they tromped through the countryside in tweed knickers, and then later as they “slurped fine wine” and feasted on pigeon breast and halibut.
The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor — not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset — and spent $17,500 for food and rooms. The private jet to get there cost another $17,500, and the limos added up to $8,000 more.
In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.”
There were at least three New Yorkers bagging birds — Jeffrey Malkovsky, a senior director at A.I.G.’s Manhattan office, Hilary James, the general manager of the Bristol Plaza Hotel, and her friend, John Roberts, an A.I.G. adviser.
Who are these looters of our loot? The New York Times should follow up the excellent Portraits of Grief it did after 9/11 with Portraits of Greed.
Payback doesn’t have to go as far as the French Revolution. The grifters shafting us don’t have to shed blood, but they do have to give the money back. As far as these self-serving corporate con men and short-selling traders are concerned, off with their headsets.
John McCain wasted his last-chance debate Wednesday by trying to stir up faux class rage against Barack Obama with Joe the Unvetted Plumber instead of tapping into the real class rage the country feels over bailing out ungrateful financiers who gambled away the life savings of working people.
’Tis a far, far better thing that New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, did when he demanded that A.I.G.’s former executives who were trying to abscond with many millions in severance payments, bonuses and golden parachutes surrender the swag. He set a good example for the feds, who slapped Mr. Fuld in the face with a subpoena.
Cuomo got A.I.G. to instantly reverse itself and cancel 160 conferences and other events that would have cost more than $8 million, as well as give up information on compensation, bonuses and other payments to determine whether they were fitting. (How could they be?)
“We stopped a $10 million severance payment to Stephen Bensinger, the chief financial officer,” Cuomo told me Friday. “Just look at the words chief financial officer. There’s a phenomenon when senior management sees the corporation deteriorating and they concoct a version of looting the company to take care of themselves.”
Even Cuomo, who has been locked in battle with A.I.G. for a long time, was stunned when he learned of the British hunting folly. At first he thought it could not be true.
“That was our partridge hunting trip,” he said. “The partridge paid the ultimate price, but the taxpayer came close.”
He is using a state “claw back” law, which he says allows him to recover contracts and rescind payments if there was unjust compensation.
Great. Now can he find the $123 billion lost by A.I.G. that we now have to plug with taxpayers’ money?
Let’s hope that if Barack Obama becomes president, the first thing he does is keep his promise to make the junketeers come to Washington (preferably by bus or carpooling) and write the U.S. Treasury a check, after which he will fire them on the spot.
Heads must roll.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Paul Newman -- Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist
Cool Hand Paul
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 30, 2008
Paul Newman taught me how to peel a cucumber.
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My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn’t actually know the intricacies of making a salad. So when the man who has made $250 million for charity with Newman’s Own dressings and sauces asked me to help him make a salad in 1986, while I was writing a profile of him for The Times Magazine, I mangled my cucumber so thoroughly that he snatched it away and showed me how to do it.
At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration: shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class.
When I asked W. in 1999 if he identified with any literary heroes, he said no, but he was drawn to Paul Newman’s defiance in “Cool Hand Luke.”
The Texan cast himself as an anti-hero and rebel. But as president, he knew how to strut only in photo-ops, not when actual calamities loomed or hit.
Newman was a rare liberal who loved the label; he made it onto Nixon’s enemies list for supporting Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam run. In 1997, I called him when he began writing a bit for The Nation (where he was an investor). He ranted about right-wingers “popping out of rat holes” but also faulted the Clintons.
“Everything is about what’s winnable, not about the morality of the issues,” he told me. In politics, as in racing cars, he said: “You can do anything if you are prepared to deal with the consequences.”
I was nervous the first time I met the star, because he’d been a teenage crush — along with William F. Buckley Jr. (I loved Buckley’s sesquipedalian dexterity — a lost art in the anti-intellectual conservative set of W. and Sarah Palin.)
We met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, where he proceeded to interview me.
Newman: “What do you know about nuclear disarmament?”
Dowd: “Ummm.”
Newman: “How can you justify The Times’s editorial position on the moratorium?”
Dowd: “Ummm.”
He was deeply uncomfortable at getting adulation for playacting, acknowledging that “there’s something very corrupting about being an actor. It places a terrible premium on appearance.”
With a Butch Cassidy grin, he told me that he pictured his epitaph being: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
He did not want to talk about his movies; he wanted to talk throw-weights. He liked Bach and Budweiser and playing goofy practical jokes. (Once, when we were driving, he began high-speed bumping the car in front of us, driven by his friend.) He was bored by fashion and embarrassed by women who brazenly flirted with him or asked him to take off his sunglasses to show his blue eyes.
Once, when he was handing out punch at a Westport charity event, a dowager asked him to stir her drink with his finger.
“I’d be glad to,” Newman replied, “but I just took it out of a cyanide bottle.”
He recalled how utterly flummoxed he was the time a stunning call girl approached him on Fifth Avenue and offered to dispense with her fee.
“You want to send her off with something classy and stylish, the way Cary Grant would, or Clint Eastwood,” he said. “You think, how would Hombre handle this? And when this woman came up to me — the guy who played Hud — what comes through? Laurel and Hardy. Both of them.”
He said he was not like his sultry, flamboyant characters: “You don’t always have Tennessee Williams around to write glorious lines for you.”
He and his wife were reputed to have one of the happiest marriages in Hollywood, but the outspoken Joanne Woodward admitted that it took a lot of therapy to cope with the fact that, even though she got an Oscar first, he was able to stay a leading man for four decades. She told a magazine that she was always “uncomfortable and even angry” that “Paul was so much bigger than I was ... Because he was living my fantasy” to be a star.
She would not talk to me for The Times’s profile that her husband did to promote “The Color of Money” — even just on the topic of his role as the director of five movies that she had starred in. She said she did interviews only solo or jointly with him — not about him. That byzantine deal reflected the rivalry that threaded through their romance.
He said that he appreciated her, as he looked around his elegant Fifth Avenue apartment, observing dryly: “If anyone had ever told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in a room with peach walls, I would have told them to take a nap in a urinal.”
Cool Hand Paul
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01dowd.html
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 30, 2008
Paul Newman taught me how to peel a cucumber.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (23) »
My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn’t actually know the intricacies of making a salad. So when the man who has made $250 million for charity with Newman’s Own dressings and sauces asked me to help him make a salad in 1986, while I was writing a profile of him for The Times Magazine, I mangled my cucumber so thoroughly that he snatched it away and showed me how to do it.
At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration: shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class.
When I asked W. in 1999 if he identified with any literary heroes, he said no, but he was drawn to Paul Newman’s defiance in “Cool Hand Luke.”
The Texan cast himself as an anti-hero and rebel. But as president, he knew how to strut only in photo-ops, not when actual calamities loomed or hit.
Newman was a rare liberal who loved the label; he made it onto Nixon’s enemies list for supporting Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam run. In 1997, I called him when he began writing a bit for The Nation (where he was an investor). He ranted about right-wingers “popping out of rat holes” but also faulted the Clintons.
“Everything is about what’s winnable, not about the morality of the issues,” he told me. In politics, as in racing cars, he said: “You can do anything if you are prepared to deal with the consequences.”
I was nervous the first time I met the star, because he’d been a teenage crush — along with William F. Buckley Jr. (I loved Buckley’s sesquipedalian dexterity — a lost art in the anti-intellectual conservative set of W. and Sarah Palin.)
We met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, where he proceeded to interview me.
Newman: “What do you know about nuclear disarmament?”
Dowd: “Ummm.”
Newman: “How can you justify The Times’s editorial position on the moratorium?”
Dowd: “Ummm.”
He was deeply uncomfortable at getting adulation for playacting, acknowledging that “there’s something very corrupting about being an actor. It places a terrible premium on appearance.”
With a Butch Cassidy grin, he told me that he pictured his epitaph being: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
He did not want to talk about his movies; he wanted to talk throw-weights. He liked Bach and Budweiser and playing goofy practical jokes. (Once, when we were driving, he began high-speed bumping the car in front of us, driven by his friend.) He was bored by fashion and embarrassed by women who brazenly flirted with him or asked him to take off his sunglasses to show his blue eyes.
Once, when he was handing out punch at a Westport charity event, a dowager asked him to stir her drink with his finger.
“I’d be glad to,” Newman replied, “but I just took it out of a cyanide bottle.”
He recalled how utterly flummoxed he was the time a stunning call girl approached him on Fifth Avenue and offered to dispense with her fee.
“You want to send her off with something classy and stylish, the way Cary Grant would, or Clint Eastwood,” he said. “You think, how would Hombre handle this? And when this woman came up to me — the guy who played Hud — what comes through? Laurel and Hardy. Both of them.”
He said he was not like his sultry, flamboyant characters: “You don’t always have Tennessee Williams around to write glorious lines for you.”
He and his wife were reputed to have one of the happiest marriages in Hollywood, but the outspoken Joanne Woodward admitted that it took a lot of therapy to cope with the fact that, even though she got an Oscar first, he was able to stay a leading man for four decades. She told a magazine that she was always “uncomfortable and even angry” that “Paul was so much bigger than I was ... Because he was living my fantasy” to be a star.
She would not talk to me for The Times’s profile that her husband did to promote “The Color of Money” — even just on the topic of his role as the director of five movies that she had starred in. She said she did interviews only solo or jointly with him — not about him. That byzantine deal reflected the rivalry that threaded through their romance.
He said that he appreciated her, as he looked around his elegant Fifth Avenue apartment, observing dryly: “If anyone had ever told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in a room with peach walls, I would have told them to take a nap in a urinal.”
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Dowd
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 27, 2008
OXFORD, Miss.
The first debate seemed like the perfect moment for Barack Obama to re-enact the Code Red courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men,” to slide under John McCain’s skin and irritate until he goaded McCain into doing exactly what he really wanted to do: tell off the whippersnapper who’d never bled for his country.
It would have been easy for smarty-pants Obama to get in the face of the temperamental older guy, just as Tom Cruise did with Jack Nicholson, to push him into erupting into some version of that climactic speech, like, “Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at your fancy faculty club, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”
The timing was ideal. McCain was so aggressively erratic as he did his free-form break dance around the economy last week that it seemed the only possible explanation was that he was creating a wild diversion to distract people from Sarah Palin’s stunningly junior varsity appearance with Katie Couric.
Once Garbo began to speak, and people realized that Palin had a few key lacunae in her understanding of the globe and even of her running mate’s record, the myth of the Alaska superwoman continued to unravel.
Between her nonsensical answers and his complicity in the deregulation that led to the financial catastrophe, he felt he needed to take another crazy gamble.
So he theatrically suspended his campaign and rushed back to get in the way of a bipartisan solution to the economic turmoil. When the two macho guys of the Republican Party — W. and McCain — took extreme measures not to look emasculated, they ended up emasculating themselves.
The president, who is so insecure that he could only choose a vice president he knew would never hold his title, and so insecure that he needs proof of presidency emblazoned everywhere, even riding a Trek bike with the presidential seal affixed, was suddenly faced with his bête noire: sitting at a table in the White House with the two men who want his job, either of whom would do a better job, given that nearly everyone in the country thinks things are going horribly.
McCain lost control of his campaign and then, in a gimmicky attempt to gain back ground, ended up in the Cabinet Room with W. when the bipartisan economic meeting collapsed in a humiliating nondeal, causing President Bush to lose control of his White House.
It was quite a memorable moment in history for the M.B.A. president and the nominee of the party of business. Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers in Gucci loafers?
The Republicans had a lot to answer for. The Bush administration had been warned about Osama bin Laden attacking and did nothing. It had been warned that there would be a civil war and insurgency if it attacked Iraq. It had been warned that Katrina was coming. It had been warned that the country’s financial casinos were courting disaster.
W. biked through all those eves of destruction.
Given the past week, the debate should have been a cinch for Obama. But, just as in the primaries, he willfully refuses to accept what debates are about. It’s not a lecture hall; it’s a joust. It’s not how cerebral you are. It’s how visceral you are. You need memorable, sharp, forceful and witty lines.
Even when McCain sneered, “I don’t need any on-the-job training, I’m ready to go at it right now,” Obama didn’t directly respond, but veered off into a story about his father being from Kenya and how he got his name. (Thanks, Barack, we got that from your book. It’s great for a memoir, but not a debate.)
McCain kept painting Obama as naïve, and dangerous, insisting that he “doesn’t quite understand or doesn’t get it.”
Obama should have responded “Senator, I understand perfectly, I’m just saying you’re wrong.”
On the surge, he could have said that McCain was the arsonist who wanted to be praised for the great job he’s doing putting out the fire he started.
When Obama took quiet umbrage at McCain’s attack about troop-funding, he could have pounded the lectern and said with real anger: “John, I am sick and tired of you suggesting that I would take funds away from our brave soldiers. I no more voted for that than you did when you voted against our funding proposals that would have imposed a timetable. And unlike you, I did not vote against funding increases for the troops that have come home with devastating physical and mental injuries.”
And who cares what Henry Kissinger thinks? He was wrong 35 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
Obama did a poor job of getting under McCain’s skin. Or maybe McCain did an exceptional job of not letting Obama get under his skin. McCain nattered about earmarks and Obama ran out of gas.
We’re left waiting for a knockout debate. On to Palin-Biden.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Dowd Today -- From Fairbanks
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 16, 2008
WASHINGTON
Readers' Comments
"The Republicans have chosen to appeal to the most divisive elements of our society..."Carolyn Hollingsworth, Tennessee
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Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
Carly helpfully added that McCain (not to mention Obama and Biden) couldn’t run a major corporation. He couldn’t get his immigration bill passed either, but now he’s promising to eliminate centuries of greed on Wall Street.
The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain was thinking about taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can’t contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” a poy-son could develop a cold war.
The latest news from Alaska is that the governor keeps a tanning bed in the Juneau mansion. As The Los Angeles Times pointed out, when Palin declared May 2007 Skin Cancer Awareness Month in Alaska, the press release explained that skin cancer was caused by “the sun and from tanning beds.”
I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.
I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.
Wal-Mart has all the doodads that Sarah must need in her career as a sportsman — Remingtons and “torture tested” riflescopes, game bags for caribou, machines that imitate rabbits and young deer and coyotes to draw your quarry in so you can shoot it, and machines to squish cows into beef jerky.
I talked to a Wal-Mart mom, Betty Necas, 39, wearing sweatpants and tattoos on her wrists.
She said she’s never voted, and was a teenage mom “like Bristol.” She likes Sarah because she’s “down home” but said Obama “gives me the creeps. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s black. He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly.”
Ten Obama supporters in Wasilla braved taunts and drizzle to stand on a corner between McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. They complained that Sarah runs government like a vengeful fiefdom and held up signs. A guy with a bullhorn yelled out of a passing red car: “Go back to the city, you liberal Communists!”
At gatherings in The Last Frontier, pastors pray for reporters, drilling evokes cheers and Todd Palin is hailed as a guy who likes to burn fossil fuels.
I had many “Sarahs,” as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. “I’ve seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup,” said manager Karena Forster, “and she’s just as beautiful.”
I stopped by Sarah’s old Pentecostal church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and perused some books: “The Bait of Satan,” “Deliverance from PMS,” and “Kissed the Girls and Made them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give In.” (Author Lisa Bevere advises: “Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream.”)
In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah’s current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians “journey out” of same-sex attraction.
(As The Times reported recently, in 1995, Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues she had seen “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelf of the library and did not approve. The Wasilla Assembly of God tried to ban “Pastor, I Am Gay” by Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in nearby Palmer.)
Anne Heche’s mother, Nancy, talked about her distress when her daughter told her she was involved with Ellen. Jeff Johnston told me he had “a struggle” with homosexuality “for a season,” but is now “happily married with three boys.” (Books for sale there included “Mommy, Why Are They Holding Hands?” and “You Don’t Have to Be Gay.”)
I covered a boisterous women against Palin rally in Anchorage, where women toted placards such as “Fess up about troopergate,” “Keep your vows off my body,” “Barbies for war!” “Sarah, please don’t put me on your enemies list,” and “McCain and Palin = McPain.”
A local conservative radio personality, Eddie Burke, who had lambasted the organizers as “a bunch of socialist, baby-killing maggots,” was on hand with a sign reading “Alaska is not Frisco.”
“We are one Supreme Court justice away from overturning Roe v. Wade,” he excitedly told me.
R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. “She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,” she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.”
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 16, 2008
WASHINGTON
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"The Republicans have chosen to appeal to the most divisive elements of our society..."Carolyn Hollingsworth, Tennessee
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Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
Carly helpfully added that McCain (not to mention Obama and Biden) couldn’t run a major corporation. He couldn’t get his immigration bill passed either, but now he’s promising to eliminate centuries of greed on Wall Street.
The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain was thinking about taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can’t contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” a poy-son could develop a cold war.
The latest news from Alaska is that the governor keeps a tanning bed in the Juneau mansion. As The Los Angeles Times pointed out, when Palin declared May 2007 Skin Cancer Awareness Month in Alaska, the press release explained that skin cancer was caused by “the sun and from tanning beds.”
I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.
I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.
Wal-Mart has all the doodads that Sarah must need in her career as a sportsman — Remingtons and “torture tested” riflescopes, game bags for caribou, machines that imitate rabbits and young deer and coyotes to draw your quarry in so you can shoot it, and machines to squish cows into beef jerky.
I talked to a Wal-Mart mom, Betty Necas, 39, wearing sweatpants and tattoos on her wrists.
She said she’s never voted, and was a teenage mom “like Bristol.” She likes Sarah because she’s “down home” but said Obama “gives me the creeps. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s black. He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly.”
Ten Obama supporters in Wasilla braved taunts and drizzle to stand on a corner between McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. They complained that Sarah runs government like a vengeful fiefdom and held up signs. A guy with a bullhorn yelled out of a passing red car: “Go back to the city, you liberal Communists!”
At gatherings in The Last Frontier, pastors pray for reporters, drilling evokes cheers and Todd Palin is hailed as a guy who likes to burn fossil fuels.
I had many “Sarahs,” as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. “I’ve seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup,” said manager Karena Forster, “and she’s just as beautiful.”
I stopped by Sarah’s old Pentecostal church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and perused some books: “The Bait of Satan,” “Deliverance from PMS,” and “Kissed the Girls and Made them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give In.” (Author Lisa Bevere advises: “Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream.”)
In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah’s current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians “journey out” of same-sex attraction.
(As The Times reported recently, in 1995, Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues she had seen “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelf of the library and did not approve. The Wasilla Assembly of God tried to ban “Pastor, I Am Gay” by Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in nearby Palmer.)
Anne Heche’s mother, Nancy, talked about her distress when her daughter told her she was involved with Ellen. Jeff Johnston told me he had “a struggle” with homosexuality “for a season,” but is now “happily married with three boys.” (Books for sale there included “Mommy, Why Are They Holding Hands?” and “You Don’t Have to Be Gay.”)
I covered a boisterous women against Palin rally in Anchorage, where women toted placards such as “Fess up about troopergate,” “Keep your vows off my body,” “Barbies for war!” “Sarah, please don’t put me on your enemies list,” and “McCain and Palin = McPain.”
A local conservative radio personality, Eddie Burke, who had lambasted the organizers as “a bunch of socialist, baby-killing maggots,” was on hand with a sign reading “Alaska is not Frisco.”
“We are one Supreme Court justice away from overturning Roe v. Wade,” he excitedly told me.
R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. “She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,” she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.”
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