Maureen Dowd

What form of the "Chinese water torture"?

What the hell does this have to do with Maureen Dowd? I've seen her on Bill Maher's show. I have to admit, I get a little stiff in the shorts when I see her.

It's not even her looks, either. It's more the way she always seems kind of loose and relaxed, like she's just finished having a nice toe-curling orgasm.

Huh?


I noticed that.

I meant all the talk about Chinese water torture. Sorry.

Read the whole thread Kicky.

No worries. We all have our little fetishes..

OK, McG, imagine this: You've been captured by terrorists, and they put you in a cell. Then an agent of theirs walks in there and tells you you'll never be able to shop at a WalMart again. You've been kept sleepless for days and you believe him.

Does that help put the idea of psychologically torture in terms you can relate to?

No!

Most peoples fetish's involve latex or spankings. I've never seen anyone with a Walmart fetish before. Do you attend a support group for that kind of thing?

I always thought she was E'd out on Bill Maher. She looks like she's trying hard not to grind her teeth.

Obviously not the form where the person dies from an exploding stomach.

Could be. Whatever it is, it's damn sexy...

She looks like a robot to me now.

Talks like a robot too.

And not a very sexy robot, personally.

Early on, when I was still in love with an unknown woman's writing, I saw that little postage stamp-sized mugshot on the NYT site and thought she was the shizzzzzzzznit.

It was all downhill from there. The more I saw and read her, the less I liked.

I don't care about her looks.

I often agree with her and enjoy the column.
I often think the column is too easy, too unthoughtful.

Wherefore Art Thou, Clint?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 6, 2005

A friend of mine e-mailed me Friday to see if I wanted to go to the Folger Theater production of "Romeo and Juliet."

I e-mailed him back, fretting: Doesn't that play promote suicide?

What's the 411 on those Elizabethan teenagers? Were they friends with benefits who recklessly scarfed down unsafe substances and romanticized death?

Surely, the Apothecary is guilty of assisted suicide, selling the distraught Romeo a dram of poison and instructing him: "Put this in any liquid thing you will/And drink if off, and if you had the strength/Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight."

My friend suggested we skip the play and go out to dinner, where we could promote assisted gluttony. In this hypermoralistic atmosphere, you can't be too careful, even when a Friar is on hand to warn "violent delights have violent ends." I don't want to get on the wrong side of the Savonarolas.

I saw "Million Dollar Baby" and was dazzled. But then Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and other conservatives howled that Dirty Harry playing Dr. Kevorkian sends a positive message about euthanasia.

The culture cops are unmoved that Clint Eastwood's crepuscular boxing manager, Frankie, is a Catholic who goes to Mass every day and agonizes about the morality of his actions.

Mr. Medved wrote that the Oscar nominations for "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Sea Inside," which feature plots about assisted suicide, combined with snubs for "The Passion of the Christ," "illustrate Hollywood's profound, almost pathological discomfort with the traditional religiosity embraced by most of its mass audience."

I guess Shakespeare is pretty much out from now on. Ophelia drowns herself; Cleopatra kills herself with an assist from two asps; Lear's wretched daughter Goneril does herself in, as does Lady Macbeth. Brutus kills himself by running onto a sword held by his servant Strato (another assisted suicide), and his wife, Portia, dies by swallowing a burning coal; Othello stabs himself. And don't even start with the lurid family values in Greek drama and myth, rife with patricide, matricide, fratricide and incest.

It's funny that the moviemaker stirring up the fuss is an icon of the right, a man the president's father aped when he said, "Read my lips: No new taxes." When I interviewed Mr. Eastwood in 1995, he said he thought his party was onto something with its nostalgia for the old values. But he also said he was more libertarian than conservative: "The less you mess around with people, the better off people are." That attitude is passé in the Republican Party. The Christian right thinks that the more you mess around with people, the better off people are. It is eager to dictate social, cultural and marital behavior, with an assist from the man whom it boasts it put back in the White House.

The Virginia House of Delegates last week endorsed license plates reading "Traditional Marriage," featuring a red heart with interlocking gold wedding bands. (A married pal of mine joked that for verisimilitude, the plates should also feature a man and a woman looking miserable.)

But the Bard was more interested in untraditional marriage - like that lurid family dinner in "Titus Andronicus," when Titus serves Tamora meat pies made from the bodies of her two sons, who have raped and mutiliated Titus's daughter in revenge for Titus slaying Tamora's oldest son before her eyes. (Capped by him murdering Tamora and mercy-killing his daughter.)

Just because it's not "Ozzie and Harriet," does it have to be bowdlerized, or Medvedized - "Unmixed with anything that could raise a blush on the cheek of modesty," as Dr. Bowdler bragged about his eviscerated Shakespeare?

Michael Moore and Mel Gibson aside, the purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it's just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas. Mr. Eastwood's critics don't even understand what art is. Politics - not art - is about finding consensus with the majority of the audience. Art is not about avoiding controversy or ensuring that everyone leaves feeling morally uplifted.

What I love about movies and plays is seeing fictional characters behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways I never would. What I hate about politics is seeing real officials behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways on the W.M.D. "crisis" in Iraq, the Social Security "crisis," and the spread of federal disinformation from paid "journalists." Now that's worth howling about.

Like all columnists, she's hit and miss, and she has a few schticks she uses over and over. Having said that, I always check out her columns (and usually read them). And the teeny photo does present her as a babe. Can't say I've had the pleasure of seeing her on the tube; maybe it's better that way...

I know a guy who worked for her, went through the same processes you guys are talking about, only his ended up with extreme dislike. Evidently she's not a very nice boss.

In terms of her writing, I agree with Osso's take.

Oh, I can see that. I suppose I'm mostly enamored of her wit and the way she takes no prisoners. You know?

Well, at the least, I am pretty glad she exists and writes her columns.

I pick up the Sunday NYT and read the other days online.
Today's column:

Bush's Barberini Faun
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: February 17, 2005

I am very impressed with James Guckert, a k a Jeff Gannon.

How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States?

Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief?

It's hard to believe the White House could hit rock bottom on credibility again, but it has, in a bizarre maelstrom that plays like a dark comedy. How does it credential a man with a double life and a secret past?

"Jeff Gannon" was waved into the press room nearly every day for two years as the conservative correspondent for two political Web sites operated by a wealthy Texas Republican. Scott McClellan often called on the pseudoreporter for softball questions.

Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post yesterday that although Mr. Guckert had denied launching the provocative Web sites - one described him as " 'military, muscular, masculine and discrete' (sic)" - a Web designer in California said "that he had designed a gay escort site for Gannon and had posted naked pictures of Gannon at the client's request."

And The Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware reported that Mr. Guckert was delinquent in $20,700 in personal income tax from 1991 to 1994.

I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon.

Mr. McClellan shrugged this off to Editor & Publisher magazine, oddly noting, "People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors."

I know the F.B.I. computers don't work, but this is ridiculous. After getting gobsmacked by the louche sagas of Mr. Guckert and Bernard Kerik, the White House vetters should consider adding someone with some blogging experience.

Does the Bush team love everything military so much that even a military-stud Web site is a recommendation?

Or maybe Gannon/Guckert's willingness to shill free for the White House, even on gay issues, was endearing. One of his stories mocked John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" with the headline "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers.

At last month's press conference, Jeff Gannon asked Mr. Bush how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality." But Bush officials have divorced themselves from reality.

They flipped TV's in the West Wing and Air Force One to Fox News. They paid conservative columnists handsomely to promote administration programs. Federal agencies distributed packaged "news" video releases with faux anchors so local news outlets would run them. As CNN reported, the Pentagon produces Web sites with "news" articles intended to influence opinion abroad and at home, but you have to look hard for the disclaimer: "Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense." The agencies spent a whopping $88 million spinning reality in 2004, splurging on P.R. contracts.

Even the Nixon White House didn't do anything this creepy. It's worse than hating the press. It's an attempt to reinvent it.