Guest on Sam Sedar blasting Maureen Dowd's passive aggression

[devilgrrl]

her "feminization" of Kerry and Gore, left-handed compliments, parroting rightwing talking points, etc...

Doesn't take politics seriously, more concerned with hair and gifts.


Say? Ain't she hot though????? :sarcasm:

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Maybe Maureen should change her first name

to Fern 'cause I suspect she's a plant.

[madfloridian]

2. Eric Boehlert who wrote Lap Dogs. On for Media Matters.

Very good segment.

[devilgrrl]

3. The guest was Eric Boehlert of Media Matters. Link to his article on Dowd...

Dissecting Maureen Dowd's Obama hit piece

by Eric Boehlert

As a campaigner, Sen. Barack Obama is angry and overwhelmed.

That was the unflattering takeaway from Maureen Dowd's catty column (subscription required) last week about the Illinois senator's foray onto the presidential campaign trail, as Dowd traipsed out to the heartland to watch the Democratic sensation up close. But as is her custom, Dowd fixated on personality and stagecraft, not substance, as the poison-penned, Wednesday/Saturday columnist for The New York Times painted a relentlessly unflattering portrait of the senator.

In the eyes of Dowd, Obama was out of his element on the national stage: "testy," "irritated," and "conflicted."

Dowd's attack, hyped on the Drudge Report the night before the column was published and widely seen as the first real Obama hit piece of the season by a major pundit, deserves attention not because of the (largely nonexistent) insight Dowd shed on Obama's emerging candidacy, but because Dowd included several of her now-trademark -- and highly dubious -- attacks; attacks that in the past have been embraced by the mainstream press and tripped up Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry.

The truth is, almost nothing about the Obama column rang true. In part, because Dowd provided virtually no evidence to back up her contentious claims that Obama was "testy," "irritated," and "conflicted" while campaigning in Iowa.

What unleashed Dowd's wrath? Perhaps a career cynic like Dowd is put off by Obama's audacity-of-hope message. That, and her contrarian impulse to bash Obama when most others were not. But it appears the senator's specific sin in Iowa was that he publicly tweaked the press, and particularly the media buzz created when People magazine recently ran a candid, shirtless photo of Obama vacationing on a Hawaii beach. "You've been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit," Obama noted.