Deep Thoughts, By And Curated By Maureen Dowd

It is not surprising that Maureen Dowd has many nutty things to say about the Donald, for whose presence in the race she must be immensely grateful. (You wouldn’t want her to have to write about welfare reform!) For this special occasion, she has decided to outsource some of her gibberish, with hilarious results:

And Trump is, as always, the gleefully offensive and immensely entertaining high-chair king in the Great American Food Fight. He is, as Kurt Andersen wrote in 2006, “our 21st-century reincarnation of P. T. Barnum and Diamond Jim Brady, John Gotti minus the criminal organization, the only white New Yorker who lives as large as the blingiest, dissiest rapper — de trop personified.”

The novelist Walter Kirn tweeted post-debate: “Trump is simply channeling the bruised petty enraged narcissism that is the natural condition of Selfie Nation.”

After all, as James Gleick has tweeted, “Running for president is the new selfie.”

I enjoy Trump’s hyperbolic, un-P.C. flights because there are too few operatic characters in the world. I think of him as a Toon. He’s just drawn that way. And his Frank Sinatra lingo about women aside, he always treated me courteously and professionally.

I thought the New York Times didn’t run comics, but damned if there isn’t a Hi and Lois right in the Sunday Review. (“The Republican debate on Thursday was the new twerking. ON STEROIDS!”) Dowd has a remarkable ability to find #hottakes as inane as her own, I give her that. “Running for president is the new selfie” might be the worst thing ever written by someone other than Camille Paglia, and indeed I’m surprised it wasn’t Paglia.

It’s also appropriate that Maureen Dowd hauled Kurt Andersen out of the mothballs. Andersen is really one of the underrated buffoons of the early age of the internets. Dig these pensees on the 2000 election:

And indeed, I’m afraid I do think most cops in New York ticketing the double-parked car of a courteous black man carrying cats would speak exactly the way my cop spoke to me on Court Street in Brooklyn. In fact, it was his stern, ridiculous policemanese–“Step away from the vehicle!”–that surprised me, since I’m, you know, white, and middle-aged, and wear glasses.

I too like Bill Bradley, and expect to vote for him in the primary. A friend of mine who’s a theater director recently told me that I should tell another friend of mine who’s a speechwriter for Bradley that he, the director, would like to help coach the candidate in big-audience performing skills. Which I think would be a good idea. And which I also think is a very rich premise for a comedy sketch.

But my problem with politics these days (which I suppose can come across as conservatism–and may well be, in the old-fashioned sense) is that politics don’t and really can’t matter all that much in this country right now. There are rough, large consensuses on all the big issues–economics, social welfare, civil rights, women’s rights, war and peace, even abortion. And they will continue as long as the economy chugs along like this and we stay out of wars any longer than a mini-series. Sure, there’s a biggish, scary lunatic right–the Gary Bauerite creationist anti-gay regiments–but they’re not going to be running the country or amending the Constitution anytime soon. In fact, Pat Buchanan is right about the virtual indistinguishability of the Democrats and Republicans. I sympathize with both Buchanan and Warren Beatty viscerally, if not ideologically. I really think national politics kind of needs to be blown up and rebuilt. For the couple of weeks seven years ago before he revealed himself to be a horrible, crazy gnome, Ross Perot seemed to me like a great idea. And if next November the candidates are George Bush, Al Gore, and Jesse Ventura, it isn’t inconceivable that I would pull the lever for Ventura. And I certainly wouldn’t be very upset if Bush won, even if he can’t name a single book he’s ever read. (One final theory of mine: In presidential elections, the candidate who wins is the one who seems 1) most convincingly like a sportsman and 2) happiest. I think the only clear exception to the rule from FDR-Hoover through Clinton-Dole is 1968, but that one was very close, and it was 1968, when all bets were off.)

Okay, plenty of affluent white hacks were writing that there was nothing at stake in the 2000 elections. But combining a particularly dumb version of Gush-Borism with an assertion that racial discrimination by the NYPD was unpossible because I have this anecdote having been yelled at by an officer in Brooklyn Heights is special. And at least most Gush-Borites were not under the impression that there was no particular difference between the two in June 2002…

Exactly the kind of guy who Maureen Dowd would consider a Deep Thinker, in other words.