Maureen Dowd Has Always Been Terrible
By Paul recently took one for the team, checking in to observe that Maureen Dowd is still terrible. (Even for a “Obama should have the leadership to be leading, with leadership” column it was asinine. Obama should…try to arrange it so that Al Bumbry and John Lowenstein get on base in front of Eddie Murray? Exercise the powers of a sports commissioner that sports commissioners don’t actually have either? Sadly, these are her actual examples.) For those who haven’t been keeping up, here is every Maureen Dowd column about politics: Democratic men are women, Democratic women are men, I figured out two years after you did that the Republicans I strove mightily to put in the White House are terrible.
You might be tempted to think that while Dowd has evidently been coasting forever, that she was once a decent columnist. But, as Amanda Hess usefully reminds us, her nutty gender politics and casual relationship with the truth have always been there:
And how! It didn’t take long for Dowd to buckle under the power of the Clinton narrative and join the pile-on herself. By February, she was calling Lewinsky “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon” and “the girl who was too tubby to be in the high school ‘in’ crowd.” At first, Dowd attempted to pass this nastiness off as a sly, satirical commentary on the caricature of Lewinsky that the Clinton administration had painted in the press. But soon, the artifice disappeared, and Dowd devoted her column to arguing that, come to think of it, Lewinsky was both nutty and slutty.
In May, Lewinsky was asked to submit a handwriting sample to the FBI, and Dowd wrote a satirical column imagining the scene. “Her stream-of-consciousness ramblings are on F.B.I. letterhead—in a girlish scrawl, with loopy letters, little hearts and breathless punctuation,” Dowd said. “Here’s what she wrote: Monica Clinton. Monica Lewinsky Clinton. Monica Lewinsky Rodham Clinton. Mrs. Big Creep. (Frowny face.) First Lady Monica. (Smiley face.) Menu for MY Italian State Dinner: Spaghetti Carbonara. Tiramisu. Spumoni. Table placement: Me between Leonardo DiCaprio & John Travolta. Also, cannoli.”
By June, no level of Lewinsky news was beneath Dowd’s scorn. She wrote that Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair photo shoot had “shades of JonBenet Ramsey” and that “It appears that there’s one thing Monica has immunity from: brains.” That same month, Dowd happened to run into Lewinsky while both were dining at Washington’s Bombay Club, so she transcribed the contents of Lewinsky’s dinner plate (“veggie appetizers and chicken tandoori”) and claimed that her presence at the White House–adjacent restaurant “suggested the former intern was still trying to grab the President’s attention, like some love-struck teen-ager, loitering outside Billy Clinton’s biology class.”
It goes on like that, with the punchline that Dowd attributed the effort to brand Lewinsky a dumb slut to nameless “Clinton defenders.” The fact that Dowd not only somehow kept her job but won a Pulitzer Prize during this period says many things about American journalism, none of them good.