How I Spent My Autumn Hallucination

MoDo, "Savior or Saboteur?" December 23

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

FRIENDS, just for the record, I've heard more convincing denials from fucking smack addicts, okay? And I mean no disrespect to Junkie-Americans by that.

Maureen Dowd has perpetrated just under thirty columns since returning from vacation or rehab September 25th. What say we take a little survey, with a special focus on her brave, Cold Turkey kick?

Since that time she's written ten (10) columns that didn't mention Hillary. She writes three a week. So three times a month she's found some other topic. This means that if you were a MoDo column, and you weren't about Hillary Clinton, you'd have the same statistical relationship to all other MoDo columns that someone who thinks George W. Bush is doing an excellent job has to the population at large. Or, put another way: if you had a part-time, on-call, minimum-wage job, and you were called in as often as Dowd writes a column without an appearance from Hillzilla, you would have starved to death sometime around Thanksgiving.

We might also note here that there cannot possibly be any pressure on her to write more often about Hillary, so that 30% may include some padding. Which, now that we think about it, would explain some of those other columns.

Like to see how the equation would look hanging over the sofa? Okay, since September Fred Thompson (1 column) has participated in his first Republican debate, and has gone from The Next Reagan to The Current Reagan. Rudy Giuliani (2 columns, one concerning how he'd handle Hillary, aka The Debate Dominatrix) has gone from +10 to dead even nationally. The last column she wrote about either of them was on October 17. Mitt Romney's held and lost leads, sparred with Giuliani, and gone negative on Huckabee. He got a column on The Speech. John McCain, recently removed from life support, got to share a column with Joe "Talks Too Much At Congressional Hearings on the War" Biden and Gen. David Petraeus. This ties him with Cécilia Sarkozy. (While we're here we may as well note that the October 10 column entitled "Bomb Bomb Iran" concerned the position, not of the man who made the line famous, but of a Democratic Senator from New York.) Mike Huckabee. the biggest story of the campaign so far, has risen from nothing to front-runner while remaining stuck on Nothing in Dowdland, or exactly one column less than she's dedicated to pretending she's Clarence Thomas.

How 'bout over the mantle? Five columns total concerning Iraq, two of which were really about Cheney, including one of her patented faux-interview fantasias in which Tim Russert asks the Vice President pointed, sarcastic questions. Just so we wouldn't miss that it was fiction.

Care for some Clenis™, a sweet jab of the old mainline Maureen had sworn off before being forced to hit back up? Eight, counting today's, not counting the repeated suggestions that Hillary overinflates her experience as First Wife. Since Rudy's mid-speech cell phone act "almost made Bill and Hillary seem like a model of normalcy" on September 23, we've had "Bill and Monica" (Oct. 21), Halloween's Hillary as the "one who acts French, overlooking her husband's peccadilloes", Girlfriend “play[ing] the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign” (I'm assuming; I'm not exactly 100% sure what that is supposed to mean) and "playing the victim after Monica" on November 4, "Bill's galpals" on November 21, and the fantasy version of Barack "Senator Smooth Jazz" Obama zinging Hill with "White House intern" and "stain" remarks exactly seven (7) days ago. Wow, too bad she was dragged back into that marital psychodrama against her will, huh? She'd almost made it to the front gate of the clinic this time.

Let's move on to Iraq, which is an important enough issue to have sparked nearly half as many columns this fall as were dedicated exclusively to Senator Clinton. Then one looks closer. Two columns on Dick Cheney. Two on WMDs. One on Condi Rice. One on Doug Feith. Doug Fucking Feith! The woman gets 800 words in the New York Times three times a week, and apparently the last time she bothered to look at what's happening in Iraq was sometime in early 2005.

In case you've forgotten, with the single exception of crazy camp-follower Ron Paul, every candidate, present and former, for the Republican presidential nomination publicly supports our current level of operations in Iraq, excepting those who propose to expand it. Out of the subset of these which MoDo has bothered to write about in the past four months, only one--John McCain--has had more ink devoted to his position than his hairdo. Perhaps coincidentally, Senator McCain is the only one whose Iraq position could be reasonably understood from having scanned the headlines two years ago.

Still, somehow, it is Ms Clinton's vote for the Iraq War resolution and for Lieberman-Kyl which have brought the country to the precipice. Republican white guys, being, like all white guys, some degree or other of fake cowboy, are permitted to track horseshit into the house without reproach.

Just for fun, let's roll the credits over a montage of autumnal MoDo moments:

(On Lieberman-Kyl): “Barack Obama would have voted no if he had voted.”

(On Hillary): “she’s the only one in Congress [Dick Cheney] can easily persuade anymore”

“an estrogen equation”

"Sometimes when Hillary takes heat, she gets paranoid and controlling"

“the sort of belittling treatment that she sometimes dished out to her husband and his male aides at the White House”

"It’s almost as if she’s offering herself to Clinton supporters as the solution to the problem of the 22nd Amendment."

“She is a control freak”

"Bill is a narcissist"

“In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obama’s 'indispensable' capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides”

“my mom and another Catholic girlfriend actually had Southern Protestants ask them to lift up their hair so they could see the mark of the devil or the horns”

(Al Gore): "waxy orange makeup." "bloated fat guy".

"Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?"

All over a shot of the Pulitzer medal, slowly dissolving. Literally, I mean.