Will Maureen Dowd Stop Using “Female” as a Pejorative?

NYT columnist Maureen Dowd often disparages male political figures by comparing them to women. For example, in a 11/01/05 column, to show how despicable she though Cheney and his cronies were, she said that they were “catty,” a “Mean Girls cabal” and “hawkish Heathers” who “clawed out Colin Powell’s eyes.” In a 1/18/06 column she wrote that the Democrats “will never succeed as long as they’re perceived as the party in skirts.” Well, yesterday, she castigated “the Republicans” for doing the same thing. The Daily Howler explained:

“DOWD DOES IT AGAIN: Because it’s important, we’ll flag it again. Once again, Maureen Dowd is angry at”the Republicans.”Here’s how she starts today’s column:

DOWD (2/8/06): The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic. In 2000 and 2004, G.O.P. gunslingers played into the Western myth and mined images of manliness, feminizing Al Gore as a Beta Tree-Hugger, John Kerry as a Waffling War Wimp With a Hectoring Wife and John Edwards as his true bride, the Breck Girl.

Now, in the distaff version of Swift-boating, they are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies, a knife-wielding Glenn Close in ”Fatal Attraction” and a snarling Scarlett Johansson in ”Match Point.”

“According to Dowd, the Republicans”feminized”all those Big Dems. But who does Dowd forget to mention? Oh yes:she forgets to mention Maureen Dowd! For example, did the Republicans mock Edwards as the Breck Girl:as Kerry’s”true bride?”Did the Republicans cast Teresa Heinz Kerry as the hectoring wife? Here’s the start of Dowd’s typically vacuous column from July 8, 2004:

DOWD (7/8/04): I’m happy for John Kerry. Long-faced guy, as some Bushies refer to him, finally found somebody to stand at the podium and give him an adoring look.

Heaven knows Teresa was never going to do it. Her attention rarely seems to light on her husband when she’s at a microphone with him.

“Yes, it was the feminized Edwards who was giving Kerry that”adoring look.”And by the way:this column bore a typical headline:”Breck Girl Takes on Dr. No!”Omigod:it was Maureen Dowd who was”feminizing Edwards”as Kerry’s true bride:as the Breck Girl:

DOWD: Unfortunately for this White House, it is Mr. Edwards’s great talent to talk about the class warfare of ”two Americas” in a sunny way. The Breck Girl is already getting under the Boy King’s thin skin.

“Dowd went on to say that Edwards had been”nicknamed the Breck Girl by Bush officials.”But as always, the vacuous columnist ran with it hard. She just couldn’t wait to feminize Edwards:just as she’d raced to feminize Gore during Campaign 2000. In December 1999, for example, Dowd savaged Gore and Naomi Wolf in the stupidest possible terms.”[W]hen a man has to pony up a fortune to a woman to teach him how to be a man, that definitely takes the edge off his top-dogginess,”she wrote. Soon, Every Dumb Pundit was out recycling their own top dog’s dumbest-belle quotes. It’s bad enough that this vacuous scribe presents such crap in so major a forum. But now she pretends that someone else has been doing the deed all along! In the past week, career liberals have actually begun to notice that the RNC does this to every Big Dem (more to come on this dawning realization). But until we start to tell the truth about the people who have really done this, we’re unlikely to stem this tide. This morning, Dowd plays her readers for fools again, slamming past conduct which she herself led. And the mewling boys of the self-dealing career left will again be much too careful to say so. These boys will do what they’ve done all along. They’ll keep their careerist traps shut tight:and play you for fools once again.

“One more note on Dowd’s complete fakeness: Today, she complains that the Republicans”feminiz[ed] Gore as a Beta.”But what was the headline of the column from which we took her quote about Wolf? Of course! The headline of that widely-cited piece was”The Alpha-Beta Macarena.”On and on she went in that piece, mocking Gore as a girlie-man Beta (the column was factually inaccurate in several ways, by the by). Dowd”feminized”Gore every step of the way:and”the Republicans”ended up in the White House. But today, again, Slow Mo forgets:and she says the Republicans did it.”

If the New York Times can only manage to have one female Op-Ed columnist, why oh why does it have to be Dowd?

–Ann Bartow