Who's Your Dowdy Fisker?

Hey, who's up for a 2:30 AM fisking? I know I am!

Yeah. That's right. I'm a college student. And I'm typing a political weblog entry. At 2:30 in the morning. On a weekend. I really need a social life. Or a girlfriend. Or something. Oh well. This is entertaining.

Maureen Dowd is back again with another column full of her classic "I'll base my entire argument on stereotypes" technique. Let's take a look:

Who's Your Daddy Party? By MAUREEN DOWD

I wasn't sure how to ask John Kerry, so I just blurted it out: "Is there anything we need to know about your relationship with your father?"

I didn't think the country could take another vertiginous ride on the Oedipal tilt-a-whirl. It's hard not to see the Bush unilateral foreign policy...

TWEET!!!! Maureen Dowd, two minutes for using the "unilateral" meme. Time of the penalty, 2 paragraphs. That's Dowd, 2 for unilateral, 2 paragraphs.

Have I mentioned I love hockey? I don't think I've mentioned that in a while.

...blowing off allies and the U.N...

Right. Because people who want to see us fail are always great allies.

to rewrite the ending of a gulf war his father felt had ended appropriately — as the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion.

So, it had nothing to do with WMD, terrorism, human rights violations, violations of the rules set by your precious U.N., or harassing weapons inspectors? It was all just Bush trying to rebel? I'm glad you're not a psychologist.

"I know what you're saying," Mr. Kerry murmured.

Which means, of course, that Kerry understands the English language. Impressive.

The globe got whipsawed...

"Whipsawed?"

...by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents that we're still not sure if W. was trying to avenge his father with Saddam or upend his dad's legacy in Iraq — or both.

Did it occur to you that he may have had actual motives beyond your little conspiracy theories? There's this thing called terrorism, you see, and it tends to make people not be alive anymore...

Or was he just following the gloomy, brass-knuckled lead of his surrogate father, Dick Cheney?

I really don't understand how she can regurgitate some weird DUish stereotype and expect people to treat it as an actual argument. It would be like me saying, "Hey, MoDo, you're a poodle, so your column must be bad, because dogs can't write!"

You don't win an argument by beating the crap out of straw men. Unless you're arguing with a straw man. Which should be pretty easy, since they don't have brains. And if you have flying monkeys at your disposal...Wait, what was I saying?

Little Bush cited big Bush as a rationale for war in Iraq, referring to Saddam as "the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time."

News flash: Saddam DID try to kill his dad at one time. Is there something wrong with telling the truth now?

Now Mr. Bush's ex-counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, has said that the war in Iraq "greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Gee, there couldn't be any @ss covering involved there...

Both J.F.K. and W. were the oldest sons of patrician fathers who had served as diplomats.

But while dutiful son John and the uneffusive father who sent him to Swiss boarding school were able to bond when they talked about foreign affairs, black sheep W. and his effusive father spent more time on sports than foreign policy tutorials.

Wow, it almost sounds like Dubya and his dad had a TYPICAL FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIP, YOU ELITIST MORON!!!!!!

"Your dad played catch with you? That's nothing! My dad and I talked about the stock market all summer!"

Junior, as he was known in those days...

It's almost like he has the same first name as his father. Isn't that weird?

...was disengaged from the policy side of his father's presidency. He ran the political loyalty department.

Senator Kerry is cast as the heir to George H. W. Bush's avid internationalism and tender stewardship of the Atlantic alliance.

I wish I'd paid more attention when we diagrammed sentences in elementary school, because I don't know which part of that last statement is the part I'm supposed to argue with. Let's move on.

Being the son of a foreign service officer, Mr. Kerry says, "gave me a great sense of being able to look at other countries not just through our eyes but through their eyes, and that's, I think, an important asset."

Evidently, that also gives him the ability to see our country through their eyes. In other words, as a threat to humanity. Either that, or he's REALLY clueless about national defense. What's that saying about ignorance and malice...?

Mr. Kerry's father, Richard, was the anti-Wolfie. He wrote a 1990 book, "The Star-Spangled Mirror," warning that America should not see the world in "black and white," exaggerating our goodness and our enemies' evil, or try to recast the world in our image, "propagating democracy" and imposing our values and institutions on the third world.

I guess all those people enjoyed being raped and killed for their dictators' amusement. Who knew?

W. went along with the neocons' desire to dis Europe and undermine the U.N., where his father once reigned as affable U.S. ambassador.

If Europe and the U.N. try to undermine us, why shouldn't we "dis" them? We're a superpower for a reason.

...I guess that's a bad thing in your world.

The president seems oblivious to the swelling doubts about his policy in an Iraq sulfurous with treachery and blood.

Also known as a "war."

On Wednesday, he went to a press dinner here and made light of the fact that his rationale for invasion has evaporated. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he cracked, showing a photo of himself searching under a table in the Oval Office.

It seems to me that he just admitted he may have been wrong. Oh, but it can't be that simple, can it? The Indispensable Opposition™ has to find a way to attack him for it.

This was awkward for some...

Everything is awkward for some, dang it.

...because the dinner also featured the first presentation of an award named for David Bloom and a speech by his wife, Melanie. Mr. Bloom, the NBC correspondent who died in Iraq, probably would not have been there without the hyped claims of W.M.D.

Uh...okay...since when does Bush control the press? I'm not saying Bloom would still be dead if we hadn't gone to war, but how can you blame the president for it?

Republicans are demonizing Mr. Clarke, who has accused the administration of negligence on terrorism in the months before 9/11.

I love it. It's not "discrediting because he waffles more than John Kerry and lied about Condoleeza Rice." No. It's "demonizing." Not like insinuating that Bush got a reporter needlessly killed. That's just stating the facts.

Bush officials accuse him of playing fast and loose with facts...

Accusations are true sometimes, you know.

Insert leftist here: "Neocon facts don't count!"

There we go.

...even while they still refuse to acknowledge they took us to war by playing fast and loose with facts.

What happened to Bush's comment about WMD? You can practically taste the cognitive dissonance.

Even after a remarkable week in which a simple apology by Mr. Clarke carried such emotional power, Mr. Bush was still repeating his discredited line on Iraq, as if by rote.

Calling it "discredited" doesn't make it discredited. Unless you're some kind of genie or wizard or something. And you're probably not. Then again, how else could the NYT not have fired you yet...

"I made a choice to defend the security of the country," he said Friday, in a speech in Albuquerque, adding: "You can't see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us. But the lesson of September the 11th is, is when the president sees a threat we must deal with it before it comes to fruition, through death, on our own soils, for example."

And what have we learned from this, children? That's right: The president isn't allowed to take action against a threat after trying other methods for over a year, but he can still be criticized for not dealing with a threat in his first 9 months as president. Ow, my head.

Even a president who was routinely referred to as adolescent criticized this White House's adolescent attitude.

How is it adolescent to defend your country?

"They remind me of teenagers who got their inheritance too soon and couldn't wait to blow it," Bill Clinton said.

Heh. He said "blow it."

...What? Don't tell me you didn't laugh at that.

And this, he scoffed, is the "mature daddy party"?

"Mature daddy party?" What the crap are you talking about?

Well, it's the party obsessed with daddy. That's for sure.

Let's review: She made a few brief statements about GHWB in the beginning, then proceeded to make an argument based on the version of Richard Clarke's testimony that makes Dubya look bad. Where is this "daddy obsession" she mentions?

I'm amazed Dowd still has a job. How can you not believe the NYT has a left-wing bias?

Posted by CD on March 28, 2004 02:53 AM
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