Maureen Dowd’s full immersion!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 2012

The various kinds of baptism: Maureen Dowd has been the most influential, and most destructive, print journalist of the past thirty years.

As she has simpered, minced and clowned, she has helped a fatuous upper-class press corps complete its move toward total trivia.

She has pushed a set of throwback gender values which went unchallenged by major players until Clark Hoyt finally spoke.

And uh-oh! In recent years, she has displayed the bigot’s impulse with respect to Mitt Romney’s religion. She has now written at least five columns which urge her readers to focus on Mormonism’s very strange, scary ways.

She has finally stopped mocking the “magic underwear” to which she referred in two of these columns. Last Sunday, though, matters got worse.

She worked Elvis into her headline, hid behind Anne Frank at the end. She began her discussion by recalling the day when Illinois folk would just murder such people. In the middle, she pimped and clowned about Mormons’ strange beliefs.

Two pathetic doctored examples, straight from the cesspool that’s Dowd:

First, this simpering clown with the bigot’s impulse played you about a non-event from Campaign 2008:

DOWD (3/18/12): Mitt works overtime pretending he’s a Nascar, cheesy-grits guy and masking his pride in his bank account and faith.

When he talked about his beliefs in his last presidential run, it sometimes provoked confusion, like this explanation to an Iowa radio host about the second coming of Christ: that Jesus would first appear in Jerusalem and then, “over the thousand years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places, the law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”

Does Romney mask his pride in his bank account? Briefly, Dowd went off-message. But Romney provoked very little confusion through the five-year-old statement Dowd chose to quote, except in the brains of mossbacks like Dowd.

This is what actually happened:

Dowd is quoting something Romney said while off the air in August 2007. He was speaking to an Iowa radio talker who wanted to discuss various aspects of Mormon theology and belief. Romney told this flyweight, again and again, that he wasn’t running for president as a Mormon—that he didn’t plan to go on radio shows to discuss such irrelevant topics.

Romney wasn’t on the air during the discussion from which Dowd cherry-picked one statement. But as it turned out, he was being videotaped by this radio host’s in-studio cameras, and the tape became public. You can see the entire discussion here, not just the part Dowd cherry-picked. The relevant part starts about nine minutes in. The whole discussion is fascinating. (For the record, Romney talks about what “the church” believes. He doesn’t assert his own belief.)

Completely predictably, Dowd clipped Romney’s comments to make them seem as strange as possible; this is how bigots play it. But this utterly pointless non-event was included in Dowd’s column for an obvious reason—to satisfy her inner bigot, to help you fear “those people.”

Please note: Mormon theology doesn’t “make sense.” Neither does the theology of Dowd’s own Catholic faith. Question: In 2004, did Dowd complain that Candidate Kerry wouldn’t discuss various aspects of Catholic belief theology and belief?

Actually no, she did not. Darlings, she was much too busy sliming Kerry’s wife!

As Sunday’s column continued, Dowd was soon playing the bigot role in a more pitiful way. To see her impulse at its purest, note the highlighted statement at the end of this misleading discussion of so-called “proxy baptism:”

DOWD (continuing directly): Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”)

Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.

Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”

Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.

You just knew Dowd would her way around to Mormons and menstruation! Before we see where that reference came from, let’s consider the matter of “proxy baptism”—noting the double standards and deceptions Dowd smuggled into your heads.

Should Romney go around stating his view on proxy baptisms? More specifically, should he state his view on proxy baptisms of people who aren’t family members? As Newsweek did in 2007, Dowd gave readers the impression that Romney has engaged in the latter practice, which some people find offensive.

We’ve never seen any indication that Romney has engaged in such baptisms for non-family members. According to authoritative reports, Ann Romney’s family did conduct a proxy baptism for their late father. (Ann Romney’s two brothers were also Mormons; her mother converted to Mormonism near the end of her life.) But unless Dowd plans to make herself grand caliph of every other family’s faith, that’s different from conducting such baptisms for non-family members.

(In Dowd’s faith, babies are baptized by their families! This was even done to us—or at least, so we’ve been told. Should families be allowed to do such a thing? Should Dowd be in charge of this?)

Dowd helped confuse you about this matter, then suggested that Romney should speak out about the latter practice. Question: Did Dowd insist that Candidate Kerry go around stating his views about various aspects of Catholic practice?

Actually, no—she didn't. These kinds of demands are always reserved for The Other, against whom the bigot is moved to stir up resentment and fear.

And this, of course, explains why Dowd ended up talking about menstruation, as her tiny, disordered mind tried to spread its revulsion and fear among the wider population.

Where in the world did that reference come from? Completely and thoroughly by accident, David Axelrod accidentally pimped it around last week, a thoroughly accidental matter you can read about here. Axelrod did this completely by accident. He wasn’t trying to push the idea that Mormons are weird and scary.

Axelrod’s completely accidental link went to this pointless, stupid column in the Salt Lake Tribune. On Sunday, Dowd became the first major journalist to say a word about this.

Let’s repeat that: According to the Nexis archives, every other American journalist took a pass on this topic. But darlings, the tale involved menstruation and Mormons! Dowd had to get involved!

Maureen Dowd is a horrible mossback—and she has the bigot’s impulse. But within the upper-class guild, this broken-souled loser is very powerful. The career liberal world has been averting its gaze—and eating her shit—for the past thirty years.