THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2011

Lady Collins—and a dog and a joke—are back: Did you think your troubled nation was confronting extremely tough issues? Sorry—you were wrong. To wit:

The highest lady, the high Lady Collins, has been away on “book leave.” Sadly, the lady is back. Needless to say, by paragraph 3, she’s talking about Romney’s hair:
COLLINS (9/8/11): Debating With the Stars

It was a dark and stormy night.

Except in those parts of the country where it was dry and fire-prone. But what did America care about the weather when it had the chance to forget about its troubles on Wednesday night and curl up with eight candidates for the Republican presidential nomination?

The voters have a lot to figure out. What would it be like to have a president who continually tells the country he’s going to get the working class workin’? And is there something going on with Mitt Romney’s hair? The dark part is looking darker and those little white tufts around the ears are getting whiter. It makes his forehead look as if it’s levitating.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! And before too long, the high lady went there! As she pondered last night’s debate, a familiar voice sounded between her ears. just like that, she found herself typing about Mitt Romney’s poor abused dog:
COLLINS: I was sorry that no one asked Perry more of the really critical questions. For instance, is it true that he saved his daughter’s puppy from being eaten by a coyote? This allegedly happened when Perry went jogging “packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets.” Because, as he says, he is “that kind of guy.” His puppy-rescue is a stirring picture, especially considering that Perry’s chief competitor is the man who drove to Canada with the family dog Seamus strapped to the roof of the car.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Wonderfully comical high Versailles clowning about “the really critical questions!” Just like that, this became the nineteenth column in which this highest, most fatuous lady has mentioned that poor roof-strapped dog.

The lady had two more plays in her book as she showed us how royals amuse themselves with affairs which affect just the help.

On-line, the lady has now cleaned things up. But in our hard-copy Times, she included this passage—and she offered no mitigation:
COLLINS: The current front-running Mitt Alternative is Rick Perry, possibly the first major presidential candidate opposed to the direct election of U.S. senators since the advent of the Bull Moose Party. He did not do anything super weird, unless you count claiming that the reason a quarter of the Texas population has no health insurance is because of government interference.
In the high lady’s hard-copy column, it didn’t count as “super weird” that Perry kept calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” People! Concerns like those are concerns of the droogs! On-line, we see that the lady—or one of the help—has added a belated line about that important topic.

Presumably, Perry’s language didn’t strike this high lady as weird—until she learned that the workers in the TV wing were talking all about it.

We were struck by one more part of the hard-copy column, a passage where this haughty high lady mentioned a famous old “joke.” If you want to know how the liberal world had gotten destroyed in the past thirty years, just consider the mentality behind this amused and amusing passage. On-line, this comical passage has now been disappeared:
COLLINS: Republicans, do you want to trust your nomination to a guy [Perry] who makes Mitt Romney look clever? Even during a debate when he told the Al Gore Internet joke? Just think about it.
Romney did tell that famous old “joke”—the “joke” that sent George Bush to the White House, the “joke” that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But to royals like this horrible lady, that death-dealing slander remains a joke—a source of amusement and pleasure.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a bit more about last night’s repeated use of that joke. We’ll also discuss that “Ponzi scheme” claim, aboutwhich must will be said. For today, we’ll only suggest that you ponder the soul of this highest societal lady.

She’ll soon be on Maddow’s show again; Maddow will be kissing her keister, as she always does. For our money, this highest lady has now surpassed even Dowd as the avatar of this empty-souled class. But the liberal world keeps gulping her beer—and our millionaires kiss her high keister.

Final question: Can you imagine the type of “book” this high lady must have been typing?

4 comments:

  1. Bob Somerby:

    It will probably take something like an extended stint in a North Vietnamese prison pit for Droll Lady Collins to assume even a hint of the psychosis embedded in the prose of the Lunatic Dowd.

    As has been mentioned many times (and perhaps best by blogger Driftglass), Maureen Dowd is a deeply disturbed, frustrated, amateur fetish sex-worker:

    File under: Another Modo “Beautiful Agony” column.

    Reading Maureen Dowd's piece in the NYT, “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, shed absolutely no new light on the subjects it alleged itself to be about: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani.

    None.

    But that clearly wasn't the point. Because what it did accomplish, very effectively, was to let Ms. Dowd peel herself down to her taxi shoes and nipple clamps and walk giddily around the block in front of a whole bunch of people.

    Stripped of what passed for its context, here is the just the vocabulary she used in her column; just the subtext, staked out spread-eagle for your prying eyes.


    dominatrix

    disciplining

    upstart

    flick the whip

    unapproachable

    voice, gaze and body language

    punishing

    brought to heel

    mesmerizing display,

    iced them.

    responds

    belittling

    strong woman

    keep him in line

    master

    the art of (the) loving

    refused to meet his eyes

    she owned him

    tortured

    brazenly

    cut

    dragged

    control freak

    letting her take control.

    all the vulnerable places

    Without ever uttering her name

    laced

    spank

    Now it is a little hard to suss out whether or not Ms. Dowd is trolling for a new lover or telegraphing her erotic shopping list her to an existing one, but from her perch atop the NYT she is without doubt doing one or the other.

    And while I have my very strong impression of which side of the stockade she wants to be on, whether she likes to be the one on her knees and trembling, or the one circling slowly and whispering is still a trifle ambiguous.

    What is not difficult to figure out -- regardless of which end of the leash she yearns for -- is that Ms. Dowd very much likes the idea of being put through her paces in front of a crowd.

    Very, very much likes the idea.

    And while I respect all of consensual, adult Roads of Excess that lead to the Palace of Naughty, Bad Fun, I really do wish Ms. Dowd would quit twisting reality, bending the politics of people she clearly despises over a barrel, and then flogging it to a pulp just to suit her barely sublimated need for a particular brand of gratification.

    Write mediocre erotica, Ms. Dowd, or write about politics.

    Or write both.

    But as thrilling as it may make you feel down in the ol' Dowd Fun Area, please quit using your column to badly trick out one and pretend it’s the other.


    It's incomprehensible to many of us that Maureen Dowd's editors pay her money for her to have her staff produce these sorts of Voice escort ads. Your inquiring audience looks forward to your team's crack analysis of how this Titanic state of affairs came to be. How did these journals of establishment liberalism become so decadent, so estranged from the information needs of its readership, so obviously alien to the movement liberalism of us regular folks out here?

    But, since you know all of this, Bob Somerby, I'll just add that this little reminder here is "For eighteen years or older, entertainment purposes only."

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  2. In the midst of the "Welcome back!!! How witty! We've missed you so!!!" drooling from the tribe one comment stood out:

    "If SS continues unchanged, the fund will be exhausted by 2037. Given how even attempting to touch SS is considered political suicide, I'm not convinced it will happen. In 2037 I will be 50 years old. So chances are I'll pay into the system for the majority of my working life, and get nothing out of it. Forget a Ponzi scheme, the system is set up to rob my generation, quite literally."

    Of course, there is nothing in Collins' latest to debunk this kind of myth, and the poor writer will wander long and far to find the truth.

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  3. I canned through Collins' comments to see how quickly someone thanked her for mentioning Seamus again. (Commenter 65.) But that's a fascinating catch. RE which:

    The MSNBC pundit crew burned up more than two hours after the debate last night. None of them made any attempt to explain what was actually wrong with the "Ponzi scheme" claim until poor Harris-Perry had to explain it very, very late in the game.

    Their work was amazingly bad. It's no wonder so many people got understand these matters.

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  4. I missed Harris-Perry's explanation, what I saw today was Chris Matthews call SS a "Ponzi scheme," while criticizing Perry and defending SS, and I believe his name is Steve McMhan, something like, a Democratic strategist on Fox News, basically doing the same thing, except he actually MENTIONED the trust fund, but then said, 'but Congress has borrowed the money from the trust fund....', as if the money is no longer there.

    It would be nice to say 'but it is Fox News' but MSNBC is just as bad. You have to laugh, how can that be?

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