TS, I just want you to know I hit the recommend button. The generally vacuous punditocracy is tiresome.

Dowd is totally obsessed with the Clintons. Just because you are a woman doesn't mean you aren't sexist, and just because your black doesn't mean you aren't racist towards African Americans. Pundits think this shit is a James Bond movie or something, she will be selected for a job and she will do it to the best of her abilities, period.

Recommended, especially because of all the linked references, but I must say I feel it isn't quite right to put the blame squarely or wholly on the media.

I came to your post right after reading this Politico piece linked to on the front page of TPM, and that reminded me of how much tactics practiced by part of Obama's campaign are also responsible, as are many "grassroots" followers in the blogosphere and elsewhere who picked up and played with those memes. Remember, for example, the brouhaha over the "she's a monster" thing? Now Obama chastised for that, but the attitude was obviously part of some of the people associated with his campaign, and it was a clear hit with many "followers" of Obama in the blogosphere.

I am always hesitant to blame "the media" for starting viral memes, especially since I have follow "the blogosphere." I have seen for myself how these things come out of people's prejudices, likes and dislikes, as surely as fashion trends spring bottom up from the street rather being forced top down from corporations. The corporations, looking for profit, tries very hard to create what the street likes and wants. I think someone like Dowd is where she is because she recognizes what other people are thinking, she's astute at seeing trends, senses things people want to believe. Our "media" mostly runs on ratings, we are our media, our media is what the majority is willing to consume as media, and the blogosphere is no different. For example, there was far more buzz created on the whole "she's a monster" thing in the blogosphere than anywhere.

You can't blame it on "the media," they are just giving political junkies the coverage they want. Even Josh Marshall thinks covering issues during a campaign is like force feeding spinach. I wish that the political junkie internet audience had more discerning taste in what they want to see covered, but the reality is, they don't, they will click on the smear stories and political ops stories and on the personality and character stories and not on the issues stories. And the rest of us are a minority and will not get that sort of coverage without rigorous editing procedures and therefore being labeled elitist snobs.

(Deep thought for the day: PBS was once formed as a station where content was "edited" by elites and where discussions were "moderated" to polite discourse by people informed on their topics, so as not to pander to "vox populi" of ratings and things like "the people's" desire for vituperative inflammatory debate of p.r. talking points v p.r. talking points. This earned them the labels of snobby and boring.)

More molehills---guess not much is happening right now. I'll stipulate media can be nuts. That's why I don't watch TV. Dowd is fun, but I enjoy Gail Collins more these days.

But why are we looking at such mild kvetching as this when Rush Limbaugh is making this look like the most genteel tea conversation, or Michael Savage?

"If you're insane, hate the family ... hate your mother and father, hate the Bible, hate the church, and hate the synagogue," you oppose CA gay marriage ban"

Or Gingrich?

"[T]here is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us"

These are noteworthy distortions, and hateful speech. Dowd is just silly.

Excellent. It was nice to see Bill Mahr smackdown Arrianna Huffington last night on the Rachel Maddow show. Arrianna was going on about the psychodrama HRC and Bill would bring to the Obama administration. Mahr simply said the only psychodrama is projected upon them by people like Huffington who hate the Clintons so much and it is a fact that they are two of the best policy wonks in recent American history.
Arrianna quickly went to another topic.

I like Rich better than Dowd, because he concentrates his efforts almost exclusively on Republican misbehavior, and he's grown up a lot since he trashed Gore back in the days.

Oh, how I ranted in the primary about "progressives" united with corporate media to attack the Clintons. This unity is pathetic.

Will they stab the Obamas in the back like the Clintons?

Thanks for your interesting (and well-researched) angle on this, ts77. Recommended.

stop the wishing, she is going to be SOS....i agree with those who think she is best suited for senate majority when the time is right (i get a tickle just thinking about it)...i even see her as Sof the House...but i would have loved to see her appointed to the Supreme Court....

like i said before, I dont think she would be terrible at SOS, but choosing her for that spot says more about obama than it does about hillary c and that is not meant as a compliment....he caved and now he is currying favors like any other politician....best man for the job my big toe!!! obama needs to purchase his weapon of choice and hand-deliver it to each of his ardent rivals in washington and then tell them where to meet him at sundown....oh, obama will be unarmed!!! geesh!

Not to put them all in the same qualitative category, but MoDo suffers from Safirism, much as does Peggy Noonan. A drinking game a friend and I had for years was 'How many sentences (in any column) before Safire defends Nixon?' Noonan does the same with Reagan, who, like Nixon, needs all the defenders he can get.

I suppose MoDo's variant is 'How far into any column, on any subject, will she write before she condemns a Clinton?' And the real question is, when will she turn her hatred/envy/jealosy on Chelsea?

I nominate her for the Judy Miller 'Self-Justified Blinkeredness' Award, and predict she'll also be parked at a conservative junk tank, like steno-pool Judy at Manhattan Instinktute, before the re-election of Obama.

Maureen Dowd is a hack.