Attacks of the mean girls
Dowd's column was one that confused insult with logic. She reinforced it by ramping up the insults with name calling. She did not lessen my respect for Palin, but Dowd did lessen my respect for her writing skills.What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska's governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall.
The assassination of Sarah Palin - by media.
For those who didn't pay attention, Mrs. Palin's unexpected stratospheric rise as a national political figure threatened the media's preordained presidency of Barack Obama.
In light of how the Obama machine took down Hillary Clinton, which unsettled many feminists who believed 2008 was their time, many who saw sexism at play - the destruction of an ascendant Republican female icon was an urgent imperative for the Democratic Party.
In conjunction with the laws of political correctness as perfected by the Democratic Media Complex, it would take prominent women to take down an unlikely and unexpected conservative feminist symbol that threatened to steal away Mrs. Clinton's votes from the Chosen One.
While the vanquished then-senator from New York conspicuously removed herself from this task - going so far as praising Sen. John McCain's running mate as "a very composed and effective debater" - a trio of media partisans, each with a unique skill set, rose to the task of tearing down Sarah Palin.
Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey - Obama's Angels (featuring Joy Behar in the role of "Bosley") - used a potent mix of mockery, snobbery and vitriol to undermine Mrs. Palin's feminist bona fides.
They are what my wife calls "pad throwers," an allusion to the shower room scene in the Stephen King film "Carrie," in which the popular girls throw sanitary napkins and tampons at the film's namesake.
Simply put, they are bullies. And female bullies - "Mean Girls" as Miss Fey's film calls them - are the cruelest kind.
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Miss Dowd's attempted takedown of Mrs. Palin is less skillful surgery than it is name calling using fun noun and adjective pairings. Think "Mad Libs." And, that's exactly what Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey are. Once the ladies did their job, liberal men like Jon Stewart and David Letterman had the cover to join the hate campaign.
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While "empathy" and "tolerance" may be liberalism's highest values, Miss Dowd offers her conservative victims none. They are caricatured, demeaned and dehumanized. They are to be mocked and ridiculed to the point where the other students point and laugh. The MoDo template is so simple and repetitive it could be written into a software program.
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