How Bad is Maureen Dowd?
Dowd's columns during Clinton's impeachment opened my eyes to the corruption by power and the sneering contempt for the rest of society that the Clintons had. Unfortunately, Dowd herself has now come to share this contempt and display from her perch as a columnist, as explained in this article in today's NRO:
[I]t is symptomatic of the intellectual state of the Left — and Dowd is its great exemplar in this respect — that rhetorical disdain has come to substitute for rational criticism...The problem with this sort of writing is that it's free-floating sarcasm. There's no substance underneath except for Dowd's conviction that she can peer into the souls of her political adversaries in order to discern their true motivations. In this respect, she is simply Al Franken with a bigger vocabulary or Michael Moore with table manners. (Quick aside on Moore: Flip through his book next time you pass it on a shelf. Note the SENTENCES IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Note the preponderance of exclamation points! In the current climate, Moore is a wobbling monument to the false impression that mouthing egalitarian clichés from the Sixties constitutes a reasoned worldview; in a more literate time, Moore would pass for a JERRY SPRINGER GUEST!) Dowd, Franken, and Moore, taken together, represent the evolutionary spectrum of a new species of elitists. Elitism, to be sure, is as old as human society. But never in recorded history has a less cerebrally, morally, or spiritually elite Elite looked down their noses at the majority of their countrymen. The minimum requirement for membership in the intelligentsia used to be, well, intelligence. This is no longer the case. Rather, what is now required is the mere sense of your own superiority, the smirky confidence that flows from an undergraduate grasp of history, philosophy, and literature, and which can only be sustained by a maniacal deafness to counterarguments. Listening to your political opponents is deadly under such circumstances; they must therefore be dismissed, a priori, as stupid.
This is the reason that so many Leftist critics of the coming war in Iraq don't even bother arguing against it on rational grounds. They just say that it's about oil, or a distraction from the economy, or intended to cover up corporate greed. It drives them nuts that someone they think is stupider than they are is a popular president.
Dowd's columns during Clinton's impeachment opened my eyes to the corruption by power and the sneering contempt for the rest of society that the Clintons had. Unfortunately, Dowd herself has now come to share this contempt and display from her perch as a columnist, as explained in this article in today's NRO:
[I]t is symptomatic of the intellectual state of the Left — and Dowd is its great exemplar in this respect — that rhetorical disdain has come to substitute for rational criticism...The problem with this sort of writing is that it's free-floating sarcasm. There's no substance underneath except for Dowd's conviction that she can peer into the souls of her political adversaries in order to discern their true motivations. In this respect, she is simply Al Franken with a bigger vocabulary or Michael Moore with table manners. (Quick aside on Moore: Flip through his book next time you pass it on a shelf. Note the SENTENCES IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Note the preponderance of exclamation points! In the current climate, Moore is a wobbling monument to the false impression that mouthing egalitarian clichés from the Sixties constitutes a reasoned worldview; in a more literate time, Moore would pass for a JERRY SPRINGER GUEST!) Dowd, Franken, and Moore, taken together, represent the evolutionary spectrum of a new species of elitists. Elitism, to be sure, is as old as human society. But never in recorded history has a less cerebrally, morally, or spiritually elite Elite looked down their noses at the majority of their countrymen. The minimum requirement for membership in the intelligentsia used to be, well, intelligence. This is no longer the case. Rather, what is now required is the mere sense of your own superiority, the smirky confidence that flows from an undergraduate grasp of history, philosophy, and literature, and which can only be sustained by a maniacal deafness to counterarguments. Listening to your political opponents is deadly under such circumstances; they must therefore be dismissed, a priori, as stupid.
This is the reason that so many Leftist critics of the coming war in Iraq don't even bother arguing against it on rational grounds. They just say that it's about oil, or a distraction from the economy, or intended to cover up corporate greed. It drives them nuts that someone they think is stupider than they are is a popular president.
posted by lar at
11:12
