Maureen Dowd, Fifth Column Columnist!

I would suggest that the person who disagrees with my comments on Maureen Dowd's column which appeared in yesterday's Times read Paul Krugman's column in today's Times for a brief lesson on clear directed writing.  Krugman, like Dowd, has a point to make--in Krugman's case that Republicans are anti-intellectual, in Dowd's case that in our technology-centered world of instant gratification, nothing is private.

As an aside, it's also important to note that both Dowd and Krugman are Op Ed columnists (read "political"), and both are viewed by the Times as writers who represent a leftist point of view. The Times also employes columnists that lean to the right (Brooks, Douthat and, on occasion Bill Kristol), and is quite open in this regard, stating that in hiring commentators such as Douthat and Brooks, it wants to provide some balance in its Op Ed page.  Admittedly, if we were to include Dowd in the Times stable of left-leaning commentators, its Op Ed page would represent the left far more often than the right.  But . . . in my observation over many years of reading the Times, Dowd does not swing to the left.  She's a "fifth columnist" columnist.

Back to their writings.  Dowd and Krugman uses certain devices to make their points--in Dowd's case, she uses George Bush Junior as a example of someone who lost his privacy by having had his emails hacked.  Krugman uses Eric Cantor's recently hyped major policy speech as a jump-off to making his point. The differences in their use of example is telling.  Dowd uses the paintings that Bush attached to his emails as her primary example, except as she notes, and other critics as well, there's nothing in the paintings that Bush would/should find offensive when exposed to public view. Instead of using Bush's paintings to support her point that we live in a world of instant self-gratification she uses them to make a different point altogether, that in his paintings Bush shows an acute understanding of reality and observation that he did not show when he served as president.  First, how does this relate to her thesis of instant self gratification through technology, and second, give me a break!  The paintings are poorly executed and show little, if any, observational skills.  Perhaps Dowd should attend a few art lectures or visit a few museums before comparing Bush to Lucian Freud.  (And yes, I'm deviating from my point as Dowd deviates from hers, but I don't write political columns for the New York Times.)

If you read her column critically, you will note as I did that she is actually praising Bush, which then offers a comparison to Obama and Bill Clinton, both of whom she damns in her column.

And back to my initial point:  Dowd's example of Bush's emails and her other examples do nothing to support her thesis:

On Thursday, at John Brennan’s confirmation hearing to be C.I.A. director, some senators took a stab at thinking it through on the smart, sleek, robotic machine that dominates our political debate. (Drones, not Obama.)Those who battled Cheney’s nefarious efforts to obliterate constitutional checks and balances and practice pre-emption can’t look the other way when a Democratic president is caught up in the narcotic allure of drones and pre-emption. You sell a little bit of the democratic soul when you start zapping people with no due process.The Chinese, who have already broken into the White House computer network, have now pilfered, maybe spear-phished, oceans of e-mails from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.With the Chinese stockpiling our vile, vexed, vulgar, vivacious and vinous e-mails, they can trounce us easily. They can simply threaten to release a batch of our e-bombs about our bosses, spouses, dates, friends and crushes. We’ll all lose our jobs, but everyone else will, too, so we can just reboot and change places.

Huh!  Okay, so Dowd owns a dictionary, but better she had learned to use it properly.  If she had studied poetic devices she would know (one hopes) that alliteration is employed to enhance one's thesis and not as a gimmick.  More important, does anyone, even Dowd, believe that the Chinese hack emails to expose us to our bosses or spouses?  And how does her snarky crack comparing Obama to a drone further her point on self gratification through technology.  Actually, that's an interesting concept but Dowd doesn't make it in her column.  Perhaps I'll do that later in one of my blogs.

And finally, and to get to my point,  Dowd's column meanders everywhere and goes nowhere.  It doesn't serve a political or a cultural purpose.  She appears to tell us at the end that it's too late to protect ourselves from technology, so what's the point.  I suspect she had to write a column and she's not ready yet to come out of the closet and acknowledge her conservative views.  So instead she swipes and swipes and says nothing.