Informed Speculation

One thing we’ve learned for certain about Maureen Dowd – she is the center of her universe. And like a good narcissist, she loves to pretend that she’s just oblivious to all the fuss. Another case in point comes from Howard Kurtz’s review of her new book, “Why All Men Suck”:

“I have no complaints about my personal life,” she says in her stately Georgetown home, where the decor ranges from a pink jukebox to an expensively restored Hungarian portrait of a partially disrobed woman. “I get asked out. I don’t know how much more I’d get asked out if guys weren’t scared of me.

“Any woman who criticizes men for a living — which I do because politics is still male-dominated — may have a harder time getting dates. I get plenty.”

The book is a rumination about the inscrutability of men, the perils of dating, male anchor clones, makeup, shopping and the demise of feminism in a sex-drenched society — all while showing a little leg, in a personal sense.

The author is acutely aware of the slashing MoDo image and resigned to hearing that she has some kind of castration complex.

Let me ask you – in all seriousness – do you care about anyone’s sex life but your own? And if you do – why? And another question, if I may – is it possible to profile Maureen Dowd without images of castration?

She skewers public figures in the most personal terms, calling Bill Clinton “the Animal House president,” Al Gore “a teacher’s pet from hell” and George W. Bush the “Boy Emperor.”

But while Maureen Dowd would seem to have a well-developed taste for combat, appearances can be deceiving. Even after a decade of writing a New York Times column, she admits to being “very thin-skinned” about criticism.

“I’m just not temperamentally suited to it,” Dowd says. “The first couple of years I spent curled up on the floor and crying.”

Yes, well, the ability to dish it out without taking it is certainly an appealing one, isn’t it? You did catch, I hope, that magic MoDo phrasing…hahahaha…how charmingly intelligent!…

Does Dowd try to have it both ways? Serving up sneak peeks of her romantic life but crying foul when it’s invoked by others? Cataloguing the myriad flaws of men without examining her own neuroses? Or is there, as she says, a double standard for hotshot women?

Let me help you out here, Howie – yes.

What seems to aggravate Dowd most is that post-feminism doesn’t resemble the snappy Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy encounters she adores. Instead, says Dowd, women expect male suitors to pay, are obsessed with looks, sport “plastic breasts,” and “appointments with dermatologists are the new status symbols. It’s hard to find women to talk about books and politics. They all want to talk about skin.”

Not that Dowd, who always looks chic at Washington parties and once spent $195 for a seaweed concoction favored by Sharon Stone — purely for research purposes, she says — is immune to that sort of thing.

With her looks, glamour and caustic wit, Dowd would be a natural for television, except for one minor problem. By her own account, with her whispery voice and penchant for saying “you know,” she sounds like a Valley Girl. On the rare occasions she has mustered the courage to appear with Tim Russert, she says, “It’s so terrifying. When you hear that ‘Meet the Press’ music, I want to faint. Sometimes I’m scared I won’t have anything original to say.”

I find it incredible that Dowd thinks she can spend interview after interview talking about how she looks and then condemn people who talk about how they look! As to the Tim Russert problem, well, no need to be scared, MoDo, you won’t have anything original to say – and your fans don’t seem to mind.

“W. is so insulated and infantilized by having sycophants around him that he’s become completely blind and deaf to the fact that someone who sucks up to him is not necessarily qualified for the Supreme Court.”

Pot, meet kettle…

After 9/11, Dowd began to write more seriously about terrorism, and she has lacerated the White House for botching the Iraq war. But critics say she keeps recycling her satiric ruminations about Bushie, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie and the neocon gang.

You don’t say?…

Now, I played a trick on you by featuring two MoDo takedowns in less than twenty-four hours, and here it is, well past Halloween. Here’s the treat: MoDo will be in Austin next Wednesday for a free talk entitled “Are Journalists Necessary?” I plan to be there…and no, I’m not going to be so crass as to disrupt the proceedings, I’m just doing a public service for you, my dear readers, and because, like all men, I just find Dowd so damnably irresistable!…