The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Update: She’s fine, and back at work.  Glad to see, despite the unfortunate sequence of events.

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Maureen Dowd in her Sunday and Wednesday column, plagerized a blogger.  This is pretty awful – bloggers often channel the news, but rarely get credit for doing so… so outright plagerism stings… (and gets widely reported, and quickly noticed.)

The next week, she published this story panning President Obama: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/opinion/20dowd.html. It was a piece unworthy of Maureen, in my opinion, but clearly “red meat” for a certain sector of the liberal blogosphere.  I read it with utter distaste, and concluded that Maureen had dug in a little deeper to placate her liberal readers – the ones most likely offended by her plagerism.

Since then, nothing.  No new articles from MoDo.  I’ve written here on this blog of my appreciation for Maureen, but the silence since that last essay doesn’t sit well with me.  It feels like she, having not drawn the liberal applause for the manipulative piece, has dropped off the map (or been dropped?).

I hope not.  I hope she is healthy, that all is well for her, and that she is still in the NYTimes employ.  Here’s wishing Madame Incorrigible well, despite my recent displeasure.

QT

This is priceless…

Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.

In the ignoble tradition of rockers who sing for huge sums to sketchy people when we’re not looking, Crow — in her stint as a federal employee — warbled these lyrics to the oblivious revelers:

“Slow down, you’re gonna crash,
Baby, you’re a-screaming it’s a blast, blast, blast
Look out babe, you’ve got your blinders on …
But there’s a new cat in town
He’s got high payin’ friends
Thinks he’s gonna change history.”

I am increasingly skeptical of our Secretary of the Treasury. I think our President likes Geithner as a fellow smart and elegant (thank you, Sean Penn!) guy. I recall reading that during the selection process, Obama just “fell in love” with Geitner. Well. I think the honeymoon will be over soon enough if Geitner keeps pouring money needed for other priorities into the banks while not really holding them accountable, and from all signs that I can see, the Treasurer’s plan doesn’t quite meet the president’s lofty goals for accountability.

We shall see. I remain committed to prayer for our nation, and for our president.

QT

There are two pundits who have periodically been disdained by Obama supporters: Mayhill Fowler and Maureen Dowd. Mayhill Fowler brought us the now infamous “bittergate” – a scandal which was wholly manufactured from the soundbyte machine that is the mainstream media. I’d read the article without any sense of impending doom – she was faithfully reporting a personality trait of Senator Obama that was both endearing and human, and until the media reduced the whole of her writing to a snippet that could be exploited by the 30-second rule, I had thought it was one of her best pieces. Maureen Dowd, of course, gives us “Obambi” which has been picked up by feminists as proof that Hillary should have been the nominee, since “Obambi” is presumably about to get eaten alive by the general election process. I only began reading Ms. Dowd this cycle, and at that, after the “Obambi” nick had gone mainstream, so I originally had an impression that Ms. Dowd was anti-Obama. After a while though, I began to realize something quite different.

I’m reasonably certain that both Ms. Dowd and Ms. Fowler are my seniors. I’m nearly certain that they are also Obama’s seniors. And – it seems to me that they both act like clucking aunties where he is concerned, which always amuses and delights me. Yeah, I know. That’s weird. But they both take a tone about him that is both admiring and admonishing, and it oozes of older women teasing and cajoling younger men – in good fun, and in character building fashion.

All of that to preface that in the race for favorite auntie – Maureen has won. Today’s article cleverly weaves Jane Austen into the Obama narrative, with a good humor, a touch of concern, and typical, incorrigible teasing… I admit that I love all things Jane, so this, was the clincher. Bring your sense of humor, and open-mindedness, and I think you might discover that Maureen’s narrative about Obama is a caring one (whether you agree with it or not).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03dowd.html

QT