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Sunday, January 10, 2010

MoDo's a DoDo

Honestly, why is anybody willing to pay Maureen Dowd to write her endless high school yearbook pseudo-psychologizing crapola? Obama isn't Spock (if only), and if you or anybody else elected him to be your Daddy and make all the Bad Dad booboos go bye-bye that is honestly something you should take up with your goddamn therapist (see how easy and empty such moves are?) rather than slathering it into the world's eyeballs under the heading of commentary or analysis or whatever the hell that is supposed to be .

And while I'm on this tear, how can it be that we spend months talking about batshit crazy paranoid fantasies about non-existing totalitarian "death panels" when we should be talking about actual healthcare reform, whomped up pseudo-scandals about climate-scientist e-mails while the earth veers toward genocidal climate catastrophe, hysterical ticking time bomb thought-experiments when Geneva Conventions on torture were actually being violated in our names, Obama's failure to "change the tone" while the GOP literally announces its plan to obstruct Obama in historically unprecedented ways and then does precisely that? Why are we always talking about the issues we are actually engaging with through these fucked up proxy discussions? Why do factual disputes (most of which really do involve questions and problems that would benefit from real dispute) always get deranged by these completely non factual matters?

There are no death panels (unless unscrupulous for-profit denials of coverage count as such), there is no version of catastrophic climate change that doesn't involve hundreds of millions of unnecessary human deaths, there are no justifications for the actual criminal acts of torture that happened in our names, nobody thinks pundits on tee vee are cute and nobody with any intelligence thinks Washington is best understood as a re-enactment of junior high school.

Just. Stop. It.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't think she's so bad. She had a good piece about Obama and co. shunning Gregory Craig out of the white house a couple of weeks ago.

Dale Carrico said...

It isn't enough that she occasionally writes pieces I do not abhor that she so often does the contrary, but more to the point she indulges in the kind of facile psychologizing and high school gossip-mongering (don't tell me you've forgotten her endless petty columns about Gore in the run-up to that epochal debacle) that has functionally undermined the press in its crucial role as one of the few remaining countervailing powers to the military-industrial complex (the nearly eviscerated labor movement and ongoing corporatization of the academy are two more instances of such losses). I think she's awful, even if she's far from the only one and not the very worst one.