Karl Rove, Romantic Fool

Karl Rove feels a little rejected. He "wasted a couple of bucks" on flowers for a girl. Poor guy, all he wanted was to "give her a smile on her face." The occasion, it turns out, was an editorial board meeting at the New York Times and the girl was Maureen Dowd, one of the most powerful Op-Ed writers there. Predictably, Dowd wasn't charmed and by the day's end doughboy wonder had left another woman unsmiling.

Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining the unrestrained invective he loosed against Dowd on Fox News. When prompted for his response to a recent column of hers, he decided instead to hold forth on her character (a man who buys flowers and listens). Here's part of what he had to say:

I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for the New York Times who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for anybody on the conservative side of the aisle.

Presumably, at the mention of disdain his thoughts were naturally cast back to that occasion when he presented Dowd with flowers. After telling the story to his Fox sympathizers he states summarily that, "This is a dour, downbeat liberal."

So, we're supposed to picture Dowd—or "this," as Rove prefers—as man-hating, gloomy and totally unfun. Really? We're talking about the woman who never tires of quoting her mother's advice to her that "when blue, wear red," the woman who thinks the most overrated virtue is gravitas, who thinks that "no mini-bar" signals the lowest depth of misery, who, in an interview with Charlie Rose, asked with exasperation, "Can we talk about sex now?" and who is described in a New York profile as "an utter and unreconstructed fox" with a "fundamental drive" to seduce.

The column causing the fuss, Can the One Have Fun?, doesn't exactly give her away as a sourpuss either. There she criticizes the fun police et al. for censuring Obama's leisure activities, which include a date in NYC with his wife, golfing in Washington, a cameo on Stephen Colbert's show, and sightseeing in other countries.

Perhaps the most strident Republican outcry was over date night. The RNC released a negative ad, and pundits decried the corruption and the excess and generally heralded all manner of decline in public life. Pundits like those on Fox News displayed damning banners including THE OBAMAS: OUT & ABOUT and OBAMA THE BOOKWORM. But even Tucker Carlson, as a friend of mine put it, could barely muster fake outrage and proclaimed somewhat helplessly on the Fox segment that, "I'm for marriage...I'm for the President's...I'm for everyone's marriage." The same segment ended with one of the anchors criticizing the fact that Obama finds time for reading—a juicy reveal courtesy of Jon Meacham's recent interview with Obama for Newsweek. And the specific grounds for her criticism? "I cannot read more than a paragraph. How the leader of the free world can be reading novels is beyond me."* No fake outrage here, unfortunately.

Now, if you've read Dowd's column, or have a passing familiarity with her work, this will be anticlimactic: she's for fun, but not at the expense of good governance. Rove seems mostly to have taken offense at the unfavorable comparison she drew between his former boss and President Obama, though it should be noted that she also draws unfavourable comparisons between other former presidents (both Democrats) and Obama. Parroting conservative rhetoric, Dowd asks in the column, "With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?" Here's what follows (none of which is quoted by Fox):

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” the former president explained later. “I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Actually, what sends the wrong signal is going to war with a phony justification, inadequate troop levels, insufficient armor, an inept Defense secretary and an inability to admit for years, deadly ones, that you needed counterinsurgency experts.

She then applauds Obama for his urbanity, curiosity, and cosmopolitanism. With reference to his date night, she says that she "loved the 'Pretty Woman' romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived an entitled life where he could afford such lavish gestures, throwing off his tie and whisking his wife, in a flirty black cocktail dress, to sip martinis in Manhattan, as Sasha hung over a White House balcony and called out goodbye."

I like this picture too. But some people don't see the charm. As one blogger put it, "Earth to Maureen Dowd, you just called the First Lady a whore and said that she dresses to fit the job. Earth out." I'm guessing that the IMDb link to 'Pretty Woman' is supposed to fill in the interpretive gaps here, but I'm still left wondering how Dowd's observation about Obama's fantastic late entry into a life of privilege is an insult against his wife. An insidious and much less plausible tableau is the one fashioned by Rove for Republican insiders over breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club this time last year. At that time he's reported to have said:

Even if you never met [Barack Obama], you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette, that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.

The picture here is of a man who's only known entitlement. But at least Rove isn't calling Obama's wife a whore. So, points.

In a move that, as Rove puts it, is typical of Dowd's "twisted, bitter, little heart," she contrasts her portrait of Obama with a "dangerously detached" George W. Bush who spent time "bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world."

One of the disasters Dowd is alluding to is the poor management of Hurricane Katrina, at which time Bush was conducting what became popularly known as Operation Enduring Vacation. On August 31st, The Washington Post wrote that "As the devastation from Hurricane Katrina grew clearer Tuesday [August 30th], President Bush decided to cut short his month-long vacation." This seems like a bit of an understatement. Couldn't you see the disaster coming? I don't know, I tend to trust NASA over The Post, and in their words "Hurricane Katrina exploded into a Category 5 storm on August 28 as it moved north through the Gulf of Mexico towards the United States." Interestingly, in the same piece, The Post notes that "The abrupt decision to return to Washington represented a turnabout of sorts for a president who for weeks ignored criticism that such a long summer break -- the longest stretch away from Washington of any president in decades -- appeared unseemly at a time when U.S. forces are at war in Iraq."

I think Maureen Dowd has plenty to smile about.


*Netherland, Obama's book choice at the time, is a post-9/11 novel.

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Patricidal Hands

"By the end of lunch, my fingers were wrapping around the fruit knife in a patricidal grip."

- Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup

In his article "Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You're a Liberal," Nicholas Kristof echoes scientific findings that suggest conservatives and liberals not only think differently, but feel differently. For instance, Kristof takes the upshot of one study by Diana Mutz at UPenn to be that "liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." A stunning piece of investigative journalism. (For further incisive observation see Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.)

Apparently, some scientific research shows that there's a systematic correlation between people who register high disgust responses (feelings!) and those who identify as political conservatives, with the opposite holding for people identifying as liberals.

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

Disgust responses are measured by psychologists—in the most boring of all ways—by getting people to fill out questionnaires (see the "disgust scale" one). The questionnaire cited by Kristof does have potentially sick-making questions*. But it also has this:

Please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements, or how true it is about you.

I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper [sic]**

I hope this is a control sentence because I don't feel anything between 0 and 4 in response. I do feel confused, but that's off-scale, strictly speaking.

Now, if you've read Kristof's columns or "follow" him (your verb, not mine) you'll have noticed that he's a really, really nice person who wants the world to be a better place. So here's his prescription for making things better:

So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us.

Right, this could work if only for the fact that eating with other people is a really sure way to be grossed out by them, especially if you're bringing together people who are scoring 4s and 0s respectively on a disgust scale.

Anyway, these findings aren't very convincing. Proof by anecdote to follow.

In his new book, Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher Buckley (Yale, magna cum condescensio) delivers a posthumous bitch slap to his father (William F. Buckley, Jr.), causing a scandal in the conservative community his father helped to build. In one chapter he includes a series of "urine reports," which he emailed to family at the bedside of his dying father.

Urine-wise, until now I have endeavored to spare you details about this aspect. But the high volume of reader mail suggests that you will not be denied every detail. Have it your way.

Until now, I had never imagined that my happiness could be contingent on the color of my father's urine. (My life used to be more exciting, really.)

Today's is...how do I describe today's? I would describe it as the color of a fine Riesling: umber, full-bodied, with hints of creatinine and red blood cells with a nice finish. This is a vast improvement over the Coca-Cola hue of 48 hours ago. volume-wise, I repeat yesterday's med bulletin: He is a river to his people.

Later he even quotes Henry Kissinger (a urine report recipient) as saying:

I miss your urine reports.

See. Conservatives love gross stuff. QED.


*Leave it to psychologists to fuck with your mind by calling a list of statements a questionnaire.
**This was the only statement without a period, which just confirms my suspicion that something is up.
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