Dear Diary,
I hope people enjoyed my column yesterday, the third one I’ve written about Sarah Palin in as many weeks. My doctors sure didn’t.
“Maureen, your obsession with trashing Sarah Palin is so profound that it far exceeds the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders IV,” my psychologist told me over the phone. “If you don’t get ahold of yourself, we’ll have to begin exposing you to sunlight.”
How rude, right? He wants to treat me like some Alaskan mental patient. I’m a white woman who won a Pulitzer Prize, a smarter Rosa Parks whose bus happens to be a nationally syndicated column.
I told him that only a third of my columns this year even mentioned Sarah Palin. He found this unacceptable and launched into a long diatribe about my supposedly repressed sexual feelings for the governor. I zoned him out after that. I’ve seen and referenced Mean Girls enough times that I can’t settle for any Palin that isn’t Tina Fey.
Still, I’m pretty impressed I remembered every single word the doc said, even though it was just a casual phone conversation. Last time I reproduced a conversation verbatim like I just did, I was accused of plagiarism by sites like Hot Air! Please. It’s not that hard to remember a 43-word quote from a casual verbal conversation with 97% accuracy and then write it down and publish it in a column.
The nerve of the Republican wingnut blogging establishment makes me so irate that I can’t even think of a pithy cultural reference here to further demonstrate my dismissiveness. It will have to suffice for now to say that I have never come closer to almost smiling in my life than when I saw how ugly Matt Drudge is.
If it is true—as Sarah Palin has said so many times that I do not even need to provide citation—that the Creator loves conservatives so much, why did he make me so beautiful and leave them at the mercy of the ugly stick?
Fine, doctor. I admit I may have a problem with elitism. But no one can deny that, as my columns point out every single week, Alaskans live in the wilderness, hunt grizzlies, and are stupider than I am. The state has produced not a single New York Times columnist in its existence, probably because global warming’s melted their brains in addition to their ice caps.
But I absolutely, unequivocally deny the allegation that I have published sexist comments about the now-retiring Alaska governor. Because doctors have informed me that I myself have a vagina, it is completely impossible for me to be sexist, by simple syllogism.
To be sure, though, my comments that she is a “nutty puppy Caribou Barbie” and a “huntin’ and fishin’ gal” may seem to the untrained and uneducated eye to be targeted at Palin’s gender. This is a mischaracterization. They are, in fact, targeted at Palin’s penchant for trying to be a man. Alpha-guys should be in power. Alpha-girls should be on the sidelines gossiping and trashing anyone stupid enough to abandon them for the big boy’s world.
One thing still irks me, though. One anonymous reader from Anchorage left a comment calling me “unfunny” and telling me that I should not assume that Palin will spread her wings—and legs—to run in 2012. After all, I can’t know that Palin won’t return to her journalistic roots and become a pundit or a wannabe-Maureen Dowd somewhere. Assumption, said the reader before the comment was deleted by one of my editors (who don’t edit me so much as they find me edifying), is my greatest vice.
How ironic. Some uneducated religious nutjob takes a break from eating salmon and grizzlies to tell me that Assumption isn’t a time to feast and celebrate superstition.
I think it’s time I left and checked on my cats; it’s been five minutes since I’ve let them chew on my finger. But this was a soothing experience for me and, probably, for you as well. So much so that I think I’ll just start publishing my diaries as my columns from now on.
You can’t plagiarize yourself, can you?
-MD
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July 9th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Maureen Dowd makes me vomit in my own mouth.
I think the fact that I keep it in my mouth is considerate, though. I could vomit on to paper, and then sell that to a major newspaper for syndication. But I don’t, out of respect for the intellect of my potential readers.
It’s what separates me from Maureen Dowd.
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July 9th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Sarah Palin makes me vomit in my own mouth.
But, I didn’t think that Maureen Dowd column about her recent resignation was at all constructive, just…bitchy.
Something in this article gives me the impression that the author believes Sarah Palin is the true feminist between the two, and, as a male who is a veritable expert on feminism, I struggle to understand that. I guess the answer is, I sort of agreed with Dowd, even if she is trashy.
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July 10th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Dowd is nothing more than an aging liberal elitist who thinks everything and everybody outside of New York City is a rube who doesn’t have the capacity to understand her nuance.
She’s a hack of the first order and one that would not be published anywhere but on a personal blog were it not for the largesse of Pinch Sulzberger, a man who has driven the NY Times (and Boston Globe) into the ground with his solipsistic ways.
There’s a reason the Wall Street Journal is increasing circulation while the Times is in free fall. The Journal will have all view points on any particular issue while the Times has one view and it’s regurgitated by Kristoff, Krugman, Rich and Dowd on a daily basis.
People don’t read Dowd for her supposed witticisms anymore, they read her for the humor quotient; as in can she be as laughably inane and ridiculous this week as she was last week. Astoundingly, the answer is a hearty yes. How one writer could continually publish such hackery twice a week is a question that a little person like me can’t quite answer.
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