Yesterday's Fishwrap

Note the title of yesterday's Fishwrap op-ed by Maureen Dowd:

Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball

The notion of a "masquerade" comes - verbatim - from David Axelrod, who is quoted near the end.  It seems to me that if you're using his idea, he should be quoted more prominently, but it's their fishwrap. Not mine.

The gist of Dowd's commentary on the GOP convention is pure racial bigotry. White people - "in shades from eggshell to ecru" - are despised simply for being Caucasian, and none more so than those who have earned a fortune -- worst of all, in the real world. Oh, and if you saw anything other than white skin at the GOP convention, that was planted there, just for show.

What Dowd finds significant is that "the audience reflected a party in decline." The party is in decline, you see, because white people are in decline. At least I think that's her "logic."

Never mind that Rasmussen reports the number of Republicans is at a record high and Gallup, that the Democrat party is at a record low in terms of favorability going into a convention. What Maureen Dowd wants you to know is that Republicans are white, despicable and "cruel" in their lack of feeling for their fellow man (and woman). Democrats, we need not be told, diametrically opposite.

Now if we were to accept the premise that Republicans are naught but a masquerade, and we follow the stream of Ms. Dowd's consciousness to its logical conclusion, then the Democrats must be... well, I guess what you see is what you get.

And so it is.

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Interesting, I think, that Dowd has taken to calling Paul Ryan "the Irish undertaker" -- because, she says, Ryan has placed the "safety net" inside a coffin which will, presumably, be placed in a grave as soon as he and Romney win. She's also calling Romney "the Mormon bishop" -- implying, I suppose, that Romney will officiate at the burial service. Dowd's always had a penchant for nasty, even vile, "humor" -- but this is the first time, so far as I know, that she's resorted to the morbid and the macabre. Since metaphors reflect the thinking of the people who devise them, I can only assume that Dowd's metaphors reflect her fear that it's the Obama presidency that's really lying in that coffin awaiting burial. If so, she's still right about one thing: it'll be Romney and Ryan who smilingly officiate at the funeral.

[ghd hair straightener]

When I was in college majoring in English Lit, a number of my professors -- feeling compelled, I suppose, by the frequently-heard charge that literary study was impractical and a waste of time -- would launch into lectures on the importance of being "well-rounded." The term has pretty much fallen into disuse; nowadays, if you speak of a "well-rounded man," folks will think you're talking about Chris Christy (although I did have one prof who liked to joke that Winston Churchill was "well-rounded in girth and every other way"). Rabbi Soloveichik is well-rounded in the original meaning of the term: he has a mind that seems comfortably at home wherever it roams. And he writes so clearly that readers who may not know nearly as much as he does will feel comfortably at home with what he's written. I'd put him up in debate against the entire membership of Rabbis For Obama -- but that would be unfair to the RFO crowd. This is a terrific addition to the roster of GOP convention speakers.