Maureen Dowd must go

By Ted Leibowitz


Maureen Dowd spent a good chunk of the 1990s ripping the Clintons for just about anything she could. Her snarky op-ed columns in the New York Times were sometimes entertaining, but rarely served much purpose beyond displaying just how cruel and snarky she could be.

To make matters worse, her targets often did not deserve of her wrath, and her reliance on rumor and innuendo often resulted in her victims being vindicated by other sources.

It didn't dawn on me until Dubyah almost beat Al Gore in the 2000 election (before losing to him in the selection) that, gee, perhaps a good number of NY Times-reading voters were swayed by this woman's churlish character assasinations. Maybe not enough to vote for the boob the Republicans were running, but perhaps enough to indignantly stay home on election day.

Dowd is an angry, mean, destructive force. Maybe not quite the red-haired Ann Coulter, but certainly worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence.

The New York Times should be better than that.

Dowd is at it again, slashing President Obama both unfairly and unnecessarily from her over-sized podium at the Times. She's on the new president's back because there is (gasp!) wasteful spending in his administration's first budget even though he vowed to cut pork.

Guess what, Ms. Dowd? There is always going to be pork in trillion dollar budgets. That's just a fact of life in the way our government works. Can it be controlled and decreased? Sure. Is now the time to belittle the fledgling administration over this?

This budget bus has been speeding along carrying all of this pork for decades, dontcha think that pulling a complete u-turn at speed might be a bit irresponsible?

In her pork-bashing column she mentions that Iraq was leftover from last year, "and the president’s trying to end that." Yes, and I expect the new president and his administration cut quite a sizeable hunk of last year's bacon out of the budget, too.

Can we be a little realistic here? The Obama administration has a massive clusterfuck to fix and has been on the job for 6 weeks.

A little slack for Mr. Obama, please.

And a pink slip for Ms. Coulter. Er, I mean Dowd.

What do you think? Please take the poll above.

PS-I hear Keith Olbermann is looking for a column...

(Cross-posted at State of the day)