Along with Daisy Buchanan: As she starts her latest column, Maureen Dowd is in crackpot heaven. She gets everything into her first four grafs, including Howard Stern:
DOWD (7/31/13): The cruelly misunderstood Anthony Weiner has “no idea” if he’s about to be stabbed by another stiletto heel.Dowd was getting herself lathered good. It was like the good old days when she cited her friend and fellow sex-nut Chris Matthews, then moved on to Gennifer Flowers:
“These are people who I thought were friends, people I trusted when I communicated with them,” he told Denis Hamill of The Daily News. “But who knows what they might do now?”
Yes, who knows? Free-spirited young women having digital sex with a well-known politician who loves to expose himself and talk raunchy can be so damnably unpredictable and untrustworthy.
The delusional Weiner, who has turned shamelessness into performance art, was expecting the sexual equivalent of honor among thieves. He wasn’t counting on being out campaigning Tuesday morning while one of his online inamoratas, Sydney Leathers, was holding forth to Howard Stern about their fantasies of “a secret sex den,” her possible future in porn and Weiner’s satyriasis.
DOWD: After years of literally following in Hillary’s footsteps, little did Huma know how fully she would follow in Hillary’s footsteps.Good God! She even returned to Tom and Daisy Buchanan! Back in the well-lathered Year of Impeachment, that was a requisite allusion. You couldn’t get your Echo License from the guild if you hadn’t said it.
Weiner continues to play the rebel without a pause. He shrugged off reports that the Clintons, who have been christened the careless Daisy and Tom Buchanan of politics, regard him, in the words of F. Scott, as the foul dust floating in the wake of their dreams.
“I am not terribly interested in what people who are not voters in the city of New York have to say,” Weiner sniffed about the first couple of Westchester.
Bill confessed, “I hadn’t been perfect” after the Gennifer Flowers story broke, so Weiner echoed: “I recognize I am not a perfect messenger. I get that.”
Bill and Hill are Tom and Daisy—and let’s not forget about Gennifer Flowers! Make no mistake—this is the Big East Coast Irish Catholic Crazy within which Dowd and Matthews were raised.
The vast majority of Us Irish have moved way on since then, even Matthews. He was once the most unhinged Hillary-hater of them all. Today, he's her most devoted stooge, even as he fulminates about Weiner’s sexy-time conduct.
But Dowd can’t break free from the past. (Rather plainly, neither can Lawrence.) We Irish! Those of us who can’t break free from the values of the mid-century priests keep staging breakdowns of this much-e-mailed type.
Dowd continues her streak today. It’s even back to the Buchanans—and we don’t mean childhood friend Pat!
Maureen Dowd remembered: Back in 2008, Dowd remembered the good old days when everyone and his sex-crazed uncle was comparing the Clintons to Tom and Daisy Buchanan:
DOWD (1/2/08): Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom? She is speaking in a soft, measured voice in these final days, so that, as with Daisy Buchanan, you have to lean in to listen. But is she really different than she was in the years when she was so careless about the people around her getting hurt by the Clinton legal whirlwind that she was dubbed the Daisy Buchanan of the boomer set?Back then, everyone had called Hillary that—but no one did it more than Dowd! It started with a remark by Joe Klein, in 1994 or 1995. By August 1995, Dowd had begun to obsess:
DOWD (8/10/95): As with Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the landscape is littered with aides taking the fall. As Joe Klein wrote of the Clintons in Newsweek: "They are the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of the Baby Boom Political Elite. . . . They smashed up lives and didn't notice. . . . How could the First Lady allow her chief of staff to spend $140,000 on legal fees? Why hasn't she come forward and said . . . 'I'll testify.'"Clinton got re-elected anyway. At that point, Dowd began to obsess and complain about his vice president's bald spot.
DOWD (3/14/96): As though Pat and Bay Buchanan were not enough, "Blood Sport" reaffirms the portrait of the Clintons as Tom and Daisy Buchanan—careless about using people, reckless about the rules.
DOWD (7/21/96): In May 1994, the love affair ended abruptly when Mr. Klein wrote a story called "The Politics of Promiscuity." He now found Mr. Clinton not bionic, but boorish. He had come to see the Clintons as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of politics, a careless couple who expected others to clean up their messes. He said the President's "wanton affability leads, inevitably, to misunderstandings. It forces him to finagle, which he does brilliantly. It leads to a rhetorical promiscuity, the reckless belief that he can talk anyone into anything (or, more to the point, that he can talk his way out of anything), that he can seduce and abandon, at will and without consequence."
This morning, the good old days were back. Even Flowers was there!
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