applauding the wrong state

Maureen Dowd, as usual, with so much cleverness and so little insight. Remember what I said about some stupid arguments flying around after this kind of court decision? Let's get one thing straight: the decision by the Iowa Supreme Court on gay marriage does not mean that Iowans are more progressive than Californians. There are a lot of specious arguments being pushed about this issue, but this one's so obviously dumb that she needs to get called out for it.

And no, her point is not bolstered by the fact that Iowa chose Obama and California chose Hillary in the primary. There was no small amount of debate between many very liberal people on which candidate was more liberal (Paul Krugman, for instance, was absolutely sure it was Clinton), as if that was the primary reason most Democrats voted for their respective candidate, anyway.

The galling thing about this bandwagon to crown the Midwest as the new home of Enlightened America is that it draws attention away from the really big and lasting gain for gays that occurred in Vermont last week, where the state assembly became the first body in America to legislate gay marriage, and did so over the governor's veto, to boot. Vermont opens the door for other like-minded states to follow suit, and if gay marriage is going to gain a footing in any part of the country, it's going to be in socially liberal New England, not in the Midwest.

What is Maureen Dowd's problem?

This may be the most hateful, sneering column I've ever read. Edwards' confession was "creepy?" Really? And what's with the odd, irrelevant side-swipe "Bill Clinton's alleged soul?"

Also, this is a trap:

The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

Edwards would not have stressed that fact if he didn't think (almost certainly correctly) that Dowd et al. would have been all too happy to "elide" the timeline to sensationalize his infidelity, in some cases just letting people assume he was cheating during his wife's hour of need, and in other cases outright lying about it, unless he made it inescapably clear that such was not the case. It's a disingenuous and unfair attack.

For that matter, she claims:

John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.

Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.

And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too...

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist.

Really? She's gotten so worked up that she would write such a bile-filled column, complete with puerile name-calling ("Breck Girl?" You're really still tossing that one around, Maureen?), because she's so upset that John Edwards is a narcissist? Isn't she a little long in the tooth for a "politicians are narcissistic" epiphany? It's not exactly cutting-edge political insight.

So why has Edwards' and Clinton's particular infidelities evoked such rage from Maureen Dowd? After all, it's not like they were out there waving their fundamentalist fingers and trying to prevent gays from marrying while they sullied their own marriages or anything, yet so far as I can tell, neither Larry Craig nor even the execrable Mark Foley got anything approaching the Edwards treatment. Maureen Dowd appears not to have even written about David Vitter when his scandal broke. Do dirty sins of the flesh "narcissism" and having a "need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking" only merit heaps of scorn when the guilty party fits the Democrats-as-sexually-depraved narrative? What gives?

mean girls

Even when we're on the same side, and even when we're on the same side of the same side, I just can't stand Maureen Dowd's column. It's so petty and superficial, and irresponsibly biased as well; it takes quite the matrix of conspiracy theories to make Hillary Clinton into the monster of Dowd's column. Is she still in high school?