Friday, April 29
Thank God for the internet, because I don't have the energy to deconstruct Maureen Dowd's mental problems on my own.
DOWD PARODY [Cliff May]Maureen Dowd must be on vacation. What appears to be a Maureen Dowd column this morning is surely a parody of a Maureen Dowd column. I mean, she wouldn’t write anything this ridiculous. And if she did, her editors would never publish it. Headlined “Uncle Dick and Papa,” it pretends to be a comparison of Pope Benedict XVI and Vice President Dick Cheney. Who wudda thunk that those two have anything in common? So faux-insightful! What a joke on Maureen! According to the Dowd satirist, “the new pope is a Jurassic archconservative who disdains the ‘if it feels good do it’ culture and the revolutionary trends toward diversity and cultural openness since the 60's.” (Jurassic archconservative! Don’t you love that? It really does sound like Maureen’s humor. Except, of course, that it’s not at all funny or clever! And that impassioned defense of the ‘60s, the Golden Age for all superannuated hippies and old new leftists – that’s brilliant.) Pope Benedict XVI and Vice President Cheney “are a match,” the satirist continues, “absolutists who view the world in stark terms of good and evil, eager to prolong a patriarchal society that prohibits gay marriage and slices up pro-choice U.S. Democratic candidates.” Is that hysterical, or what? Even Maureen wouldn’t be so clueless as to chide a pope for seeing the world in terms of “good and evil.” The Dowd stand-in then observes that both PB16 and Cheney are “from rural, conservative parts of their countries” – poor dears; had they been raised on the Upper West Side or in Georgetown they’d probably be almost as sophisticated as Maureen!– who “want to turn back the clock and exorcise New Age silliness. Mr. Cheney wants to dismantle the New Deal and go back to 1937. Pope Benedict XVI wants to dismantle Vatican II and go back to 1397.” Get it? 1937 and 1397? The real Dowd would know better than to think that inverting the two digits of a date constitute a thigh-slappingly ingenious literary device. The column also chides the Pope because “as a scholar, his specialty was "patristics," the study of the key thinkers in the first eight centuries of the church.” How dopey of him to study dead white men – and Christians no less! He could have majored in diversity studies with Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado! The kicker of the column is a quote from a real expert – a philosophy professor at the University of Utah who enjoys the extraordinary distinction of having had a letter printed in The New York Times. And pace Papa, he says that, in actual fact, “moral absolutism is relative” because “those who hold 'liberal' views are not relativists. They simply disagree with the conservatives about what is right and wrong." This is a scream! But when Maureen comes back from vacation and sees it, I think she’s going to be angry.
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_04_17_corner-archive.asp#061344
 
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