Maureen Dowd Fans

[RanchHQ]

Hey, Ducky, when do you see those Relatives again?

NYT’s Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes Left-wing Blogger

On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.

On Sunday, Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo accused New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of plagiarizing a piece he posted a few days ago.

Dowd has now admitted her mistake.

As Marshall wrote Thursday (h/t Hot Air):

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Dowd wrote before she got caught:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

As such, Dowd merely substituted "the Bush crowd was" for "we were." The rest is exactly the same.

Dowd’s piece now reflects her admission:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.” [...]

An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.


So, we not only have so-called journalists channeling nonsense from the liberal blogosphere, but now they’re just cutting-and-pasting from it.

And newspaper owners wonder why their subscription rates continue to plummet.

Article source : NewsBusters.org

[Maximus]

Folks please read Ranch's post. Please read how the lefties feed off each other. Liberalsim 101.

[RanchHQ]

Max:

A President never uses the word "Please" in an Executive Order.

Does he/her/confused?

[pingtheduck]

Thanks for looking out Ranch! I might have to send this one in retaliation for the last MoveOn.org unsolicited forward. Maureen Dowd.. I hope she gets nailed at least as hard as the press nails Limbaugh. She's the perfect example of just straight up hateful talk. What is the good in that?

[RanchHQ]

OK, Maureen Dowd is not a Plagiarist; she did not take her writings from this Josh fellow, she took it from a "Friend" who must have taken it from the Josh fellow.

So, she just put in her Piece, word for word, what her Friend said.

Yea, right.

Update: A site about NYT gossip claims to have obtained a statement from Dowd. It’s unspeakably lame so I’m guessing, yeah, it’s authentic.

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

I.e. “I didn’t mean to rip off Josh Marshall, I meant to rip off my friend.” I’m curious as to how this exchange with her “friend” went, precisely. Presumably they were chatting casually and whoever it was read Marshall’s quote and she said, “Great point! Say that again!” and he/she repeated it … verbatim, and slowly while MoDo scribbled it down. Has that ever happened to you while making chitchat? Someone asks you to repeat a point you made and you restate it … word for word?

Update: Ah, a more reasonable possibility from the comments: When she says she was “talking” to a friend, she might mean IMing. The friend could have copy/pasted it without attribution and she thought it was an original idea. Even so, though, when I want to use something someone’s said to me in casual conversation, I always frame it as “As a friend said to me the other day” or some similar formulation. The alternative is to ask their permission to treat the idea as your own, but presumably she didn’t do that in this case or else the friend would have said where he got it from.

LINK (Not FOX News): Hot Air Blog Archive Wow: Maureen Dowd plagiarizes lefty blogger? Update: I got it from a “friend,” says Dowd

[RanchHQ]

Oh oh.

Now even Maureen Dowd has problems with the inability of The Obama Administration to get anything done:

"The tyro American president got the Nobel for the mere anticipation that he would provide bold moral leadership for the world at the very moment he was caving to Chinese dictators. Awkward."



Op-Ed Columnist
Fie, Fatal Flaw!

One singular leader who wrote elegantly about his ideals, was swept into the presidency and then collided with harsh reality had some advice for another.

In an interview with Alison Smale in The Times last week, Vaclav Havel sipped Champagne in the middle of the afternoon and pricked Barack Obama’s conscience.



Havel, the 73-year-old former Czech president, who didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize despite leading the Czechs and the Slovaks from communism to democracy, turned the tables and asked Smale a question about Obama, the latest winner of the peace prize.
Was it true that the president had refused to meet the Dalai Lama on his visit to Washington?

He was told that Obama had indeed tried to curry favor with China by declining to see the Dalai Lama until after the president’s visit to China next month.

Dissing the Dalai was part of a broader new Obama policy called “strategic reassurance” — softening criticism of China’s human rights record and financial policies to calm its fears that America is trying to contain it. (Not to mention our own fears that the Chinese will quit bankrolling our debt.)

The tyro American president got the Nobel for the mere anticipation that he would provide bold moral leadership for the world at the very moment he was caving to Chinese dictators. Awkward.

Havel reached out to touch a glass dish given to him by Obama, inscribed with the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. “It is only a minor compromise,” he said. “But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”
Our president would be well advised to listen. Havel is looking at this not only as a moral champion but as a playwright. Obama (who, as Robert Draper wrote, has read and reread Shakespeare’s tragedies) does not want his fatal flaw to be that he compromises so much that his ideals get blurred out of recognition.

As Leon Wieseltier writes in the upcoming New Republic: “The demotion of human rights by the common-ground presidency is absolutely incomprehensible. The common ground is not always the high ground. When it is without end, moreover, the search for common ground is bad for bargaining. It informs the other side that what you most desire is the deal — that you will never acknowledge the finality of the difference, and never be satisfied with the integrity of opposition. There is a reason that ‘uncompromising’ is a term of approbation.”

F.D.R. asked to be judged by the enemies he had made. But what of a president who strives to keep everyone in some vague middle ground of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, without ever offending anyone?

White House advisers don’t seem worried yet that Obama’s transformational aura could get smudged if too much is fudged. They say it is the normal tension between campaigning on a change platform and actually accomplishing something in office.

Yet Obama’s legislative career offers cautionary tales about the toll of constant consensus building.

In Springfield, he compromised so much on a health care reform bill that in the end, it merely led to a study. In Washington, he compromised so much with Senate Republicans on a bill to require all nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities about radioactive leaks that it simply devolved into a bill offering guidance to regulators, and even that ultimately died.

Now the air is full of complaints that Obama has been too cautious on health care, Afghanistan, filling judgeships, ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and rebuilding New Orleans; that he has conceded too much to China, Iran, Russia, the Muslim world and the banks.

The White House Web site that went up during President Obama’s first week in office bragged about the four trips that Senator Obama made to the Gulf region after Katrina, promising to “keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans.” He may be doing a better job than Brownie’s boss, but Obama didn’t make his first visit to New Orleans until Thursday. He stayed just a few hours before jetting off to a fund-raiser in San Francisco.
At the New Orleans town hall, 29-year-old Gabriel Bordenave complained about the slow pace of the recovery. “I expected as much from the Bush administration,” he told Obama. “But why are we still being nickel-and-dimed?”

The president gave a technocrat’s answer about the “complications between the state, the city and the feds in making assessments of the damages.”

“Now, I wish I could just write a check,” he added. When an audience member yelled “Why not?” he dryly noted, “There’s this whole thing about the Constitution.”

The president should remember, though, that when you’re cooking up a more perfect Union, sometimes you’ve got to break some eggs.

[Maximus]

When MD doubts President Obama, the foundation is crumbling....

[RanchHQ]

In her latest piece Maureen Down wished President Obama could be more like Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan.

Honest.

I couldn't believe it either.

"Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference."

Op-Ed Columnist
Visceral Has Its Value

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 21, 2009

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin.

She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls.
The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax.

“And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain,” she told Bill O’Reilly.

Yet Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.

As Judith Doctor, a 69-year-old spiritual therapist, told The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz at Palin’s book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich., “She’s alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that.”

Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin. On Friday, for the first time, his Gallup poll approval rating dropped below 50 percent, and he’s losing the independents who helped get him elected.

He’s a highly intelligent man with a highly functioning West Wing, and he’s likable, but he’s not connecting on the gut level that could help him succeed.

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

People need to understand what the president is thinking as he maneuvers the treacherous terrain of a lopsided economic recovery and two depleting wars.

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

As with the debates, he seems resistant to the idea that perception, as well as substance, matters. Obama so values pragmatism, and is so immersed in the thorny details of legislative compromises, that he may be undervaluing the connective bonds of simpler truths.

Americans who are hurting get angry when they learn that Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury secretary, caved to the insistence of Goldman Sachs and other A.I.G. trading partners that they get 100 cents on the dollar when he could have struck a far better bargain for taxpayers.

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit.

Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans.

Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person.

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static.

She nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his.

He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them. As he builds an emotional moat around himself, she exuberantly pushes whatever she has, warts and all — the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names.

Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt.

On Afghanistan, Palin says, W-like, that the president should simply give Gen. Stanley McChrystal a blank check. But Afghanistan is a wrenching decision, and we do need the closest exit ramp. So the president should get credit for standing back and studying the issue, and for not rubber-stamping the generals’ predictable urge to surge. But the way he has handled the perception part has allowed critics — including generals — to cast him as indecisive.

McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus should have been giving their best advice to Obama — and airing their view against scaling down in Afghanistan — in confidence. Instead, McChrystal pushed his opinion in a speech in London, and Petraeus has discussed his feelings in private sessions with reporters. This creates a “Seven Days in May” syndrome, where the two generals are, in effect, lobbying against the president and undercutting him as he’s trying to make a painfully complex, life-and-death decision.

This time, Obama should adopt Palin’s straight-from-the-gut approach, call the generals into the Oval and tell them, “Your pie-holes you will shut or rise higher you will not. Because, dang it, the president I am!”

LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/op...3QNYB38ktsUxqg

[pingtheduck]

"The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla" God she is obnoxious!

[RanchHQ]

I think I like this Kevin Dowd guy:



Op-Ed Contributor
Oh, No! Kevin’s Back!

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 26, 2009

As my brother Kevin headed off to Christmas Eve Mass in the Maryland suburbs, I asked him how he thought the first year of Barack Obama had gone.

He didn’t have to pray long over that one. “Fine,” he replied, “if you like unmitigated disasters like the Hindenburg and the Redskins season.”



If it’s Christmas, it must be time for my conservative brother to take over my column and turn it a blazing shade of red.

So without further ado, here is Kevin unplugged, offering a perspective from “the real America,” as one of his favorite Republican philosophers, Sarah Palin, likes to put it:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Who could have guessed on Nov. 4, 2008, that the mood this Christmas would be so festive? Yet a feeling of optimism pervades as we watch the old Christmas movies and marvel at the winter wonderland on the Mall illuminated by our national Christmas tree. (No offense to that ardent Catholic Nancy Pelosi, who would prefer “holiday tree.”)

The Republicans, of course, got exactly what they deserved in 2006 and 2008 mainly because they acted like Democrats. Deficit spending and sex scandals are not a good recipe for success.

But by forcing through a government takeover of health care, the auto industry and the banks, the president and his Congressional henchmen have brought us in a time machine to Russia 1917. These massive changes have been done in secret and along bullying, straight party-line votes.

It is stunning to watch rich lawmakers driving their own expensive cars off the cliff and signing on to such a socialist agenda. In dismissing the tea parties and pushing through plans the American people obviously don’t want, they have made the fatal disconnect between the representatives and the represented.

President Obama continues life in the H.O.V. lane, fawned over by the press and the crowned heads of Europe. In between apologies, the president should have reminded those pompous blowhards that without our interference, they would all be speaking German.

My dad was a D.C. policeman, and I would like to apologize (not “recalibrate”) to the Cambridge police for the president’s assumption that they “acted stupidly.” You would think that Mr. Obama would have afforded the police the same consideration he gave to the mass-murdering Muslim Army major when he said: “I would caution against jumping to conclusions.”

The Fort Hood massacre was a direct result of Army policy too concerned with political correctness and “celebrating diversity.” It was a terrorist attack by any definition and the government still cannot say it.

President Obama should remember that Icarus tried to fly to the sun because, as he said, “it is the only thing in the universe that can match my brilliance.” How did that work out?

Here are some reflections for 2009:

To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.

To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee. Next time, do nothing.

To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted. Farewell, Harry!

To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs — including my sister — from the campaign plane.

To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work. Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.

To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes.

To Al Franken: So, 250 years of Senate tradition trashed. Stuart Smalley would have done better.

To Desirée Rogers: Get back to the gate. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson can’t get in.

To the Salahis: Thank you for showing us that shame has no bottom.

To Valerie Jarrett: So much for the Olympic Village in Chicago. Whoops.

To Chris Dodd: The only thing lower than your polls is your mortgage interest rate.

To Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen: The military should be more interested in the men and women who serve than in celebrating diversity.

To the Democratic senators: Go last next time; the bribes are much bigger.

To Sheldon Whitehouse: You, senator, are an idiot.

To Dick Cheney: You, sir, are a patriot. Thanks for firing back.

To President Bush: Thank you for your dignity. Did you really start the plague in the 14th century? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

To Hillary: Who knew how much you would be missed?

To Al Gore: A global warming conference in the middle of a Copenhagen blizzard is not a good visual.

To Max Baucus, Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards: Party on, dudes.

To John Ensign, Mark Sanford and David Vitter: Don’t party on, dudes.