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Does anyone really take Maureen Dowd seriously anymore? Just asking because her latest New York Times column (gift link though we feel a little bad about wasting one on it) reads like complete fantasy, finding Deep Rifts in the seeming party unity as the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Chicago today. (And Wonkette is here!)
In her weird dystopian fan fiction, the party bigwigs conspired to do a coup on Joe Biden, installed Kamala Harris as the nominee, and are arriving in Chicago seething with resentment for each other over the palace intrigue.
Here’s an example:
It’s going to be a glorious coronation — except that everyone’s mad at one another.
Top Democrats are bristling with resentments even as they are about to try to put on a united front at the United Center in the Windy City.
As Jeff Tiedrich points out, Maureen Dowd followed up her column “Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go” (“It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy”) with “The Dems Are Delighted. But A Coup Is Still A Coup.”
This … is about exactly what we would expect, actually.
Now that Biden has done exactly what she pined for and stepped away from the campaign — and the transition to a new candidate has gone so well that Democrats are consciously reminding each other not to get too giddy — Dowd insists throughout the column that behind all the excitement and joy, everyone at the top of the party is looking to shiv each other.
To be sure, Dowd at least presents the “coup” as a grim necessity, the “right thing to do,” while she insists that it was nonetheless “a jaw-dropping putsch.” The party leadership acted for the good of the country and “decided to put the welfare of the party — and the country — ahead of the president’s ego.” Did Joe Biden have any choice in the matter? Not in Dowd’s telling, and according to her version, Biden didn’t so much pass the torch as have it wrested from his brittle grasp, leaving him befuddled when Harris “deftly cemented her position as the nominee,” causing Dems to have a joygasm at the new sense of possibility.
Poor Joe Biden, in Dowd’s version, is somehow not even the guy who endorsed Harris 20 minutes after he announced he was getting out.
How could Biden not be hurt that the Democratic convention went from four days of “sitting shiva,” as James Carville put it, to a joyful romp with Kamala atop the ticket?
Never mind the extensive reporting about how Biden actually spent the days before his announcement meeting with advisers and coming to the decision to drop out of the race. In Dowd’s hatefic, it’s a more exciting narrative to claim that suddenly he was run over by a truck.
The deed done, the party is now praising Biden while his corpse lies bleeding before them, or more accurately, while he’s having a fine old time at events for Harris, and joking with reporters and so on. It’s been a while since we’ve read the Shakespeare play, but we honestly don’t recall Julius Caesar being so happy after his ides of March party.
Not that Dowd is at all trying to force current events into a tragic narrative or anything, apart from how she portrays Nancy Pelosi as Brutus, so consumed with guilt that she has difficulty admitting she did a coup:
One of the most ruthless and successful tacticians in congressional history seemed sheepish about knifing her pal, and conflicted over whether to take credit. Et tu, Nancy? Biden must have thought.
Or maybe there wasn’t a coup so much as a process of persuasion and nobody has a dagger sticking out of his shoulder, but that sure would be boring on stage, even in iambic pentameter.
According to Dowd, the Obamas and Bidens don’t actually like each other and haven’t for years. Joe Biden, she says,
already resented Obama for shoving him aside for Hillary, and he resented Hillary for squandering that opportunity and losing to Trump. Even though Obama tried to do everything quietly to protect his saintly status, Joe was furious that Obama was sidelining him twice.
Does Dowd bother letting us know how she supposedly knows all this? She does at least occasionally admit she’s speculating about how Biden and other players “must” feel. But almost all of it is presented as if Dowd is deeply familiar with all the inside dope, despite not referring to any insiders at all — not so much as an off the record whisper from an unnamed insider. The longest reference to any source she provides is one of Donald Trump’s deranged fantasies about Joe Biden plotting to crash the convention — he’s already speaking tonight, so he may not have to sneak in — to undo the “coup.”
Does Dowd have such a vast network of inside sources that she simply takes an oracular view without actually saying she has them, or does she just make shit up so people will think so?
In any case, even while Democrats are having a ball in Chicago this week, don’t go feeling jealous of them. They’re all on the verge of strangling each other, mmm-hmm.
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