Traveling Jejune Sideshow

September 3, 2003

Well, the phrase “what a piece of work” has never applied more than today to our haggardly friend, Maureen Dowd.  This morning, her pre-menstrual circus act went after President Bush and his foreign policy for the nine millionth time.  It’d be boring if her writing wasn’t such a giant candelabra of stupidity in gleaming New York Times font.

She begins her whine by saying that Bush’s “‘dream team’ is making the impetuous Clinton look like Rommel.”  A lie by the name of an observation is still a lie.  Maureen knows as much about Field Marshall Rommel as I know about daisies in a hothouse.  To enlighten the reader, let me describe President Clinton’s foreign policy in a few choice phrases: “Apologize to the rest of the world for being America whenever possible, accept campaign contributions from nations who hate us and pretend that the reason that their so supportive is due to a naïve policy of ‘engagement,’ and automatically back down from any terrorist you see–particularly if they try to blow up the World Trade Center or a US destroyer named ‘Cole.’”  Well, there you have it, only in the mind of the world’s biggest ignoramus would the word Clinton appear next to Rommel, but what you dread is what you get in The New York Times.    

Dowd confirms her misunderstanding of foreign policy at the end of the piece when she blathers, we are now “…more hated around the world than ever.”  Hated by whom?  I’ll tell you, by countries who resent us no longer being the weak, cowering, sissies of the Clinton Administration, that’s who.  This is what the leftists never get.  The idea of a foreign policy, or even a government for that matter, is to protect the country’s citizens.  We don’t have a foreign presence to roll up and blow kisses on androgynous Frenchmen.  What the hell is she thinking?  Not much, I assure you. 

Then with what is probably the biggest Freudian slip in the history of her work (hard to choose though), Miss Dowd states: “Even officials with a combined century of international experience can behave with jejeunosity — if they start believing their own spin.” 

What a colossal blunder!  No word better describes our columnist’s existence on this planet than ‘jejune.’  One dictionary defines it first as meaning “dull”, but a secondary definition of the word is “lacking maturity; childish” which is the perfect definition for  the work of Dowd.  It certainly does not apply to the Bush Administration.  I think here she is unconsciously letting the reader know that her salary is the biggest heist of the twenty-first century.

Our apish, brutish, jejune writer-friend then offers more mistruths saying, “[o]ur unseen tormentors are the ones who seem canny and organized, not us.”  Unseen?  They’re unseen until we hunt them down and display them on television and then the media complains about the grisly show.  Besides, there’s usually not a whole lot of them to see because they’ve been blown into fragments by missiles. 

She says the terrorists are organized.  Okay, who’s surprised by that?  John Gotti was pretty organized too, but that didn’t stop us from eventually shutting down his enterprise. Their good organization provides us with yet another justification to hunt them down. 

What we don’t understand is that, to Miss Dowd, this is all just taking too long.  “Wah!”  I can see Maureen on the wrong side of someone else’s bed bitching, “We should have pulled out four columns ago.  Why aren’t they listening to me?”

For a hysteric columnist like Dowd, twenty minutes is too long to wait for results.  Yeah, and I bet after the third date, Miss Dowd complains to her friends that her new ‘boyfriend’ hasn’t bought her a ring yet.  I am not surprised there are still problems in Iraq.  No mature adult should be.  As I’ve indicated before, I hope we draw all the terrorists in the world to that region and then annihilate then with a billion rounds.  When it’s done, I’ll say “well done boys” and Maureen will say “you didn’t do it right.”

She then has many assertions and none of them are accurate.  Here we see her idiotic use of nicknames once again: “Rummy wanted to exorcise the stigma of Vietnam and prove you could use a lighter, faster force. But our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan may not banish our fears of being mired in a place halfway around the world where we don't understand the language or culture, and where our stretched-thin soldiers are picked off, guerrilla-style.”  When did she talk to Rummy?  When did he announce failure?  When did anyone think that they’d be no guerrilla war in a ravaged country after years of totalitarian rule?  I have no answers because her evidence is all piled in the back of her mind–right next to the Valiums and the pastel color swatches for her new bedroom. 

Without knowing it, Miss Dowd provides us with the perfect reason as to why big government is so ineffective and pointless: “But after the majestic handoff of democracy to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, it seems the puppets (now nervous about bodyguards) don't even want to work late, much less govern. As one aide told The Times, ‘On the Council, someone makes a suggestion, then it goes around the room, with everyone talking about it, and then by that time, it's late afternoon and time to go home.’”  Boy, that sounds like the Senate Judiciary Committee to me!  Of course, Maureen would never make the connection between bureaucrats there and bureaucrats here.

Most importantly, she never makes any logical connections of any kind whatsoever.  That’s why her column should be changed from “Liberties” to “Spinster Mo’s Jejune Sideshow.”

Bernard Chapin