Maureen Dowd is an expert on marriage in the same way that Charles Barkley is an expert on winning NBA championship rings. In this week’s edition of Hot Jamz with MoDo, Our Lady of the Pop Culture References peers into her scrying pool and divines the meaning of notorious Basque separatist Michelle Obama’s need to sometimes go on vacations with persons who are not her husband. In a column that actually has something to sort of do with politics, Maureen’s's back to telling the Obama White House what they should do. But this time the bizarre thesis of her argument isn’t “Black it up!” It’s “Michelle Obama is too good at being a fun mom.”
She seemed to be gigging her husband a bit: “I’m going to do what I want to do. I can’t worry about whether it gives the Tea Partiers ammo or makes Democrats (including you) campaigning against the excesses of the rich look hypocritical. Even if the country is sliding into a double-dip recession, I’m going abroad to a five-star hotel on Air Force Two and give a boost to another country’s economy.”
Yes, Maureen Dowd applies her legendary psychic acumen to figure out what exactly Michelle Obama is thinking when she goes off to have a nice and well-deserved vacation with her youngest child and a close-knit coterie of old family friends in a sexier and better nation with actual culture. Clearly, Michelle wishes to spite her husband! This is maybe possibly true, and if it isn’t true, it ought to be. We are talking about a brilliant, elegant creature who has been forced by her husband’s (dreamy) political ambitions to spend most of her time in the soulless, ugly democracy strip mall that is Washington, D.C.
But MoDo does not approve. And she explains why, though not before getting in a jab at George W. Bush, a terrible president.
And because his predecessor mucked things up so royally, President Obama’s job is ridiculously hard. But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip.
Surprise! Women are not supposed to have fun unless it is a Maureen Dowd-approved type of fun, like being a bipolar whore with nice clothes. And women who have fun together are highly suspect, as they ought to spend most of their time figuring out the answer to that age-old question, “Are Men Necessary?” Maybe Michelle Obama will write a terrible book on this subject!
When health care passed after a difficult year and the president celebrated with his staff on the Truman Balcony, the first lady was with her daughters on Broadway to see Memphis.
How awful that this “Michelle Obama” should give her children an actual childhood instead of subverting her professed desire to be a great mom in order to play sidekick to her husband. In addition, it is stupid that the message of this play is that love can transcend racial differences, and also that dancing is fun. Exposing children to live theater now will only lead to them choosing plays over Maureen Dowd’s favorite vampire movies in future.
When the BP oil spill stained the White House, making the president seem so impotent that he had to make his first national address from the Oval Office, the first lady was playing with her mother and daughters in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire. She was taking in a Lakers game the night of his address.
How heinous that Michelle took her two daughters and their sole surviving grandparent to California, a place that is basically Mexico North anyway. How horrible that she did not immediately curtail a fun and wholesome Robinson girls’ trip because BP got the the Hershey squirts all over the Gulf of Mexico.
During the campaign, Michelle tried to offset her husband’s existential detachment with familial warmth. Now that he holds the world’s loneliest office, he needs that more than ever.
Oh, wow, Maureen. You done did it again, with your lame attempt at Insight (TM).
Yes, Michelle Obama provided a warmer and more relatable face on the campaign trail than could her rock-star/professor/Jesus husband. But she’s not the reason he got elected. Does Maureen Dowd think Michelle Obama still needs to be by his side when he makes every announcement about every policy decision, just so that the American Peoples will swallow their medicine? Or is MoDo personally concerned that Michelle has become too much of a GREAT MOM to be a goodly and dutiful wife to the president?
Maureen Dowd is like “The Marriage Ref” plus Dr. Benjamin Spock plus whoever the fuck wrote What to Expect When You’re Expecting, times one billion. Someone give her 18 million raises and a steak dinner with Pinch, now.
Sara Benincasa bravely re-blogs Maureen every Monday, often upon an actual Black-Berry iPad tablet phone.
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She’s just a jealous barren spinster.
I bet FLOTUS even had the audacity to use the front doors at her destinations.
Another thing, Michelle is supposed to be mulching Bo’s dogshit into her organic garden. I suppose white people have to do that now, too.
Clearly Michelle should be seeting a good example for America’s housewives during these trying times of the second Great Depression and spend her afternoons on her knees, in an apron and rubber gloves, scrubbing the White House steps. You know, frugality and all.
oh yeah, barry was really suffering without mo around! basketball and bbq w/10 of his closest nba friends lol~
I haz a sad for MoDo. She’ll never know the joys of being a parent and jetting your children off to meet heads of state like a normal woman does.
Haha, Sara, I just got back from visiting Pere Lachaise, went to see the flowers that the hippiechicks leave, “modo rising” indeed! Modo’s just jealous of flotus’s skin, Modo’s photos are are not so much airbrushed as they are stuccoed.
Hello, I’m zombie Robert Stack. Today on Unsolved Mysteries: there are apparently who read Maureen Dowd columns. Unbelievable, I know. Stay tuned for the shocking truth.
Actually, other than her confessions about her Catholic faith and the crime of her pastoral (male) leaders–MoDo has become a lazy gossip columnist. Picking at Michelle Obama is one tiny step up from MoDo writing her phone number on the wall in the men’s room–for story leads of course.
ZOMG, FLOTUS has her own life without POTUS. And POTUS approves, or at the very least, can’t stop her. Gasp! Could it be a marriage of equals? How disgusting. How un-American. Is there no cute woman who will step up to the plate and save Merika?
What ridiculous sniping. Jealous much, Mo Don’t? Serve him toast? Who the hell does that?
[re=634651]Prommie[/re]: The hell you say.
[re=634660]norbizness[/re]: She’s ghastly. She could gag a fucking maggot.
“But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip.”
So Dowd is basically telling the First Lady she should shut up and make her husband a sandwich. Lovely. It’s nice to see a woman who somehow managed to make it to near the top of her field in well-paying position wants to put all the other women in the country back to 50s housewife roles.
And by nice, I mean vomit-inducing.
Maybe Michelle, instead of being a mom to her two young girls, cultivating a kitchen garden, serving food at homeless shelters, giving speeches on oil-soaked beaches (um, she did that, MoDo, why are you complaining?), leading a campaign to fight childhood obesity, and (one assumes) giving aid, comfort and possibly advice to her husband, who has the most difficult and high-pressure job on the whole damn planet, she should perfect that vapid adoring gaze that Nancy Reagan used to stare up at her husband with as though she were receiving psychic manna from his head chakra while being a vicious harpy behind-the-scenes.
Actually, at the end of the Obama administration, Barack and Michelle ought to put together a huge book of all the gratuitous social and policy advice they got from people who don’t agree with a damn thing they ever do or say and never will. Okay, a book would only be a small sample, but dear — if I had a tenth the number of grating, strident, know-nothing idiots giving me useless advice all day as they do, I’d spend most of my free time on a Spanish beach too.
Those liquid breakfasts are really taking their toll–she must be skipping the tomato juice at this point.
[re=634665]JMP[/re]: Right. And she cites Mary McGrory, who was born in 1918, for the toast reference. McGrory probably was talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, in FDR’s first term, when she said that.
And for a highly successful working woman who wants all other woman to be barefoot and pregnant, see the walking, talking human shitstain, Phyllis Schlafly. That cunt actually had other people raising her young children while she flew around the country telling other women not to work because they had to take care of their kids. Then she worked really hard to defeat the ERA, which she did.
Is she even married? (Not actually interested enough to look it up myself). What I can’t believe is that even dragged on to “important” shows like MTP from time to time, like she really has anything to add to anything — not that most folks on MTP have anything to say.
Make him a martini? Should she also lay out his slippers and wow him with little somethings from Victoria’s Secret every few months, just to keep the spark alive? I suppose if she were really to follow the MoDo Model for Post-Feminism, Michelle would just spend her evenings searching for random men-in-power to give NSA blow jobs to.
[re=634671]Katydid[/re]: Phyllis Schlafly <<< sounds like an STD.
Has the Obama presidency caused everyone to lose their minds?! For fuck’s sake, people…She’s the First Lady…it’s her job to go overseas and fluff nations friendly to us. Prior to this you’d think that until Barry came along…
No president ever put his feet up on a desk
No president sent the ol’ ball and chain overseas to say yo! to friends
No president ever honored the leader of another nation
Did history begin with Barry? WTF?
Poor Modo. She’s lost all of her cultural touchstones, except the ones she shares with her lunch partners. I can’t figure out if she’s Ellen Goodman or Phyllis Shlafly. Her next column will tell FLOTUS to greet POTUS in Saran Wrap.
POTUS/FLOTUS 2012
[re=634682]Dashboard_Buddha[/re]: But they’re BLACK!
Anyway, did it ever occur to MoDo that Barry wants her to go on vacation? Maybe the “Oh, baby, I missed you!” sex is a better stress-reliever for him than her making him a sandwich? Maybe a vacation is the least thing he can begrudge her after dragging her into the international stage and forcing her to give up her career and personal ambitions for eight years? Or maybe she’s just a Botox injection and a Stoli/barbiturate cocktail away from Dame Peggy levels of spiteful lunacy?
Vacation in Spain, vacation in Hawaii, feet up on the desk, TELEPROMPTERs!!!, overuse of the word unprecedented, NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE!, bought a house from some guy, went to Church, secret Muslim, lived in foreign countries, NO FLAG PIN!, eats arugula and likes Dijon mustard…
eh, they got nothin’ Never did, never will.
It’s as if she wrote this column while drunk and watching ‘Mad Men.’
[re=634671]Katydid[/re]: Oh yeah, Schlafly’s always been one of the worst “do as I say, not as I do” woman-hating women. Sadly the right-wing punditocrity is filled with them, and Dowd has gone into that mode before; yet a lot of wingnuts still somehow think she’s a liberal.
Down, having never been married herself, wouldn’t really know what makes a supportive wife, now would she?
Was that mean?
too bad
[re=634682]Dashboard_Buddha[/re]: The sherrif is “near.” Yes indeed, everyone has lost their mind. Just remember, always, the sherrif is “near.” That, fundamentally, is the problem people have with Obama.
White people have many faults
but blacks have only two;
everything they say
and everything they do.
[re=634671]Katydid[/re]: I trust you for the answer to this question, you more than anyone: would it be sexist of me to suggest that Modo perhaps, well, she needs cock?
Maureen seems to be wishing for women to remain in the traditional roles set down by the religious establishment dominated by men.
[re=634711]imissopus[/re]: Or “Hung”.
Didn’t MoDo also just get back from some high-flying excursion to Saudi Arabia that she chronicled for Vanity Fair? Where she pranced around being wined and dined by the kingdom’s wealthy, oppressive, male leaders in all of most opulent hotels and palaces? Only to return to the US to infuse her article with lame Sex and the City 2 references? JESUS, lady.
Maureen Dowd as marriage counselor is like Rachael Ray as a Michelin-rated chef.
As the late, great Andy Kaufman (like MoDo, an important marriage expert) liked to say, “A woman’s place is in the kitchen.”
I think she has been watching too much Mad Men and didn’t notice that almost all of those marriages are unhappy.
[re=634791]ella[/re]: Or, Dr. Phil as a marriage counselor.
[re=634651]Prommie[/re]: Stucco? Bondo, you mean. Those fenders need a LOT of work:
http://img4.allvoices.com/thumbs/event/480/385/38948135-maureen-dowd.jpg
[re=634819]Neilist[/re]: She does look like she’s been badly faired and sprayed with primer, doesn’t she?
[re=634657]Katydid[/re]: Or even a cute man?
The most tolerable married people I know by far are the ones who are capable of taking separate vacations.
I didn’t realize that one of the most powerful executives in the world has no one besides his wife to fetch him toast or martinis.
Shorter Dowd.
Obama, call me.
“David Axelrod says, “not everything is political theater.””
Since when exactly.
I much preferred David Broder’s recent column “10 Super Sexy Ways the Obama’s Can Spice Things Up in the Bedroom!”
The time you spend reading, blogging and tweeting about MoDo, is time you will never get back.
Maureen Dowd is to journalism what Snooki is to … journalism.
How to solve the national debt:
Pay-Per-View, mano-a-mano, Michelle taking on Maureen and kicking her sorry ass and shutting her up once and for all.
Look, MoDo agrees that Shrub mucked things up royally.
Hey MoDo, remember how you helped Shrub get the opportunity to muck things up so royally with your gratuitous, juvenile slagging of Shrub’s opponent? Well, I do. Fuck off, MoDo.
You just know Dowd reads this column religiously. She needs to shut off her fucking PC and bake me a pie. Or a martini.
how disgusting. How un-American?
Or a martini.
Thank you, Sara.
I needed that.
Ask your spin-doctor if Insight(TM) is right for you.
If your thinly-veiled butthurt lasts more than four hours, consult your exorcist.
[re=634667]SayItWithWookies[/re]: Nailed it, SIWW. Nailed it.
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