The New York Times dowdified 'reporting'
Gerard Jackson
Just as the hysterical and rabid John Pilger gave us the verb to pilgerise (to distort events and presume malice and the existence of conspiracies) the equally rabid and hysterical Maureen Dowd has given us the verb to dowdify, the use of ellipses to either reverse the original meaning of a statement or to distort in such away so as to portray the unfortunate subject as dishonest, crooked, stupid, corrupt, etc.
(Things have moved so fast on the linguistic front that dowdify has considerably broadened its original meaning and now encompasses any journalistic abuse of quotes).
Dowd and Pilger have so much in common that they could be evil twins. They both hate Bush and the Republicans; they share each other's contempt for the truth and anyone who disagrees with them, and they are both intolerant liars with a pathological hatred of genuinely liberal values. (When I speak of liberal values I am referring to classical liberalism). In fact, the more I compare these two the more persuaded I am that they were separated at birth.
Without a doubt it was the net, the power of which is still greatly underestimated in Australia, that was the undoing of the Time's resident banshee, the screaming of which used to instil terror into the hearts of north-eastern 'Republicans'.
But lying about Republicans was always par for the course for the banshee. During the Florida fiasco when Gore and close supporters first openly revealed their contempt for the Constitution Dowd showed her fascist slip
Outraged that justice had frustrated Gore's attempted coup she reverted to the Goebbelesque tactic of rewriting history and smearing Bush. You know the tactic, the one where lies become the truth and the truth is whatever the party says it is. So, as the tormented Winston Smith found in Orwell's grim novel 1984, 2+2 really does equal 5 or whatever the party deems it to be.
In Dowd's surreal political world where make-believe substitutes for reality and bigotry passes for wisdom Gore became the martyr, a victim of the Bush family, that vicious political "cartel" as she once described it. And what of Gore the liar, the race-baiting demagogue, the power-hungry politician who schemed to strip service personnel of their right to vote?
Dowd, like the thugs who ran Oceania, has her own memory hole — it's called The New York Slimes where they cannot distinguish bitchy from witty, which must account for her undeserved reputation as a droll and daring columnist when she is nothing more than a lefty with a poison pen and a licence to libel.
If there be such a thing as political affirmative action, then she is graphic example of why it should be abolished.
Like most of her purulent breed she is totally unable to grasp the concept of the rule of law, thinking it is whatever a Clinton or a Gore says it is, depending, of course, on the meaning of "is". A Goebbels or Stalin would really love this line: "When you try to obscure truth, as the Bush crowd has, that is a sad day for democracy".
A "sad day for democracy indeed". It was Gore and his legal henchmen, with the tacit support of the poisonous Dowd, who schemed to deny service personnel the right to vote, a foul tactic that Dems should never be allowed to forget.
It was Gore and his win-at-all-costs cronies who tried to have 25,000 valid votes thrown out. That was not "a sad day for democracy", little Miss Dowd, it was an American tragedy and one you enthusiastically participated in. And still you have the effrontery to argue for the "sanctity of the vote" and accuse the Bush camp of "ugly" tactics.
The very notion that the Florida Supreme Court tried "to reveal the truth", as she dishonestly put it, was just another leftwing lie designed to help delegitimise the Bush presidency. Not content with this outrage she argued that the court split along ideological lines. It was split between those who believe that the Constitution means exactly what it says it means and those like Dowd who would have it say anything that promotes their ideology.
That is why a political hack like Justice Breyer thinks there is nothing wrong with legislating from the bench let alone changing the election rules after the result has been declared so that in his own words: "And therefore, I guess, whether we win [the Gore camp] — whether your side, the side you're supporting wins or loses, it doesn't change that."
Justice Scalia summed it up when he declared: "Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires." This astute observation, however, is something that the self-deluded Dowd is unable to comprehend given her unremitting support for the Dems' scorched-earth policy.
Dowd never abandoned her underlying contention that Gore would have won a state-wide recount, even though every recount demonstrated otherwise. What she chooses to ignore is that Bush won the rest of Florida's counties with punch-card voting systems. This means counting undervotes in these counties would have increased votes for Bush, just as they would have increased them for Gore if these counties had voted for him.
No matter how Dowd would have it, the Florida court's slim majority had nothing to with "principle" and everything to do with trying to fix the election for Gore. An attempt so brazenly corrupt that Justice Wells felt impelled to issue a scathing dissension stressing that the decision had "no foundation in law".
That Maureen Dowd enthusiastically cheered a decision that had "no foundation in law" because it supported her ideological choice for the White House reveals how far down the fascist road America's media elite has travelled.
Dowd's support for Gore's assault on constitutional niceties and the rule of law is really no surprise as this is the same penetrating intellect that called Florida's Cuban community a bunch of totalitarians because they resisted Elian's illegal return to Castro's paradise.
Totalitarians, Dowd? Perhaps this Gore bootlicker would like to tell us how many children this community murdered, how many political prisoners it has, how many critics it tortured to death, how much international terrorism it sponsors, etc?
To my knowledge Dowd has never condemned one criminal act by Castro. No wonder she still thinks Gore's tactics of manufacturing votes while ripping votes away from Bush supporters was a noble idea.
Her despicable behaviour in dishonestly changing the meaning of a statement by President Bush surely confirms that this closet totalitarian is not fit to cross the threshold of any respectable newspaper, which explains why she is still with the Times.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor
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