Maureen Dowd hearing voices

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

Today the least-hardworking columnist at the Times (quite an honor considering the competition) tried so hard to get through her column without a gratuitous poke at Hillary Clinton.  The main point of the piece was a summary of Ms. Clinton's unexceptionable attack on her opponent as in a fabulous gold-plated bed with white supremacists,  Jew haters, and other assorted alt-right trolls.

She made it to paragraph 12, an outstanding effort by her lights.  But such abstinence was beyond her for she segued right into another tired rant about one of this year's Clinton supposed scandals:

If Hillary had a normal opponent, her vulnerabilities would be more glaring. She would have spent the last week getting peppered with questions about how the F.B.I. discovered 14,900 more emails from her private server, which are going to drip out through the fall.

But Hillary does not have a normal opponent. She has one who manages to self-destruct in every news cycle. So instead she was soaring above her own paranoia and mocking Trump’s paranoia, soaring above her egregious messes and gamboling through Trump’s egregious messes.  (New York Times Sunday Review, Aug. 28, 2016)

Is Maureen Dowd staring to hear voices?

Actually, we know how the FBI discovered those emails, which were the ones she deleted as private (as any official is entitled to do): she didn't wipe the hard disc after pressing the delete button. 

And we also know why she deleted her private emails: she feared quite reasonably that should they be turned over to the Government, they would end up in the hands of her Congressional adversaries and leaked to her maximum disadvantage, as is apparently happening.  To Ms. Dowd, these prescient concerns are evidence of “paranoia.”

The frequency with which Ms. Dowd has repeated these claims, not to mention 20-year-old attacks on Hillary for defending her cheatin' husband, must have triggered some sort of Catholic schoolgirl guilt, for Mo attempted to justify such recycling thusly:

Many people believe that Trump is so demented and dangerous that any criticism of Hillary should be tabled or suppressed, that her malfeasance is so small compared to his that it is not worth mentioning. But that’s not good for her or us to leave so many things hanging out there, without her ever having to explain herself.

Letting her rise above everything for the good of the country is not good for the country.

“Many people believe?”  Leaving aside the provenance of that particular trope, we'd ask which people. Can she name three?  We talk to people and we've never heard anyone say that Hillary Clinton should be immune from criticism because her opponent would blow up the world.

What we have heard people saying is that whining about Hillary's standing by her husband, or trying to keep personal matters private, or even thinking that in fact there are plenty of people out there trying to destroy her is tired and beside the point.  We've even said some of this ourselves.

We've also heard people saying that the entire email “scandal” is a crock, notwithstanding the thrilling (to the easy-living columnist) discovery that parts of 3 of 30,000 emails bore (C) markings, indicating that someone thought that at one point the contents were marked CONFIDENTIAL, although the documents themselves were not properly marked and the classified status could well have passed by the time the email was sent.

We wish that Maureen Dowd, if she's going to keep hearing voices that don't exist, would hear one of them saying “How about some new material?”  At least that's what many people are asking.