Maureen Dowd's Conservative Brother
Destroys My Christmas Cheer
By M.P. Prabhakaran
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is a rarity among today’s journalists. Apart from being a bold and perceptive political and social commentator, she is also an equal opportunity ego-smasher. Movers and shakers of America – be they part of the politically correct (P.C.) crowd on the left, the religiously correct (R.C.) crowd on the right, or the crafty fence-sitting variety – become eligible to receive her barbed darts once their egos become oversize and actions and utterances produce disastrous results. For those reasons, I became an avid reader of her column ever since it began over a decade ago. But the one on Christmas Eve proved to be a disappointment. It nearly destroyed my Christmas cheer. The fault is not entirely hers, though.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been at the receiving end of her attacks more often than others. On this year's Christmas Eve, in the true Christmas tradition, she decided to be nice to the president because of the gargantuan problems he has lately been facing both at home and abroad. She decided not to write anything and invited her conservative-Republican brother Kevin to fill her column space with his thoughts. To entice the president to read what her brother wrote she captioned the December 24, 2005, column “Hey, W., It’s Safe! Read This.” W., on his own admission, doesn’t read newspapers. But it’s quite possible that he made an exception in this case and was happier for it. Kevin has poured paeans of praise on the R.C. crowd for its railing against the P.C. crowd in the recent “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” controversy. As we all know, the president, the born-again Christian, has always been in the forefront of the R.C. crowd. But in the process of making the president and his cronies happy, Kevin has disgraced his sister who, I have reason to believe, detests both crowds. The only redeeming feature in the piece is this line: "To Hillary [Clinton]: A hearty welcome to the Republican Party." It might have made Maureen chuckle. There begins and ends anything good that I can say about what her brother has written.
It was very mean of him to bracket Judge Jones of Pennsylvania with the P.C. crowd. The only ‘sin’ the federal district judge committed was that he declared as unconstitutional the Christian conservatives’ attempt to force biology classes to offer “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution. The judge was only reaffirming the fact accepted all over the world that religion belongs in religion classes and science in science classes. One should not be taught in lieu of the other. There was nothing P.C. or R.C. about his decision. Would Kevin like to go back to the pre-Darwinian age while his sister is already on the Information Superhighway?
Too Late to Stay the Course in Iraq
It is just laughable that he, in his over-enthusiasm to please the president, should appeal to him to “Stay the Course” in Iraq when the whole country knows that a decision on troop drawdown has already been made. Even complete troop withdrawal, which was considered a taboo subject until recently, is being talked about now. Kevin should know that “Let’s fight them [terrorists] there instead of here…” was a cliché Iraq warmongers used ad nauseam in the beginning to justify the war. They stopped using it when evidence became irrefutable that the “there” they had been referring to was the result of mostly faulty, and partly fabricated, intelligence and lies. They knew the cliché wouldn’t wash with the public any longer. What prompted Kevin to advise the president to revive it beats me. Also, he is contradicting himself when he asks the president, in the same breath, to stay the course and “bring our troops home with honor as soon as possible.” The president has learned the hard way that if he stays the course indefinitely, there will be little honor and few troops left to be brought home.
I wonder whether Kevin, before he decided to launch his tirade against the P.C. crowd for the position it took in the “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” controversy, had read what Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in his December 11, 2005, column in the New York Times. I am not saying that the column, which is presented in the form of an imaginary dialogue at the Pearly Gates between President Bush and St. Peter, is an endorsement of the P.C. position. Mr. Kristof, like many of us, knows that the P.C. crowd was stretching its secularism too far when it demanded that the White House “Christmas Tree” be renamed “Holiday Tree” from this year onward and that, in all government-initiated season’s greetings, “Merry Christmas” be replaced with “Happy Holidays.” What Kristof’s imaginary dialogue does is to remind the president and the rest of the R.C. crowd – “religious blowhards” – that Christmas is not about the number of greeting cards sent out and the kind of words used in them. “It’s more about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless.” For making pithy comments like this one, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel called Kristof a “left-wing ideologue.”
Kristof's Challenge to O'Reilly
[In his December 18, 2005, column, Mr. Kristof threw a challenge to Mr. O’Reilly to leave the studio of Fox News and cover a real war, like the one in Darfur, not the nonexistent “War on Christmas.” “War on Christmas” was the title Fox News gave to what Kristof calls its “crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like ‘Happy Holidays’” and to which it devoted “58 separate segments in just a five-day period.”]
I am bringing up Mr. O’Reilly here for another reason, for the reason of Kevin’s kissing up to him: “Thank you for dragging the P.C. crowd into the open. Maybe they will learn that America doesn’t want to be de-Godded.” Doesn't Kevin know that matters Godly and O’Reilly don’t go together? The man who solicited phone sex from his female coworker, and then turned around and besmirched her name when she sued him for sexual harassment, should not be pontificating on God, Christmas and related subjects. He would brand anyone who disagrees with the self-righteous spin he puts on every item he presents in his Fox News program as part of the P.C. crowd deserving condemnation. Print journalists whom he dislikes are “a bunch of vicious S.O.B.’s.” Such spins notwithstanding, he calls ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ his prime-time program, ‘The No-Spin Zone’.
Mr. O’Reilly calling his program ‘The No-Spin Zone’ is very much in line with Fox News calling its entire presentation “Fair and Balanced.” The network even had the audacity to claim trademark rights over “Fair and Balanced.” Bah! Fox News trademarking “Fair and Balanced”! Why shouldn’t a prostitute trademark “Chastity”?
[First published on December 31, 2005. It has since been slightly edited.]
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