I See Yellow - Help

I See Yellow - Help me out here. I need to come up with a pithy yet dismissive lede for this piece on today's Maureen Dowd piece. I'm having a hard time deciding - partly because Dowd leaves so many openings, partly because this sort of yellow, hack journalism so infuriates me.

Here are my finalists:

• For a redhead, MoDo can sure do a great Yellow.
• With friends like this, the Democrats hardly need Gray Davis to screw them up
• Let's see what context MoDo has misleadingly altered this time!

MoDo starts:

Well, there goes the Jewish women's vote.

Leave aside the slander later in this piece - I don't suspect that Arnold was expecting the Streisand crowd to turn out for him.

Twin revelations of Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping and goose-stepping are not going to play well with some Californians. The androgynous Gray spent the weekend hissing at Arnold's excess testosterone, as Arnold tried a rope-a-grope strategy.

The governor had to be singing "Danke Schön" over tales of the Austrian's 70's foolery: playing Nazi marching songs; clicking his heels and pretending to be an SS officer; clowning as Hitler with comb as mustache; and praising the dictator's ambition and oratorical skills. A Davis aide slyly wondered if Mel Brooks was Arnold's campaign manager.

Comical, nicht wahr? Dowd makes the rather slanderous jump from "noting Hitler's oratorical skills" to prancing about in SS-wear in one libelous leap.

But why?

I think we get a clue in the next graf:

When I was in California, Democrats said that as soon as Mr. Schwarzenegger went up in the polls, the Davis camp was prepared to blast him on women and "play it out in all its seamy glory," as one well-connected Hollywood Democrat said.

And, given that this Dowd piece plays so incongruously against the reality in the polls - the cynical dirt-mongering seems, if anything, to have helped Arnold, at least among Californians smart enough to use the likes of MoDo and Molly Ivins as bird-cage liner - I think this paragraph is the tip-off.

The "...Davis camp was prepared..." with the gloriously seamy dirt - and five will get you ten part of the preparations involved giving Maureen Dowd advance notice that they needed one of her patented slur-pieces, synchronized to catch the end of the weekend spin cycle before the election; the sort of fact-free "when did you stop beating your wife" distorion-fests that make one thing MoDo is channeling the ghost of Walter Winchell.

And yet it hasn't played that way. This piece reminds me of the infamous "DEWEY WINS" headline of 1948 - Californians, the polls tell us, seem to be failing to fall for the dirt in droves.

Although I don't know if any polls have controlled for Jewish women.

When the star's female accusers were recycled in the L.A. Times, Democratic women's groups — already in full cry against Arnold for being boorish despite his un-Bushian moderate stances on women's issues — howled even louder. They rejected his apology and explanation that he was just being "playful" when he grabbed several left breasts out of left field over the decades.

Even before the latest charges, Hillary Clinton, by phone, and Ann Richards and the lawyer Gloria Allred, in person, joined Governor Davis at a bristly rally in West Hollywood with 200 female activists, including contingents from NOW and Planned Parenthood, chanting about Arnold's sins.

At the Davis rally, Senator Clinton chose not to defend the groper who was not her husband. Ms. Richards chose not to defend the groper who was not a Democrat; in 1998, the former Texas governor shrugged off Mr. Clinton's louche behavior: "If we try to retire every man from office who's done what he did, we wouldn't need affirmative action."

Dowd reports this as if there were any suspense in the fact - that NOW and Planned Parenthood would have reached any other conclusion, that they hadn't planned on some sort of Pro-Davis/Busto, anti-whomever the Republican front runner was, from the moment this recall was certified, harping on whatever agenda point came within a California Dream of violating any of their sacraments.

An alien from another planet reading Dowd might think there was a chance that Senator Clinton would ever attack a misogynist who was "on the side of the angels", or that Ann Richards would restrain herself from one of her faux-folksy outbursts even if she could.

Now Republicans who thundered against Bill — not Arnold, who scorned impeachment as a waste of time and money — argue that peccadilloes are not relevant to governing. And feminists who backed Bill are ushering Arnold gropees up to the Democratic microphones.

Other pundits, and half the blogosphere, have noted the differences that MoDo's attention span and agenda won't allow; perjury to a grand jury, obstruction of justice, anonymous sources of groping versus named sources on rape; to repeat them would be excessive.

And not to repeat them would be to subscribe to the Democrats' facile, five year old spin: "It's all about sex to the Republicans".

Dowd's cultural imperialism takes a turn:

Cheekbones jutting, Maria Shriver played the Tammy Wynette-Hillary role with nerve and verve,...

"While she's a Kennedy - one of us, I'm going to invoke the stereotype of the "red-state" woman that so comforts us: all-enduring, duped, just not like the rest of us!"

Dowd notes that it really is all about her, anyway:

Certainly, the bodybuilder-turned-phenom has had moments of being, to use David Letterman's word, a lunkhead. But I find the selective outrage of feminists just as offensive.

Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, "Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one."

Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.

But it's not the same thing, and except in the minds of Democrats-at-all-costs, never was. While the zeal of some impeachment advocates may have been excessive, the goal was to punish a criminal, not harass someone's 30-year-old indiscretions.

I asked my friend Leon Wieseltier, who knows a lot about Judaism and politics and women, about Arnold.

"Schwarzenegger is obviously not anti-Semitic or an admirer of genocide," he said. "Hitler does not appear to have been his moral ideal, but his business model. His old fondness for the Führer is just another expression of the animating principle of his life and movies: the worship and steady acquisition of power. Sacramento is simply the biggest Hummer he can buy."

Read that last paragraph again; what does it say except "achievement=naziism"?

Besides, if we ever hear the "Horst Wessel Song" drifting from Governor Schwarzenegger's office in Sacramento, there's always the blitzkrieg option: the recall of the recall.

STereotypes, innuendo, clumsy spin (that I'll bet dimes to dollars was written before the LATimes re- ran with the Four Anonymous Gropees...

Well, you know what they say about cute redheads; what they lack in intellectual talent, they make up for in the sack.

Whoops. Did I just indulge in stereotype and innuendo?

Posted by Mitch at October 5, 2003 12:33 PM