aimai

[Mod Note; let’s please avoid personal insults of diarists and commenters.]

Mukasey’s appointment of Dannehy is like an obituary by Maureen Dowd: it’s not about the target of the investigation (or the guy who’s dead), it’s about protecting (or slamming) those left behind.

In MoDo’s case, she reminisces about Paul Newman, from 1986, when she could still get dates and they didn’t feel a need to look under the bed for an ice pick. Then, as now, her personality is so well-balanced that she was in love with both Paul Newman and William F. Buckley, which suggests a lot of experience taking uppers and downers together.

Ms. Dowd picked 1986 not because it was relevant to Mr. Newman’s career (though he won an Oscar that year for the Color of Money), but because that’s when she last interviewed him, when he taught her “how to peel a cucumber”, presumably the training she needed to cover the Clinton presidency. Ms. Dowd may be expressing her Groucho Marxian love of cigars, but she is really bragging about being such a Manhattan socialite that she didn’t know how to make a salad until 1986. Which makes one wonder about her familiarity with bananas Foster, which requires adept peeling, flaying, then burning in brown sugar.

Not content to admire the departed, Ms. Dowd lashes out at Mr. Newman’s liberalness, then his wife, the talented Miss Woodward, whom she flails for declining to be interviewed by Ms. Dowd if the topic was her husband, making her seem petty for having her own brilliant career, while being unable to accept her husband’s. An attempted smear at odds with the Newman-Woodward’s then thirty, now fifty-year marriage.

It is Ms. Dowd who can’t live with herself. Which to choose, Paul Newman or Bill Buckley, balsamic vinegar or hydrochloric acid? As always, Ms. Dowd chooses the impossible as a way to avoid choosing herself. She is not a Tim Burtonesque alley cat, whose tongue can no longer clean her fur because she’s lived too long behind the dumpster. She’s an old bear, unable to retract her claws or fangs, and they have grown so long she can’t use them without hurting herself as well as others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10…..ref=slogin

And it isn’t ‘giving’ the press a ride. They pay dearly to cover their transportation costs. Soemtimes much more that flying commercial the same route would have. And with a busy campaign schedule, it’s the only way to keep up with the candidates.

At least he never talks about it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..30647.html