May I Please Have Your Job? Because, Unlike You, I Would Not Suck At It, And I'm Also Not A Total Sexist Asshole?

It's not possible. It is just not possible that, twice in one week, Maureen Dowd has used the best piece of op-ed real estate in the nation to spread a bunch of sexist nonsense about democratic candidates. And yet, hard on the heels of the "John Edwards is a metrosexual because he gets good haircuts" article, she's done it again. Today's steaming pile of misogynistic crap -- and brace yourself, because it's really something -- is that Michelle Obama needs to stop deflating her husband by pointing out that he is merely human. This is, Dowd tells us, emasculating. And, to reiterate her prescient argument from the Edwards article, Americans want a very, very manly president. Americans, apparently, demand as their electoral right a candidate who gets cheap, crappy haircuts and whose wife never jokes around that he's not very good in the kitchen. How helpful. I cannot imagine how I would have navigated the long and confusing primary season without the aid of such clarifying analysis.

There are a lot of ways I could go with this one, including the Bob Somerby line that the so-called liberals in the so-called liberal media do as much harm as right wingers, precisely by picking up right wing stances and arguments, and spinning them from a supposed left wing vantage point of "I hate to have to tell you this, but...". I could go that line, but Somerby's got it well in hand. And really, that's only half of what drives me nuts about Dowd.

I've said this before, but it really cannot be said enough. There is one, ONE, female columnist on the Times op-ed page on a bi-weekly basis. Krugman, Kristof, Brooks, Rich, Herbert.... and Dowd. It lands with an appropriate thud, no? So if there's going to be one, ONE, woman in such a position, and allegedly holding down the liberal end of things, is it too much to ask that it not be a woman who so obviously hates women?

Reader K describes Dowd, concisely, as a Rules Girl. I describe her as a person on thin ice criticizing other people for the obvious over-expense of their haircuts. But either way, she is a pernicious example of the ways that women who learn to hate themselves for being women will sooner or later turn that self-hatred outward, and sling it around the wider world. Seriously -- her pieces are glorified gossip columns, spinning some small incident into a referendum on a candidate's chances (always in the mode of "I'm not saying I care, but voters will"). This is self-feminization -- there's no reason she can't actually, you know, be serious in those column inches. And then, to use that gossip column to slam male candidates for not, I don't know, shooting enough people in the face, or wearing big enough cod-pieces while being dropped onto the decks of aircraft carriers, just reiterates the basic self-loathing initiated by the very format of the column.

For the record, John Edwards has to have good haircuts; he's on TV roughly 39 hours per day. How, exactly, he's supposed to get such a haircut cheaply, without breaking a bunch of campaign finance rules, is a mystery to me. Barack Obama's wife is no one's concern, and if you insist on making her your concern, it should be for the purpose of pointing out that she is obviously a smart and accomplished woman. And finally, anyone at this point who hasn't figured out that George Bush's Deadly Testosterone Buildup is pretty much an advertisement for getting over our sad national obsession with masculinity clearly has priorities other than the country's actual political health.

Dowd began the Edwards column by saying that, whether America is ready for a woman president or a black president, it certainly is not ready for a metrosexual president. Since "metrosexual" is code for gay, the effect was to turn Edwards into the gay candidate. In her next column, she turned the black candidate into a woman by spending line after line describing the way his wife has her leg over him. So, you might want to read her column later in the week, in which, by my calculations, she is almost certain to call Hillary Clinton a lesbian.