How Not to Cover Politics, Pt. 2

Once in a while, Maureen Dowd is terrific. More often, she's lazy, smug and shallow, trafficking in little but caricature and innuendo.

Her most recent column, on Hillary Clinton's perceived weakness on military issues, contains a prime example of Dowd at her worst. (The column is only available to subscribers, until tomorrow.)

Rudy Giuliani's campaign, says Dowd, "recasts her as Old Hillary, a Code Pink pinko first lady and opportunist from a White House that had a reputation for having a flower-child distaste for the military."

Technically, there is truth in that statement: The Clinton Administration did have "a reputation" for wrinkling its nose at the military, with Hillary receiving most of the blame. Only, as I suspect Dowd knows, that reputation was largely based on a number of rumors that have been conclusively debunked, such as the false claim that the Clintons banned military officers from wearing their uniforms in the White House.

Why include a decade-old canard of dubious origin in her influential column? Easy: because in Dowdworld, to borrow a trope, perception is reality. "How will Candidate X react to the recycled smears I'm helping to perpetuate?" is a perfectly legitimate story. It's the same reason she had no problem portraying Al Gore as a sententious liar in the 2000 election, even as one example after another of his supposed dishonesty crumbled to dust. In her love of cheap psychodrama and received wisdom, Dowd is the arrogance of the media establishment, personified.