Ross Doubthat had his much-mocked noticed ‘Covid: If *I’m* Not Affected, How Bad Can the Pandemic Really Be?’ column. Thus challenged, MoDo throws down!
can’t make this up—key point from Dowd here is that Bernie Sanders never would’ve gone to Met Gala
boy, nothing gets by these folks https://t.co/eUYaMTuoxa
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) September 19, 2021
No, really:
… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez… said her “Tax the Rich” turn at the Met gala “punctured the 4th wall of excess and spectacle.” Sure, whatever.
Maybe it wasn’t what Karl Marx had in mind. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have done it. But if A.O.C. wanted to get glammed up and pal around with the ruling class at an event that’s the antithesis of all she believes in, a gala that makes every thoughtful American feel like Robespierre, she should have just gone for it.
Don a beautiful dress, let helpers carry the train, have fun and ignore the inevitable charges of hypocrisy. She should have adopted the philosophy of another frequent guest of that gala, Kate Moss: never complain, never explain…
(Nastygram subtweet to Anna Wintour: Why have I, the fabulous celebrity Maureen Dowd, never been invited to your big shiny NCY party?!?)
Winston
I can’t wait till we put these fuckers in their place in 2022.
Poe Larity
If I had a G-V, I’d fill it with shit and drop it on Maureen’s Georgetown townhouse.
frosty
@Winston: Knock wood.
Comrade Colette
@Winston: How many places* in a tumbril?
*in the sense of seats, of course. Although we could probably fit more in if they stand.
Winston
@Comrade Colette: I think the Governor and Senator in Florida will fill the front. Don’t know about the locals. All I know is that people are really pissed about Rs in Florida. If you haven’t already done so call your county election board to re re-register for mail in ballot. It has expired.
scott (the other one)
Was just reading a new TPM piece, by the second graf was squinting my eyes in confusion, not recognizing the world being described, by the fourth graf was getting angry, then realized I hadn’t checked the byline. Yep, John Judis. Of course. All the other writers are between good and excellent but consistently sucks. Props for consistency, I guess, but why JMM keeps him around is beyond me.
Tony Jay
I guess that makes it official. When the Mean Girls just cannot stop talking about how stoopid and, like, embarrassing the new girl’s prom dress was, she must have looked really good and made one hell of an important statement.
No one could possibly have predicted, yadda yadda.
Winston
@Tony Jay: By now everyone knows the right wing nut jobs lie about everything. It’s common knowledge. AOC looks great. That’s a fact. She says important things.
hoodlet
Maureen Dowd has spelt out the bit that has been implicit in much of the commentary. Only the rich are entitled to enjoy high culture: it belongs to them: the Met gala ‘makes every thoughtful American feel like Robespierre’.
Going to it means ‘to get glammed up and pal around with the ruling class at an event that’s the antithesis of all she believes in’.
Me, I was raised to know that high culture is the work of people like AOC and not like Maureen Dowd. Being taught that great work and intense skill belong to a particular class, from which the composers, singers and instrumentalists mostly don’t come, is absurd however often repeated.
When I go to a great gallery, or a great concert, or a great film, or read great literature, I’m not palling around with the ruling class. Nor am I doing something that is antithetical to my union membership, or my working class origins, or my working life. Anyone who says I am doing those things is trying to exclude me from some of the finest in human achievement…as if, somehow, that achievement is alien to me and to my concerns. Tell it to the Marines!
lofgren
These people are so offended that a 21st century politician is failing to follow the rules of etiquette of a 20th century supermodel. Talk about a category error.
ColoradoGuy
Ms. Dowd, I’ll use simple words so you can follow along.
AOC is cool. You’re not.
P.S. Next time you come to Colorado, don’t eat all the edibles at once. It’s not like champagne.
Tony Jay
@hoodlet:
Worse than that, at least to my cynical reading, is the implication that all the finer things in life might be produced by the striving lower orders, but they only become beautiful and of artistic value when the rich and powerful deign to appreciate them.
By going to the Gala and taking her politics with her AOC was getting way above her station. She’s supposed to be a representative of the plebs, telling them how unfair it is that the rich get all the good stuff while they get sweet fuck all, but not doing anything about it, and certainly not thinking her role as a representative of the plebs entitles her to walk the same marble floors as her betters.
In short, we’re supposed to ‘feel’ like Robespierres, because we’re supposed to know and accept that it is and will remain unfair. That’s just the natural way of things and Dowd is fine with that. AOC (and Democrats in general) are not and are telling the rich, to their faces, that it’s going to change, which gives Dowd a sad.
Which is a good thing.
Tehanu
@hoodlet:
This!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Oh, if only AOC were being held to the stratospheric standards of a Boebert or a Greene. (If your sarcasm detector did not register a profound spike in reaction to this statement, it is malfunctioning; please call your sarcasm detector retailer for repair or replacement.)
More seriously, AOC doesn’t have the backing of the kleptocrats that allows Boebert or Greene to misbehave so spectacularly without profound consequences; she does have high INT, WIS, and CHA, and she needs every point of it to do as well as she’s done.
NotMax
@Tony Jay
A classical ditty you might appreciate.
Tony Jay
@Winston:
The people they lie to the most are themselves. You just know that “AOC crashed a job-creator’s party wearing a SJW protest banner as a dress and she looked dumb and everyone hated it!” is going to become one of those in-group statements of dogma by which you can recognise Wingnuts and those who just really, really hate ‘Teh Left’.
No one else will have a clue what they’re on about, but that just shows how clued-up and (ahem) ‘Woke’ they are. Legends in their own briar-patches, they are.
Tony Jay
@NotMax:
I’ve been looking for a new drinking song!
mrmoshpotato
Ah, the fun of lying about a vaccine during a global pandemic….
Baud
George W. Bush would clear brush for the TV cameras without betraying his class. AOC can go to a fancy ball.
germy
cartoon:
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Who?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I love the new and improved Bernie (though he’s trying to fuck up today’s election in the great white north), that said, he owns 3 homes including one in a gated community with a private lake to keep the riff raff out. Not to mention he put the luxury lake house in trust to avoid estate taxes. So no, Bernie isn’t a myth, he’s human like everyone else.
NotMax
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Call it sexist but the mind vehemently rejects the image of Wilmer in an evening gown.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@NotMax: Not so. I could see Bernie in a revival of “The Producers” playing Roger de Bris (photo)
waspuppet
@ColoradoGuy: She’s one of very few prominent people (maybe the only one in DC) who makes being a liberal look like FUN. Dowd and her fellow conservatives (yeah I said it) cannot compute. They don’t have a lane for that.
Tony Jay
Speaking of ranting, the FTF Manchester Guardian went out of their way to piss me right the fuck off on Saturday with a farewell article by occasional columnist Hadley Freeman that managed to sum up in just a few words everything that is fucked up and shit with that rag’s ongoing project to transform itself into a UK version of ‘Even the Liberal’ NYT.
Freeman’s general theme was that it’s such a terrible pity that we live in an age of absolutes where people of different ideological viewpoints can’t see each other as human beings anymore, instead viewing difference as an existential attack and responding accordingly. All well and good, that’s a topic that has been raised before and it’s definitely an issue.
But…. this is the Guardian, so inevitably…
The example Freeman chose to illustrate this new era of intolerance revolved (because of course it did) around British History’s Greatest Monster and The Source of All Darkness, Jeremy ‘The Islington Eichmann’ Corbyn. Apparently, back in 2015 Freeman witnessed Corbyn ‘raging’ that her fellow Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland was “a bad person” simply because he didn’t seem to like Corbyn and said so in print. How narrow-minded of him! How terribly, unforgivably, destructive of Corbyn to usher in this Stalinist mode of black/white ideological totalitarianism where decent, hard-working journalists get menacingly unpersoned just because they don’t produce odes of fawning adulation for Dear Leader. What a complete bastard he must be.
Cue a BTL comment section that was apparently cut short after half of the responses that weren’t immediately moderated out of existence by The Guardian’s ever-so-precious Banhammer Buddies were from readers asking WTF Freeman was on about, since the actual incident she was referring to is on YouTube, and far from ‘raging’ at Freedland’s perfidy, Corbyn is his usual softly-spoken self and appears, if anything, bemused by Freedland’s determination to paint him as a monster. Freedland, needless to say, is far from being an honest journalist with no axe to grind, and actually had spent the entirely of Corbyn’s leadership waging a hate-campaign against him. His cheerleading for Israel’s hard-right informed and informs everything he ever had to say about Corbyn (anti-Semitism is a foundational principle of ‘The Left’, British Jews who don’t support Israel 100% even if they disagree with it’s policies aren’t ‘proper Jews’, a vote for the Left is a vote for gas-chambers, etc) and got increasingly incoherent after the 2017 Election was such a close run thing. This is the guy, after all, whose main contribution to Election 2019 was using Twitter to breathlessly inform his followers that one of Labour’s muslim candidates had been outed by “a senior Labour insider who I (Freedland) trust” as a vile anti-Semite… oh, hang on, no, that’s a different muslim with a similar name, sorry about that, but I’m not going to reveal who this ‘senior Labour insider’ (cough – Mandelson – cough) is or apologise for spewing out dangerous and destructive accusations on the morning of an election without even the semblance of journalistic standards. Islamophobic? Me? You can’t say that, that’s anti-Semitic!
No, Jonathan, it’s just the truth. Your entire anti-Corbyn vendetta was seeped in Islamophobia from start to finish, and the fact that your fellow Columnists and the newspaper you’re given prime real-estate in to pontificate from are not only in denial of that fact, but still can’t drop the habit of victim-blaming that epitomised its campaign to make Labour toxic to its readers just acts as a reminder that the modern-day Guardian is a piece of shit propaganda rag masquerading as a centre-left broadsheet that has pissed away all of the credibility it once had in its mission to fill the niche of “supposedly ‘liberal’ publication that will entertain its readers with stories about how awful the Right is while simultaneously lecturing everyone that ‘The Left’ has no answers a civilised person would ever deign to listen to”.
Gobshites. Rant over.
debbie
I can’t get the image of Bernie in a gown out of my mind, for some reason. ??♀️
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, I can’t think of to many artists who came from rich families.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Reading AOC’s tweets she is quite aware of that, and uses it as a way to draw attention to her causes and the Wingnuts can’t deal with woman using her looks for anything but self advancement like MTG.
VOR
AOC’s Met Gala appearance worked. Look at how much press she got. A week later people like Maureen Dowd are still upset about it. The slogan “Tax the Rich” got noticed, even if the merits of the idea have not been part of the discussion.
As for whether AOC belongs at an event like that, she is a US Congressperson. There are only 435 of them. That’s pretty selective and I’m sure plenty of politicians have attended the Met Gala in the past. And she’s from NYC, where the event is held.
cmorenc
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Um what the Hell are INT, WIS, and CHA? I’m not enough of a cool kid (or woke kid?) to understand the lingo.
piratedan
@cmorenc: dungeons and dragons character attributes… usually rolled for (created) at random with 4 six-sided dice. The higher the number, the better the opportunity for special attributes… for example, a CHA score of 17 or 18 means that in a group of folks, your 17 or 18 CHA is the one that people immediately notice….
there are six main character attributes, Charisma (CHA), Wisdom (WIS), Intelligence (INT), Strength (STR) , Dexterity (DEX) and Constitution (CON).
if you were a teenager or a young adult in the 70s and ran with a kinda geeky crowd, this is how you “rolled” as a way to fantasize and role play…
JustRuss
@ColoradoGuy:
FTFY
JustRuss
@piratedan:
Sorry, rolled with three dice. Please turn in your nerd card.
Uncle Cosmo
@cmorenc: Thanks for asking so I didn’t need to.
J R in WV
@cmorenc:
I have no idea what “INT, WIS, CHA” are, but I’m willing to take a swing. INT=intellect… WIS=wisdom… CHA, well something related to chakras? I dunno, can’t even guess.
ETA:
I see from comments I was 2 for 3. And chakras are close to Charisma, kinda. Naw, not even. I’ll take my 2 for 3 tho…
piratedan
@JustRuss: just because your DM was a tight ass, didn’t mean mine was… roll 4 dice, take the best three. Who wants to go on an adventure with a party that has the collective charisma of DMV workers?