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"THE WORLD'S MOST OBNOXIOUS FEMINIST CONCERN TROLL."
What should be my outrage about wrong-about-everything hack Bill Kristol getting a New York Times gig (because apparently the dozens of other media outlets he seems to have unlimited access to aren't enough) is attenuated by the fact that the Paper O' Record still employs Maureen Dowd. Melissa McEwan, Molly Ivors, and Echidne deal with her latest vacuous atrocity. As usual, it involves Dowd projecting various trivial personal obsessions onto the candidates and then using this as a reasons to attack their candidacies. Frankly, I would prefer straightforward Republican hackery to this.
Strangely, Dowd largely spares Edwards this time, although if he wins in Iowa I'm sure we'll be back to MoDo's Deep Thoughts about his haircuts. Speaking of which, elsewhere among the inexplicably sinecured it is indeed funny that Richard Cohen literally can't get through one sentence of his column about the alleged mendacious lying of candidates without a mendacious lie about Edwards. As Atrios says, "it's so awesome when the Villagers can't even keep their fake "scandals" straight." But, really, this makes sense; once you've decided that the price of someone's haircuts or their spouse's sex life should be major factors in determining who should be President of the United States, whether the trivia you discuss is actually true or not is largely beside the point. Indifference to truth is just on symptom of the larger problem of hiring people who don't care about politics and know nothing about any substantive issue to write about politics on major op-ed pages.
--Scott Lemieux
COMMENTS (3)
Mark Kleiman points out that Obama's line -- the one around which Cohen's entire article is based -- wasn't false either.
Cohen attacks Obama for saying, several times, that there are more young black men in prison than in college. Basically, whether this is true or not depends on how you define "college student" and how you define "in prison" and how you define "young man," but for a reasonable interpretation of all of these terms Obama's statement is entirely true. There are about 500,000 black men under 35 currently in prison or jail, and about 380,000 currently attending four-year colleges or graduate schools. (This doesn't hold for 18-24 year-olds, which is why this is supposedly a lie).
http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/the_wayward_press_/2008/01/concerning_mendacity.php
Posted by: Alex F | January 2, 2008 5:10 PM
Edwards did indeed lie about not knowing the price of his haricuts.
Per the article below, Edwards personally paid $400 for one haircut in March. So when he claimed a mere one month later that he didn't know it would be that expensive, he did in fact know that he had paid for one personally for $400.
That appears to be a lie about the price of the haircuts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401258_pf.html:
"According to Torrenueva, the last time he cut Edwards's hair was March 23, ...a month before the cost of the haircuts became public. ... Unlike two prior haircuts in January and February, which were paid for by the campaign, Edwards personally paid the $400 for the March cut, the stylist said."
"Edwards said that he was embarrassed by the cost and that he "didn't know it would be that expensive," suggesting the haircuts were some kind of aberration given by "that guy" his staff had arranged.
"... the Edwards campaign said this week ... that a personal assistant handled paying for the haircuts and that Edwards didn't realize how much they cost."
He paid for one in March for $400 - one month later he claimed that he didn't realize how expensive they were.
That's a lie folks. No need to cut him any slack - he's embarrassed because he spends too much money on haircuts. Better to defend expensive cits than edwards on thisd. And Cohen is correct - but I'll bet he won't hold his breath waiting for a retraction.
Posted by: sbj | January 2, 2008 5:18 PM
Give Maureen Dowd a break. She's funny. Like she's supposed to be.
Posted by: Traven | January 2, 2008 5:56 PM