Maureen Dowd, a longtime New York Times columnist who never has been over friendly to Donald Trump, was interviewed recently by Bill Maher, and she laid down the law, so to speak, to the Democrat Party.
In the course of a discussion with Maher on the recently
released movie Snow White, “New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared
Democrats are ‘in a coma’ while giving a blunt diagnosis of the party she
argued had become off-putting to voters,” Fox News reported.
The Democrats, Dowd said, stopped "paying
attention" to the long term political realignment of the working class.
"Also,” she added, “they just stopped being any fun. I mean, they made
everyone feel that everything they said and did, and every word was wrong, and
people don't want to live like that, feeling that everything they do is
wrong."
"Do you think we're over that era?" Maher asked.
“No," Dowd answered. "I think Democrats are just
in a coma. They haven't figured [it] out." And later she added, "I
think that Democrats just [became] a suffocating persona where you just
couldn't do anything or say anything that wasn't to be criticized."
People in Connecticut may recognize all this as a word
perfect description of U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s frothing
X (Twitter) account.
It will not do to defend the indefensible, Dowd courageously
declared well ahead of many pro-Joe Biden Democrat supporters. She referenced
Biden’s disabling frailty months prior to the now infamous CNN debate, after
which Biden was thrown out of the Democrat Party plane without a parachute by
his former supporters.
"Biden is not just in a bubble,” Dowd wrote at the
time, “He’s in bubble wrap. Cosseting and closeting Uncle Joe all the way to
the end — eschewing town halls and the Super Bowl interview — are just not
going to work. Going on defense, when Trump is on offense, is not going to
work. Counting on Trump’s vileness to secure the win, as Hillary did, is not going
to work.”
Trump, recently elevated to a second four year term as
president after a lapse of four years, has proven to be, much to the
consternation of leading neo-progressive Democrats such as Murphy, remarkably
resilient and, most annoying to Democrats, unexpectedly popular.
Murphy, a rising light among left wing never-Trumpers, has
been salting his carefully arranged town hall speeches in his home state, with
his own raucous supporters. Murphy’s “Town Hall” gatherings are tightly
scripted and choreographed, rather more like huddles among team players and
cheer leaders than true Town Hall meetings that tend to be entertaining and raucous
affairs – “fun” in Dowd’s terminology.
“The event was posted in the Indivisible Facebook group on
Tuesday—four days before the Town Hall—“ the Connecticut Centinal reported concerning a similar event in
Stamford, “and it wasn't even advertised, according to Murphy, except via an
email just to those who have contacted his office.”
Murphy is no Maureen Dowd, but then Dowd, content with being
an observant ink-stained wretch, has no ambitions for high office. There is a
lean and hungry look about Murphy. “Let me have men about me that are fat,”
said Shakespeare’s Caesar, “sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond
Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
The riff on Murphy is that he is a serious campaigner but
not a serious politician. He has in the past been able to haul in massive
donations for his fellow Democrats in Connecticut’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional
Delegation, and this has assured him a degree of respect among neo-progressive Democrats
and left leaning Connecticut media helpmates. Because Connecticut has for
decades been a one-party state, the state’s legacy media has over the years learned
to dance to the tune of the ruling party. Nothing personal, we are to assume. It’s
just political business.
Murphy has enormous political advantages in Connecticut, as
deep blue a state as faltering California. Some have said that Murphy is Connecticut’s
Gavin Newsom, another lean and hungry neo-progressive now dressing himself up
as a “moderate” Democrat.
Winston Churchill used to call such political pretenders
“wolves in wolves’ clothing.”
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