We regret to report this, but it appears that Maureen Dowd has siblings. And those siblings are Donald Trump fans who are even more determined to vote for the convicted felon now in the wake of his criminal conviction for lots and lots of felonies.
This fact, by the law of the transitive property applied to opinion page columns at the world’s most august newspaper, is supposed to be worthy of 800 words of journalism’s most valuable real estate. MoDo’s siblings’ voting preferences are supposed to mean something, we guess. Something other than MoDo once again housed a pot brownie and got higher than a Chinese weather balloon, anyway.
So, first things: MoDo talks about having grown up “steeped in the lore … of martyrs.” Literal martyrs, she means. People who were “stoned, crucified, beheaded, stripped of all their skin,” and on and on rolls the Catholic snuff film that apparently plays on the movie screen of MoDo’s mind.
MoDo then announces she is “surprised” her conservative siblings would put Trump in those martyrs’ company. This should not actually surprise a New York Times columnist at all. Trump being a martyr akin to Jesus Christ in his willingness to take the slings and arrows from liberals has been a theme of his entire shtick for the last nine years. Every stump rant contains a reference to his alleged martyrdom. His evangelical followers constantly post memes equating him to their Lord and Savior. Dead people have probably heard of this by now.
This week marks the ten-year anniversary of that time MoDo got into the edible wacky tobacky, and this column indicates she just came down maybe last Thursday.
MoDo’s brother and sister were actually fans of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley before the two of them bombed harder than Michael Richards at the Apollo. Her sister, Peggy, was not going to vote for Trump this time around. But then Alvin Bragg something something:
“I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said. “I was dreaming that I was in jail after a sham court trial. I was thinking that if they arrest me, I’d be out of luck. My father’s dead and two of my brothers are dead. Who else would save me?”
First, as Robyn noted in the chat cave, if Peggy couldn’t sleep, how is it that she was dreaming?
My sister is not MAGA; she voted for J.F.K. in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Barack Obama in 2008 and wrote in Joe Biden’s name in 2012.
Who did she vote for in 2016 and 2020, we wonder. (We don’t really wonder this.)
And she is irked by the Democratic fervor to throw Trump in the clink.
“They want to put him in jail three days before our convention?” she asked.
“Our convention” is a huge tell, not that MoDo is going to notice. Or at least acknowledge anything that gets in the way of her thesis that her sister, who at a minimum is 82 years old, has some fragile liberal bones left in her body.
MoDo’s brother is also not happy:
“This reminds me of Republicans celebrating when they impeached Bill Clinton,” he said of Democratic glee over Trump’s conviction, predicting that the “farce,” as he called it, would give Trump a bump, as the G.O.P.’s pursuit of Clinton did for him.
Early polling suggests this conviction is — surprise! — wrong, sorry, Brother of MoDo. An ABC News poll out on Monday shows 50 percent of Americans think the jury got it right and 49 percent think Trump should drop out of the race. That latter number is actually a point higher than it was in April of 2023, when ABC polled the question of whether Trump should have suspended his campaign after he was indicted.
MoDo at least has the brainpower to spend the second half of her column criticizing Trump for his behavior, his racist rhetoric around immigrants, his self-imposed sense of martyrdom, and his constant deflecting.
Then, because this is Maureen Dowd and The New York Times, she has to end things by noting that things are still bad for Joe Biden:
If Trump keeps railing about himself in apocalyptic terms, it could give Biden an opportunity. And Biden badly needs an opportunity.
There has, up to this moment, been nothing about the state of Biden’s campaign in this column. The only one who has said anything about Biden is MoDo’s sister Peggy, and MoDo just spent paragraphs upon paragraphs giving us reasons why Peggy is a wingnut whose opinion can be safely ignored.
We’d say it’s as if her editors couldn’t let a column get published without some both sides-ism, but then we remembered that the Times’s opinion columnists of MoDo’s seniority don’t have editors. This equivocating is unsurprisingly all MoDo.
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I GOT THE JERB!!!!! I start on the 19th!
With all the many experts and smart people we have here maybe someone has some thoughts on a teak bowl I found. It is small but unique looking so I checked the bottom and it was stamped
"Kay Bojesen Denmark Copyright Teak Finn Juhl Design". On the google machine it says it is from a well known Danish designer and could be valuable. I saw a few being sold for $800- $1150. Of course that doesn't mean I can find a buyer. But I need to first decide whether to treat it as it is drying out and old even though still in pretty good condition. Then what to do about selling it. It was super random that I found it in a cabinet, left behind by one of my former roommates years ago. So if I can't sell it no loss but it would be awesome if I could make a few bucks off it. Thoughts?