What is even going on, when "liberal columnist" Maureen Dowd writes a column about how Obama should govern the country the way Sarah Palin promotes books, and token conservative Ross "still at least definitely not Bill Kristol" Douthat patiently explains that Huckabee and Palin are both ridiculous jokes.

Well, what is going on is that Ross "cares" about the "credibility" of the Republican party, and also he knows, as a grown man who reads books and remembers history, that these clowns will not be president of anything, ever.

Whereas Maureen is, as always, internalizing and repeating the dumbest talking points of the Cheney wing of the Republican party (a world where "bowing" is a scandal and "dithering" is a resonant critique) (and also "mom jeans," because, you know, it's not a Maureen Dowd column without a crack about how a Democrat is embarrassingly feminine). Obviously Obama should just act more like a petulant, polarizing moron, screeching for attention and repeatedly castigating the various people who have wronged him, because that would definitely take care of this Afghanistan mess.

Here are the sort of people he could then welcome into his governing coalition, once he "goes rogue."

I was beginning to panic. I pored over the book to see if there was anything that I shared in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.

We both had what Palin calls "a love of the written word" and we both won Veterans of Foreign Wars writing contests as children.

We both read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "Animal Farm."

We both came from families that loved Ronald Reagan, drove Ramblers and watched "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights.

Palin's father offered to let her hold some moose eyes. My dad came from Ireland, where they ate sheep eyes soup.

Sarah and I both banged on the upright piano in the living room and twirled around to "The Sound of Music."

We both grew up loving Hershey's bars and bacon and steak. As Sarah explains her carnivore philosophy: "I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals - right next to the mashed potatoes."

She hunted moose, and I hunted for Bullwinkle on TV.

We both belonged to the scouts, were baby sitters and kept diaries. (Of course, I was writing about making Jiffy Pop, and she, stacking firewood.)

We both now have stressful lives where we sometimes, as she puts it, want "a wife" to organize things. And we both went through an Ann Taylor period before discovering Dolce & Gabbana at consignment shops.

And both of them are propped up and supported by powerful, supposedly smart people for no other reason than that they both annoy liberals.

The last time early-1960s advertising executive and New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd was so obviously baffled by a slight subversion of gender norms, noted masculine asshole Tom DeLay was gyrating in a feminine manner on the television.

This time, it's Barry Obama, the elegant and lady-like Democrat, who is, according to recent reports, excluding ladies from his inner circle, because they do not like to golf or talk about the football or play the basketball.

In her column on this important matter, Dowd simply ignores her own lengthy history of interpreting Obama according to her rigid "Democrats are fags and Republicans are real men" worldview. Instead, he is like presidents of old, who crack "racy" jokes with male aides. She quotes "a girlfriend" (Alessandra?) who wishes the uppity ladies would just let the president be a man with men in peace.

You would think someone who repeatedly called Obama "oBambi," and also butterfly, in columns dedicated to the argument that Hillary Clinton was the real man in the party, even if she pretended to have a vagina and ladylike tendencies (like those tears), would write a column expressing some sort of mild surprise that Obama is perhaps more traditionally masculine than she thought.

You would think she would remember the fact that last year she wrote that Obama is "the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style." And then, perhaps, she might revisit those words, and say "huh, perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Obama is not a girly man."

Instead, she (this is once again nothing unusual for Maureen) talks about how it is those cruel Republicans who wish to paint every male Democrat as a "Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy." It's a good thing no supposedly liberal columnists for supposedly liberal newspapers play along with that creaky old act!

And then she throws in a "Rahm Emanuel is a fag" laugh line for the hell of it.

Obama likes to play sports, watch sports and talk sports. (Even his favorite TV shows, "Mad Men" and "Entourage," are set in male-dominated worlds.) So the Obama aides who can do that, like Robert Gibbs, have a deeper personal connection with the president than someone like Rahm Emanuel, the former ballet dancer who prefers yoga to golf.

Yes, Maureen, we know that it is funny that a man would do yoga (is that funny, actually? is it 30 years ago?), but the problem with that little joke is that Rahm is part of the circle of men that Obama is reportedly more at ease with. The original stupid story was not "Obama excludes women and girly Rahm Emanuel from his inner circle."

Portfolio was basically the starter pistol for Conde Nast's fall: a publication that would've been great with an online-only presence that instead screwed the pooch by disregarding their awesome online staff and instead trying to make a Tina Brown-modeled finance magazine with swagger. Examples of their miserable print presence? A Dov Charney cover story that was two years late. Lipman had the helm! But back to that in a moment.

Her theory—that Feminism isn't where it should be at this point—may very well might be right!

There're some great examples of places where sexism still exists, particularly in Hollywood and in some of the very, very misogynistic pop culture this country's turning out daily (forgetting what some of pop culture's women—Kate Gosselin being Public Enemy #1—have done onto themselves). I'd love to talk about gender politics—and yes, bring up the fact that there are no women on our masthead, too—but that's not nearly as interesting as simply assuming Lipman's idea to hold water, and referencing all other inquiries regarding this theory to another website, the first hour of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, and then moving forward to drop jaws at Lipman's insanely massive, overwhelming ego put forth in an essay that could've been something far more substantial.

Where to start? How about right here:

So why have we stalled out?

Part of the reason can be traced to the aftermath of 9/11.

Everyone's life was reshaped by 9/11. Like many New Yorkers, I experienced that day in an intensely personal way: I was in the World Trade Center with a colleague when the first plane hit. And we were just outside the second tower, making our way through burning debris, hunks of airplane seats and far worse when the second plane came in directly over our heads.

I'll spare you the manner in which she tied that together, suffice to say it's got her quoting Graydon Carter about irony being dead, and then backtracking to say irony's still alive (which, as you'll later see, is very, very ironic), and that after 9/11, the conversation regarding women suffered greatly. Without providing any examples except for a Google search of an interviewer that turned up pictures of boobs. You can Google anyone's name and come up with pictures of boobs. Welcome to the internet, maybe this kind of know-how explains why Portfolio's web strategy sucked so badly. There's also this charmer:

As a freshman, I had an interview for a magazine internship in New York City. As I sat down, making sure to demurely close up my slit-front skirt over my knees, the interviewer barked, "If you want the job, you'll leave that open."

Scandalous! But is the blunt force of this *racy* anecdote really worth putting in the middle of an Op-Ed about how far women haven't come when you're trying to prove some, but not all progress past that? Surely, it belongs somewhere, but in this context, it just seems self-serving, as if Lipman's trying to say, Ladies, I've been there, and I got past it. Isn't the point that they've all been there, but more importantly, that they're still there? It's kind of absurd. Lipman also cites the way her career was described in an article as "leggy," which is (A) funny, (B) could be true in four different contexts outside of what she thinks of her actual legs and (C) is presented without any context whatsoever! We don't even know which article she's talking about, so how can we decide what the hell that means? Good thing The NYTpicker came in to regulate on this thing. Observe the smackalicious smackdown:

Here's what Steve Fishman actually wrote in New York Magazine last April:

S. I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Condé Nast, falls in love with his editors. His romance with Joanne Lipman began over lunch at his U.N. Plaza apartment, with its beige carpets-no red wine allowed-and paintings by Warhol, de Kooning, Cézanne. Lipman, 47 years old, who'd spent her entire career at The Wall Street Journal, is a serious journalist with a serious mien, and long legs, which she likes to show off with short-skirted power suits. Lipman is "attractive," in Newhouse's vernacular-"He uses the word like others use the word spiritual," says a former editor. The two brainstormed at a small dining-room table. Newhouse, in his standard worn New Yorker sweatshirt, told her he had an idea for a business magazine. Newhouse didn't say much more; he rarely does. He asks questions. But Lipman excitedly filled in the details.

Anyone who thinks that sentence — or even that paragraph — sums up Lipman's career as "leggy" just can't read.

Touche! Lipman's essay is, among other things, disingenuous towards the discrimination she's "faced" in that regard alone. And unfortunately, she's writing for people who can read, but who often don't have the time to discern the smell of bullshit from the sound of the truth, especially because this is a newspaper, and they're supposed to be able to trust what's there (ha).

The Batman-like NYTpicker also notes that a few sentences later, Lipman preaches to the ladies:

"Don't be afraid to be a girl."

Ladies and grown-ass women, how much do you enjoy it when you're referred to as a "girl?" I know it's a little different than being a Jew making Jew-jokes, but still, I'm not sure it's something I could get away with. Why the double-standard, Jo?

Back to the failure of Portfolio. Remember this gem from Page Six?

EYEBROWS were raised last week when Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman - not known for her modesty - not only insisted on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos but demanded to fly to Switzerland first class. "It's just jaw-dropping," an insider said. "Not only is her magazine not profitable, but she just laid off almost the entire Web site and fired many others on the print side." Portfolio has cost Condé Nast more than $150 million, so far. But a company rep claims the trip was necessary: "All of our editors are continuing to cover and attend the events that are important and relevant to their magazines." But those who found Davos not relevant enough to make the trip included Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Chevron CEO David O'Reilly, Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankenfein, Sony chief Howard Stringer and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit.

Can we spell out the joke, here? The one way Lipman's completely wrong about men and women meeting in the middle is the example she set: that they both possess the capability to be equally as disgustingly vapid when it comes to the captain punching holes in their sinking ship. Both men and women, hand in hand, can disregard integrity for grossly incompetent, morale-shuttering selfishness!

It's like The MoDow School of Essayists is working on their class of 2009, and Lipman's first presentation is shoot-for-summa stuff. Even as someone who thinks everything Maureen Dowd writes smells like Julia Childs' Cote du Horeshit recipe, I can appreciate this. Except, Lipman's essay actually reads like a subversive "Portfoilio failed not because I was at the top, but because a woman was at the top in a still very male-dominated world" tome. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, or the first step in the Kubler-Ross model. It's something well-insulated by angry gender bloodpolitik projection, or so Lipman would like to think. We're not the cavemen you'd like to paint us as, Joanne, and the women reading your bullshit aren't the Tarzan'd Janes you're telling them they are, either. If the system's gonna change, it's gonna have to start by dispatching with self-serving setbacks like you.

It certainly surprised us, that not a single editor told Maureen Dowd to ditch the completely pointless and unfunny parody of the theme song to "Ghostbusters" that opens an otherwise completely harmless and fine column.

"If there's someone weak,
if you've sprung a leak,
if the world looks bleak,
if you hide and seek,
who ya gonna call?
OBAMABUSTERS!"

"If you hide and seek"??? What?

Anyway the rest of the column is about how Dick Cheney and his terrible daughters are all terrible, which you knew. We look forward to next week's column, "Biden He Does As He Pleases," which will explain what to do when you're stuck on the Amtrak between the moon and New York City.

His nickname was literally "The Hammer." He was a thuggish, corrupt former exterminator who ran the House of Representatives like it was an organized crime family.. He loved wars and tax cutting and gerrymandering and fucking over opponents. He is Maureen Dowd's dream man.

But there he is prancing like a pretty pony on television's Dancing With the Stars!

The Hammer, who in rehearsal admitted to feeling like "a complete goose" - and not simply because he had his golf shirt tucked into his sweat pants - is clinging to his Texas machismo even as he follows Cheryl's instruction to find his "feminine side."

"I'm being more feminine and a little prissy," he said, using a word that smacks of über-alpha "I am not gay even though I have on heels and sparkles and want a disco-ball trophy" overcompensation.

Look how torn she is! His sad protestations in defense of his threatened masculinity must be mocked, but we must admire his use of the "uber-alpha" word "prissy," which is the sort of word someone like Maureen Dowd might use to describe someone like John Edwards.

Well, let's just make fun of his stupid girly clothes one more time (also he winked at a gay!) and then finish up with some meaningless "wacky op-ed about an unexpected situation" boilerplate.

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he's trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have "a strategy to whip the vote" on "Dancing."

Once the Hammer accepted a million dollars from Russian oil executives in exchange for a vote. Now he accepts compliments from an effeminate British judge in exchange for many votes. Once he blamed the Columbine massacre on the teaching of evolution. Now he blames his poor dancing ability on the fact that he hurt his foot. Once he violated Texas law by funneling corporate money to state legislative races via the RNC. Now he is a sad old man on TV instead of in jail forever.

Maureen Dowd finished this column after furiously voting for DeLay literally thousands of times.

See, a model named Liskula Cohen googled herself and found out that some anonymous and completely unread blogger called her a "skank" and so she sued to find out the identity of the blogger who called her a skank and it turned out that it was this girl she knew, of course, because who the hell else would bother to blog about how some random model is a skank?

Dowd aligns herself with Cohen, the wronged party, which is odd, because Dowd's entire career has been built on calling people names. But Dowd has also been a victim, herself, of people saying mean things about her, on the internet! (People like us!)

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I'd never come to work. I'd scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

Yes, well, we can both dream, can't we?

The argument is always framed as "I have no problem with being criticized, it's being criticized by anonymous cowards that is wrong and must be stopped!" Our position has always been, bullshit is bullshit, bylined or no. And this is bullshit:

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody's character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

But our very own MoDo has proved that you don't actually need anonymity to shred somebody's character before the entire world and not be held accountable.

Coddington is the magazine's creative director and is in charge of the majority of photo shoots. This former model—who worked at British Vogue and Calvin Klein before starting at American Vogue on the same day as Wintour—is often described as a "genius," including by Wintour herself in R.J. Cutler's documentary (out this Friday!). It appears that she is the only person willing and able to stand up to the Ice Queen of the fashion world and still escape with her life.

A consensus seems to be quickly forming that Coddington is the unlikely victor is this glossy cage match. In the New York Times, Cutler says, "[Anna] is cool, [Grace] is warm and languid," he said. "Anna is all about ‘next,' and Grace is most interested in a historical perspective on art and fashion. Every time they got together, sparks flew." The Associated Press writes, "Coddington seems to pump passion and artistic integrity into the pages while not being swept up in the celebrity frenzy that seems synonymous with fashion these days." Even Maureen Dowd calls it to attention

"There is friction in the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards relationship between the 59-year-old Anna and her closest collaborator, the 68-year-old flame-haired creative director and former model Grace Coddington, who is the only one willing to tweak "the Pope," as Anna is dubbed by a staffer. Coddington tells French Vogue, "We have a real mutual respect for each other, even though sometimes I feel like killing her."

The feisty, flame-haired visionary didn't want to be filmed and only relented at Anna's behest. But watching the documentary, you'd barely know it: she charms Cutler's (and thus, in some ways, Wintour's) film crew and soon is using them for her advantage by talking money with Anna on camera so that she can't cancel her budget. This dame knows how to play the game and isn't afraid to fight dirty, but she doesn't do it in the name of flighty Fashion (with a capital F) but she does it for art, which gives her a nobler cause. Here she is in full-on exasperation:

At one point in the film, she counsels a junior editor who just suffered one of Anna's tongue lashings, "Don't be too nice, not even to me, because you'll lose. You have to beat your way through." And that is just what Coddington does. She admits that both she and Wintour are stubborn, adding, "I know when to stop pushing her, but she doesn't know when to stop pushing me." One of the greatest scenes in the movie comes when the two share a long, awkward, silent elevator ride together on the way to visit Jean Paul Gaultier. It seems the only reason these two tolerate each other is for the good of the magazine.

Eventually, Coddington gets so palsy-walsy that she puts one of the September Issue cameramen into a last-minute photo shoot as a prop. The resulting pictures are fresh and fun and even manage to make Anna smile, although it's not clear if she likes the pics or is just enjoying telling a middle-aged cameraman that he's too fat. When Coddington hears that Wintour wants to Photoshop out his belly, she gets on the phone and threatens the art director and tells him that he has to leave it alone. "Not everything can be perfect in the world," she rails. It is the climax of the movie, where Coddington eventually triumphs over the tyrant, who has been chipping away at her artistic integrity for the entire 90 minutes.

Wintour tries exerting her iron will over everything in order to make it perfect (see an example in the clip below). The portrait the movie paints is not incredibly flattering, where she orders around designers, photographers, and especially editors based on her precarious edicts. The audience can appreciate the way she does business, but not the tactlessness she brings to it.

While the film begins with Anna, it ends with Coddington, her mane of red hair blowing in the wind as she looks out on the gardens of Versailles (where the magazine is doing a photo shoot). She stands still and silent, just taking in the sight. "It's beautiful," she declares simply before returning to work. Yes, Grace, it is. And so are you.

MoDo, whose beliefs about the proper behavior and roles of the sexes are generally some unholy mixture of John Ford movie and Real World hot tub argument, has always believed Hillary Clinton to be "aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing," and so MoDo was shocked to find our Secretary of State being competent and professional on TV one morning, instead of hysterically screeching and maybe castrating some lovably rakish men.

But this Sarah Palin lady, who used to charm her, has disappointed her by embracing so many of those terrible feminine traits Dowd abhors, like being a whiny bitch all the time.

Oh, there are so many classic Dowdian moments in this one simple column.

The Alaskan who shot to stardom a year ago as the tough embodiment of Diana the Huntress has now stepped down as governor and morphed into what the Republicans always caricatured Hillary as - preachy, screechy and angry.

You know, Maureen, that unfair Republican caricature kinda resembles how you have always written about Hillary Clinton! Isn't that funny?

Hey, can you stick a pointlessly emasculating description of Obama in here too?

Obama advisers say privately that the president truly respects the woman he ran against, and that they have a good relationship, so good it has even surprised Hillary. Certainly, she doesn't have to worry that this president's gaze is going to drift over her shoulder to some pretty thing behind her. In this White House, Barack Obama is the pretty thing who is taken with Hillary's serious, smartest-girl-at-Wellesley aura.

Now, Maureen, could you reuse a meaningless one-liner? Yes, thank you, that'll do.

NYT Picker caught the editor's note, which is inexplicably not on the paper's web site, and points out that Siebert's sin is strikingly similar to what Maureen Dowd did when she lifted a paragraph from Josh Marshall's blog a couple months ago. Only Siebert, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, got rapped with a lengthy editor's note that explained the mechanics of his mistake, while Dowd got off with a one-line correction that explained nothing.

Siebert's story ended with an account of a whale that was found stranded in fishing lines in 2005 off the coast of San Francisco, and its reaction after rescuers freed it. According to the editor's note, Siebert lifted some of his descriptive language from an e-mail account of the event that had been sent to him:

Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam "in joyous circles" after it was freed and "nudged" the divers gently, "as if in thanks"; that the divers thought it was "the most beautiful experience they ever had"; and that one diver said he would "never be the same" appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to the Times' writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting.... Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form.

This hippy-dippy testimonial from one "Dr. Ingeborg Puchert," found on the web site of the "University of Healing," contains some—but not all—of the phrases at issue, and seems like the sort of thing that would get widely circulated via e-mail. Siebert also relied on—but didn't lift any language from—a San Francisco Chronicle account of the same event.

Writing is, in its own way, hard—not as hard as real work, but still. We can understand how Siebert could either cut and paste something into his story with the intention of chopping it up into quotes and later forgetting to attribute it, or write something that he thought was his own synthesis of various sources but actually included phraseology bouncing around in his head that he didn't know at the time was a direct quote from one of those sources. It's not necessarily a cardinal sin, and—if Siebert is telling the truth—it's categorically different from someone deliberately plagiarizing someone else's work.

But it's not different—at all—from what Maureen Dowd did in May, when she "inadvertently" copied an entire paragraph written by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall into her column. Dowd's explanation for the slip was that she was "talking to a friend of mine...who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column...but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." We have to assume, giving Dowd the benefit of the doubt, that she was referring to an e-mail conversation, because it's preposterous to imagine that her friend verbally recounted a 43-word paragraph word-for-word and that Dowd took it down in her notes as such. So it was an instance of a Times reporter unintentionally lifting language from an e-mail.

When Siebert does it, he gets a 232-word editor's-note-lashing explaining, in finite detail, how the error happened. When Dowd does it, she gets this:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd's column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall's blog at Talking Points Memo.

We've asked the Times why the two cases received differential treatment, and why the editor's note isn't available online. And we've emailed Dowd to ask her why she thinks Siebert's lifting was apparently seen as more problematic than hers. And we couldn't immediately track down contact info for Siebert—let us know what you think, Charles.

Reports the Hollywood Reporter:

The writer has been brought on to do a draft of the baseball drama, drawing on Steve Zaillian's earlier take. The studio wants to move forward quickly with the new iteration, with Sorkin set to turn in his version as soon as next month.

Brad Pitt remains on board to star, but Steven Soderbergh no longer will write or direct and is not involved in the film.

Soderbergh, you may recall, fought with the studio over the creative direction of film, leading to production being killed by the studio just days before shooting was set to begin last June

Now, we like Sorkin's work (especially Sports Night!) so we're confident that if anyone can make an adaptation of the book work, it's him, but we still can't figure out how it would be worth a crap on the big screen. However, if it does work out, and we seriously doubt that it will, we do look forward to a scene in which Billy Beane and Jason Giambi walk down a long corridor, pause in front of the door to the locker room and turn to face each other so Beane can yell "You can't handle a curveball!" at Giambi. It'll be grand!

Aaron Sorkin Game for Moneyball [Hollywood Reporter]

In an editorial posted to their website tonight, Gazette editor Jeff Thomas cited four separate occasions where Hailey Mac Arthur apparently lifted passages from past Times stories. Here's one of them:

Gazette, July 6: Few factors set homeless apart from the fortunate

Defining homelessness is politically charged these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables - the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up more than a third of the homeless in Colorado Springs.

. . . The homeless usually bear their losses in silence, their misfortune unreported and their offenders unknown.

NY Times, Dec. 5, 1999: Labeling the homeless, in compassion and contempt

Defining homelessness is politically charged in New York these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables, the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up almost two-thirds of homeless shelter residents in New York City.

According to the bio on her blog we found through Google cache (she's set her blog to private and deleted her Facebook, LinkedIn and Google profiles), Hailey Mac Arthur is a second-year student at the University of Florida College of Journalism who has also interned at the Gainesville Sun. Back in April she conducted a hilariously salacious interview with Gay Talese over the phone and wrote about it on her blog. Here are some of the highlights:

I interviewed Gay Talese in my underwear.

It was a phone interview.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in all of this is that young Hailey Mac Arthur's writing seems to have some Maureen Dowd-ish qualities to it, no? Too bad Mac Arthur couldn't get away with concocting some sort of ridiculous "my friend told it all to me over the phone" excuse like Dowd so famously did back in May when she plagiarized TPM's Josh Marshall. If there's any justice in the world maybe the Times will give Hailey Mac Arthur her second chance. After all, everyone does deserve one.

A Breach of Trust [Colorado Springs Gazette]
pic via Hailey Mac Arthur's blog

We don't know for sure what movie Sanford was talking about when he wrote this to María Belén Chapur in July 2008:

was just going to find the movie the Holiday as we had spoken of it last Thursday. Its music was pleasant and made me think of you - its mood and the notion of a holiday (wrapped up in our case over two days) certainly fit as well....

Dowd assumes it's The Holiday, which isn't really about a holiday so much as a house-swap between Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz, wherein they start fucking each others' boyfriends or somesuch. But Dowd finds parallels:

He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie "The Holiday," presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives. He was fantasizing about catapulting himself into an exotic life where stimulus had nothing to do with budgets.

But there is another Holiday, a 1938 golden-era-of-Hollywood comedy starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, that is basically a filmed enactment of Mark Sanford's fantasy life. We'd like to think that it was this older Holiday—which we haven't seen, but which Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder calls "Cary and Kate at their finest"—to which Sanford was referring. And if Dowd wasn't losing her pop-culture edge—she probably didn't want anyone to think she's old enough to have seen it in theaters—she could have had a lot of fun doing her patented movie-mirrors-real-life schtick with this one. So we'll do it for her!

Holiday stars Grant as restless young man who has worked too hard for too long, and doesn't want to spend his life at a desk. He longs to travel the world to figure out his true purpose in life. He gets engaged to a stuffy heiress who wants to pin him down to a life of routine in her daddy's bank, but falls in love with her free-thinking sister; they run off together for a life of adventure, leaving the stuffy fiancee behind.

This sounds familiar, doesn't it? Here are the parallels:

• Grant meets his stuffy bank-heiress-fiancee at a resort.

  Sanford met his wife Jenny, whose great-grandfather founded the Skil Corporation, the manufacturer of the first portable electric saw, in the Hamptons.

• Grant becomes "despondent" after agreeing to work in his future father-in-law's bank in order to save his engagement.

  Sanford hates his job, running off to his farm to dig holes, one of his "favorite ways of escaping the norms, constant phone calls and formalities that go with the office."

• Grant doesn't know what he wants to do with his life: "Because he has worked hard ever since he was a child, he now feels that he should take a long-term holiday and discover the true meaning of life."

  Sanford clearly hates his life, and loves adventures: "I told her about my love of the Appalachian Trail.... And I told her of adventure trips both in college.... I'd fly different places around the world; get myself a job; carry a hundred dollars emergency money, and either find a job there with the locals...or come on home.... I have found in this job is that one desperately needs a break from the bubble wherein every word, every moment is recorded — just to completely break."

• Grant's fiancee is a traditionalist, and her sister—his true love—is a wise-cracking free-thinker.

  Jenny Sanford was a driven investment banker who was happy "serving as a first lady who would choose one of her son's class plays over a presidential dinner anytime, but who was also perfectly comfortable discussing intricacies of the state's finances"; the exotic Belén Chapur did things like sunbathe on "lhabela, a beautiful island near Sao Paulo."

In other words, Holiday is the movie of how Mark Sanford wished his life had gone. It's gobsmackingly obvious that his dalliance was about chafing at the confines of the success he'd worked so hard for—escaping the security detail, the phone calls, the wife for an unencumbered life of Latin American torpor.

The only other clue as to which film he was talking about is that Sanford though "Its music was pleasant" and made him think of Chapur. The soundtrack to the 2006 film is by Hans Zimmer, a composer famous "integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements," according to Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to fit with what we imagine Sanford's tastes to be. (It does also feature songs by a Brazilian musician, however, which would, we suppose, make him think of his Argentinian lover.) The soundtrack to the 1938 film includes songs by Stephen Foster and Johann Strauss.

Whichever movie Sanford was really talking about, the older version is clearly a roadmap to the man's middle-aged psyche, whether he knows it or not. We're disappointed in Dowd for missing a chance to riff on it.

Yesterday an email was sent out by former Huffington Post media blogger Rachel Sklar, who is helping the former MSNBC executive/host launch the site, explaining what they're looking for:

We want Mediaite to be a platform for great, smart takes on media, and are establishing a community of columnists and contributors to that end. We're looking to to develop a number of great, regular paid columns and intend to have a number of paid contributors on the masthead as we grow. We are still in start-up mode so compensation issues are still being hammered out, but our goal is to develop smart column/feature ideas with our contributors. We believe in strong, smart ideas executed well — and we plan to pitch those ideas to advertisers accordingly.

What does this mean for you? Well, our goal is to develop these ideas, and eventually to pay certain top contributors a revenue share and/or stipend. This will probably be at least a few months down the road, but we want to make our intentions clear from the outset. We think this will be a win-win on both sides: we provide the platform, editorial support and ad sales efforts; you provide the smart and innovative content. We are still in the very early stages, but we are fairly confident that some great, highly clickable features will come from this, and we think this is a terrific way to provide incentive beyond visibility, working with great editors and being part of an awesome new start-up site.

Yeehaw! Sounds great, right? Well, all except the part about the "compensation issues" to be hammered out, you know, whenever. You'll get a "stipend" a few months down the road. Maybe. For now you'll work for free and like it because Mediaite is so awesome y'all! After all, who needs money these days anyway?

Sklar then goes on to lay out the somewhat patronizing and legalese-heavy "columnist contributor guidelines." Here are some of the highlights:

3. Feel free to express any opinion, however unpopular; however, you must be able to support your arguments with linkable facts and/or original, verifiable reporting. We need to give the reader enough information to intelligently disagree with you; you need to be able to demonstrate to your critics why you are totally right and they are idiots.

6. Please send us the post WITH HTML already in place. If you don't know what HTML is - that's the code allowing for hyperlinks and style elements like italicizing etc. We recommend opening up an account at Blogger.com or Tumblr.com to figure it out. (It's no harder than Microsoft Word. The first post will get you up the learning curve in no time.)

7. It goes without saying that the work should be your own. Still, we're saying it because it's easy to accidentally copy and paste. For video submissions, please refresh yourselves on fair-use guidelines if using copyrighted images. Upshot: Be extra-sure to attribute all the words and/or images that are not yours. ("Hat-tips" to where you heard of something are good form, too. Links are the currency of the Internet.)

9. NB: #3 effectively precludes racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or otherwise unsupportable/repugnant views. Provable arguments mean rational, sane thought. Since you are all sane, rational people we're not that worried, but it must be said.

13. You retain all the rights to your work. In the event that we enter into a revenue-share or some other financial deal, we reserve the right to negotiate the terms on a case-by-case basis.

So yeah, support your argument with, you know, logic and facts and stuff, put your own Goddamn links in there lazy-ass, don't pull a Maureen Dowd, don't piss anybody off (especially the Abrams Research clients we'll have you shill for occasionally), your work belongs to you, unless we decide that it doesn't, and we'll decide how little we're going to pay you when we feel like getting around to it.

Sounds awesome!

Full recap: Edmund Andrews writes about economics for the Times and went broke. Because he's an NYT reporter, there's the rub! He wrote a book about the experience of going broke as a Rich White Guy Who Should Know Better and excerpted it in last week's New York Sunday Times Magazine. The Atlantic's Megan McArdle did some research and found that Andrews' second wife, with whom he experienced the fiscal woes, filed for bankruptcy not once, but twice, the second time after they were married. The bankruptcies aren't mentioned in the article (and most likely, the book), which makes Andrews' story slightly less "this happened to us" and slightly more "we did this to us," which still probably could've sold the book! But leaving this out is at best, sketchy, and at worst, a lie by omission. So what'd Andrews have to say to McArdle?

NewsHour, who ran a segment on his book Thursday night, asked him for a quote on the kerfuffle. He cries innocence:

It is hard to believe that anybody would accuse me of trying to airbrush a story in which I recount the cringe-inducing details of my calamitous plunge into junk mortgages.

..These bankruptcies did occur, but they had nothing to do with our mortgage woes. They were both tied to old debts from before we were married or bought a house. They had nothing to do with my ability to get a mortgage; nor did they have anything to do with our subsequent financial problems.

...None of this has any connection to our story. It had nothing to do with Patty being a spendthrift. It had no bearing on my ability to take out a mortgage, and it had nothing to do with our financial problems.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Schwah? What? Old debt from previous marriages unresolved during a current marriage is still an issue when you're applying for a home loan. Let's assume Andrews got the seedy flex-loan money without his wife's name on it, without her history on it, without her having any association to the mortgage whatsoever. He would still have to consciously omit her from any attempt to get said home loan. And how is that - and her financial history at large - simply not relevant to the book he's writing on his family's financial issues? Maybe because the bankruptcies were kinda scandalous, and shady in their own right.

Bankruptcy Number One came from an ex-husband who's apparently far sketchier than Andrews, five years previous to their marriage. Her ex-husband (a TV commercial producer, naturally) didn't file returns for five years. Since Patty was reporting them on their personal tax returns, she had to join him in the filing. Bankruptcy Number Two is a little more salacious:

Patty's second bankruptcy stemmed from a loan she received from her sister, while Patty was still living in Los Angeles. At the time, she was caring for four children, working for very modest pay, and receiving almost no child support from her ex-husband. (Despite multiple court orders, he remains chronically delinquent on untold thousands of dollars.) When Patty couldn't repay, her sister followed her east and sued her. I offered to pay off the loan by withdrawing money out of my 401k, but I wasn't allowed to because the purpose didn't qualify as a "hardship." Without an alternative, Patty had no choice but to seek bankruptcy protection.

So Andrews wanted to help and couldn't; he certainly doesn't sound like a bad guy. But then again, his wife was apparently appalled at some of the things he wrote in the book while he was writing them. How is this any more scandalous than her being a chronic cash profligate? It's not! Which is why Andrews claiming that he's protecting the emotional interests of his wife sounds like bullshit.

Cover-up or foolish omission, it was just a bad play. And now, without reading or knowing the book, it's completely evident that this omission changes the context of the story at large. A financial history is just that, and Andrews' revisionist account - however supposedly well-intentioned - gets shucked of some serious credibility that's central to the conceit of the book (and the Times article, which stems from the book).

Between this and the whole Maureen Dowd thing, the Times isn't looking too good lately. All parties involved might find it in their best interests to shut up Andrews and start getting the spin-control engine turning before their credibility (and, thus: book sales) are further affected. As evidenced below, they might want to move quickly.

Ed Andrews Responds to Criticism in the Blogosphere [PBS Online NewsHour]
Making Sense (Video) [PBS NewsHour]
Customer Reviews: Busted [Amazon.com]

Andrews, who is also the author of a book titled Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, from which the Times Magazine article sprung, essentially paints a picture of he and his wife, Patricia Barreiro, being burned by evil mortgage brokers and bankers who held guns to their heads and made them take out loans and make purchases they couldn't afford. However, McArdle discovered that Barreiro had another undisclosed bankruptcy in her past, leading one to believe that Andrews and Barreiro aren't so much innocent victims as they are people who can't stop living beyond their means, which, of course, completely alters Andrews' narrative.

In September 1998, California bankruptcy court records indicate that Patty and her first husband declared bankruptcy. The financial statement they filed with the court indicated family income of $174,000 in 1996, $87,000 in 1997, and $126,000 in the first nine months of 1998. The income fluctuations are not surprising, given that her husband was in the film production industry. By the time of the filing, the couple owed about $30,000 on 8 credit cards, over $200,000 in back taxes, and almost $15,000 in private school tuition, as well as substantial car and mortgage payments.

In 2007, nearly as soon as she was eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again in Montgomery Country. When called for comment yesterday, Andrews was unavailable, but there is no question that it is his wife: his income and occupation are prominently featured in the docket.

This is really highly unusual. For starters, the overwhelming majority of people who file bankruptcy do not make anything close to $100,000 a year—the standard estimate when the 2005 bankruptcy reform was passed was that about 80% of filers had household incomes below the median income in their state. The number of affluent people who file twice is even smaller, and has presumably gone down since the 2005 filing largely eliminated abusive serial Chapter 13 filings, which used to be used, often by quite wealthy people, to forestall evictions or foreclosure.

The bankruptcy code requires filers to wait 8 years after a previous Chapter 7 discharge. Barely four months after she became eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again. And the filing shows some suggestion of strategic debt management.

The point McArdle makes from here is this: Multiple bankruptcies do happen to some people, usually those with the shittiest of luck who happen to be living paycheck to paycheck, not people living with six figure personal budgets. Edmund Andrews seems to be out there peddling a tale of woe brought upon by bad luck, when in reality his wife has spent years living beyond her means and then seeking shelter in bankruptcy court when everything came crashing down around her. All of this, of course, paints a very different picture than the one laid out by Andrews in his book and Sunday Magazine article. To which McArdle says this:

"If you structure your finances so that absolutely everything has to go right, it's hard to blame the mortgage company when you don't quite make it."

The only issue we take with McArdle's post is this: She actually lauds Andrews' desire to "shield his wife" from the embarrassment of the first bankruptcy being made public in his book and subsequent article, an assumption that presumes the best of intentions on Andrews' part. However, we don't see it the same way. You see, if Andrews includes the details of the first bankruptcy in his story, as we noted earlier, it completely changes the tone of his "the bad finance people did this to us" narrative to the point where it leaves him devoid of a story compelling enough to sell. Therefore, we feel Andrews' motivations for leaving this little detail out are, shall we say, less than innocent, and most definitely not rooted in chivalry.

Regardless, in the wake of the Maureen Dowd plagiarism flap and the "oh this is nothing" company response that soon followed earlier in the week, it'll be interesting to see how the Times addresses this, if they even bother to address it at all.

The Road to Bankruptcy [Megan McArdle/Atlantic]

See, the problem with the last column was that it was all about "issues" and "an important political debate" and she tried to make "points" using "evidence" to advance an "argument." That is not what Maureen Dowd does! No wonder she needed Josh Marshall's uncredited help! No, what Maureen Dowd won those hundred Pulitzers for was "fanfic about politicians making liberal use of embarrassingly out-of-date pop cultural references." Hey, so, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney walk into a bar, right...

"That was funny when you were on Fox and Neil Cavuto called you Obama's ‘ball and Cheney,' " Rummy grins, taking a gulp of his brunello.

Dick grunts, raising a fork of his Risotto Gucci with roasted free-range quail.

"The punks thought they could roll over us," Vice mutters. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

Hah. That is a line from the popular 1987 film Dirty Dancing. The guy from Road House (may he rest in peace!) says it. Wouldn't it be incongruent and therefore hilarious if that cantankerous old Republican politician Dick Cheney said it?

Dowd is also back to impugning Obama's masculinity, of course, because he is adopting some of the national security arguments of the manly, psychotic Republicans. Also she is calling George H. W. Bush "poppy." The only person Maureen Dowd is plagiarizing today is Maureen Dowd!

In a short post on Talking Points Memo last night, Marshall wrote:

I generally think we're too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism. I haven't said anything about this because I really didn't think I had anything to add. Whatever the mechanics of how it happened, I never thought it was intentional. Dowd and the Times quickly corrected it, which I appreciated. And for me, that's pretty much the end of it.

Marshall's obviously taking the high road here, effectively joining a chorus of others who have given Dowd a pass in this matter, as did the Times itself in a statement issued by a spokesperson:

Maureen had us correct the column online as soon as the error was brought to her attention, adding in the sourcing to Marshall's blog. We ran a correction in today's paper, referring readers to the correct version online.

There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error. It was corrected. Journalists often use feeds from other staff journalists, free-lancers, stringers, a whole range of people. And from friends. Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Maureen's work knows that she is happy and eager to give people credit.

Though Marshall's blessing may now help Dowd and the Times bring this matter to a close, we stand by an assertion made on Monday by our own Hamilton Nolan about the Times' hypocrisy in regards to the creation of content:

Let's point out that the NYT is one of the loudest newspaper voices bemoaning the idea that they create all the original content and the internet rips it off, in a one-way downhill dance of media thievery. In fact, the NYT itself has a grand tradition of stealing stories from smaller regional papers, parachuting in their own correspondents to re-report and repackage those stories for a national audience.

All papers do that! But none as well as the Times.

Yeah, exactly. What he said.

Very Briefly on Dowd [TPM]

There was a time when this little plagiarism incident—even if inadvertent—would have been a big deal. But the "new media" these days, always with the copying and the pasting and paraphrasing—you can see how this could happen by mistake.

So let's give her the benefit of the doubt! Then let's point out that the NYT is one of the loudest newspaper voices bemoaning the idea that they create all the original content and the internet rips it off, in a one-way downhill dance of media thievery. In fact, the NYT itself has a grand tradition of stealing stories from smaller regional papers, parachuting in their own correspondents to re-report and repackage those stories for a national audience.

All papers do that! But none as well as the Times. And just as blogs use NYT stories for raw material, the paper does the same; since they're too straitlaced to stray from polite discourse, they'll just pull what they want to say from a blog, i.e. "Rupert Murdoch has always had his detractors; Snark-purveying wags at Gawker even described Mr. Murdoch as a 'piss-drinking mummy' and insinuated he had sexual relations with several lowland gorillas on a trip abroad, though that could not be independently verified."

They can't say it, so they let us say it, then they say what we said! Just like we use their reporting as a launching pad. Let's just admit we're one big interconnected ecosystem here. We wouldn't want MoDo to get fired anyhow. We're the only ones who get something worthwhile out of her.

[Feel free to borrow our Pinch Moose jokes, NYT.]

The controversy started when the following 45-word passage appeared in Dowd's column, titled "Cheney, Master of Pain," on Sunday:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Now compare that to Marshall's 43-word passage from a Talking Points Memo post on Thursday titled, "Bubbling":

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The similarities were caught by a TPM contributor on Sunday afternoon who pointed out that the only difference between Dowd's words and Marshall's was that Dowd used the phrase "we were" instead of "the Bush crowd was."

On Sunday night, in emails to "The Nytpicker," a blog devoted to covering the goings-on at the New York Times, and the Huffington Post, Dowd admitted that the similarities weren't accidental and that she had indeed plagiarized Marshall, though she placed the blame for the mishap squarely on one of her friends.

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Having looked at this from every possible angle, would it be completely out of line to state that there's something distinctly bullshit-y about Dowd's explanation? Dowd, who ironically played an integral role in exposing Joe Biden's speech plagiarizing in 1988, needs to explain the "my friend did it" excuse in more detail. Who is this mysterious friend who helps Dowd limp across the finish line of the marathon that is two 750 word columns per week for the Times? Was the conversation in question over the phone, in which Dowd would have written down her friend's words in a note, or was it via email or instant messenger, where perhaps there's an electronic record of the exchange? And finally, why was Dowd needing help expressing the thought contained in the passage in question, a sequence of words which, with no disrespect directed at Josh Marshall, don't seem all that remarkable. It's a point well made with words, for sure, but it's not something that couldn't have been expressed in a number of different ways.

Look, most people who write can sympathize with being "blocked" occasionally, perhaps even spitting out a thought via a sentence or two that was conceived by reading something written by someone else that went on to take root in the subconscious, perhaps then creating the appearance of plagiarism when in reality there was no writerly malfeasance involved, but this, this just doesn't seem to make any sense. At all.

If there's one absolute certainty to come out of this whole fiasco it is this: If Maureen Dowd needs help from friends composing two cohesive 750-word arguments per week, she'd be one hell of a shitty blogger.

NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall[TPM]
Dowd Admits Plagiarizing to TNYTpicker [The NYTpicker]
Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM's Josh Marshall[HuffPo]
[Trainwreck photo via On The Brink]