I almost never look at Maureen Dowd’s opinion columns. I’m pretty sure the last time she was on my must-read list, Dick Cheney was still living in the Naval Observatory. But today she decided to write about the virility of the president of the United States and I just had to see what was up.
“The Golden Bachelor” showed that sex is not just for spring chickens. Hearing aids and making out in a hot tub can go blissfully together.
Now comes the Golden President. Even though fretful questions about his age have engulfed Joe Biden’s campaign, one thing is clear: His romance with Jill is still crackling.
I have observed that myself.
I could just leave this right here. It’s kind of priceless as it stands, don’t you think?
But the column doesn’t limit itself to the present day. It takes in many of the more randy statements uttered by Joe Biden, going back to the aftermath of the tragic death of his first wife.
The most famous profile ever done about him was Kitty Kelley’s Washingtonian piece in 1974 — a year and a half after his beautiful young wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, tragically died in a car crash at Christmastime.
“Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover,” he said. “The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports.” In an office with 35 pictures of Neilia, he pointed out one of his “beautiful millionaire wife” in a bikini, noting, “She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?”
He said he was so exhausted from campaigning for the Senate in 1972, “I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else.”
Why is Dowd writing about this? There actually is no good answer to that question, but it’s a set up to contrast with the Republicans’ pinched attitude towards sex, sexuality and even artificial acts of insemination. Biden has healthy robust sex with his wife, while these puritanical GOP bastards are trying to “stamp out sensuality.”
Never mind that marital sex is perfectly consistent with puritanism. Dowd wants to write embarrassing stuff about Biden while making it look like praise. It’s so titillating!
I suppose it could be worse. Dowd could have written an entire column intimating that our president can no longer get it up. Actually, that’s probably going to be the topic of her next column.
In the last few years I’ve wondered if cultural artifacts like bad NY Times columnists (Dowd, Friedman, Stephens, Douthat, Brooks) Saturday Night Live, the Simpsons, Sports Center, 60 Minutes and like are not themselves a representation of fascism in America. Not that these wisps of deep fired nothingness have any idealogical coherence enough to represent hateful nationalism, but as entertainment/news focal points that won’t ever go off the air, but aren’t good enough to be worth viewing, they form a dull longing for a past where those shows still matter, but they never even really mattered to begin with…
Anyways, Maureen Dowd is the worst, and I remember vividly going down to see my grandparents in Boca Raton FL in the mid 90’s and my grandfather just thought she was the most poignant writer. Still haunts me.
Back in college, my freshman communications class had us sending to the nyt. The professor told us we were a part of a rare elite reading the nyt on the west coast. Then I read Maureen Dowd and wondered what the hell that even meant
Since Dick Cheney? Nah. She hasn’t been relevant since the 90s. I recall making an active decision never to read her after 9/11. It seemed obvious to me that her Clinton-obsessed psychobabble was just inappropriate for serious times. It’s astounding that the editors allow her to keep plugging along, using a schtick that lost what little bite it had three decades ago.