Bitch is ... jealous ?

or maybe just afraid of honest competition?

After pretty much wasting her twice-a-week soapboax busy funnin' on Nancy {sic} O'Donnell and Sarah Palin, Gail Collins doubles down goes for broke on insisting the messengers just can't hear the message...

The Gilded Age also happened to be the time when the media was wildly fragmented, with thousands of small, underfinanced local newspapers all yapping frantically to try to make an impression. This produced a climate of semihysterical sensationalism, along with some of my all-time favorite headlines.
...
On the other hand, the Gilded Age had Mark Twain and Eugene Debs and Lillian Russell, who exemplified a beauty standard that extolled fleshy women. A Virginia City man writing to a friend about a tightrope walker named Ella LaRue said admiringly: “Great ‘shape’ — more of it than I ever saw in any female. Immense across the hips — huge thighs.”

Maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Not sure if this is like some fiscal-conservative dog whistle that the liberal media just can't seem to hear, or if perhaps Krugman's been teaching her that fingers-in-the-ears coping mechanism, but either way?

Merit evaluation is coming. And the competition -- yessirreee! -- is working it regularly, and determined to participate. No more sitting on the sidelines while the chosen, well-circulated columnists continue to miss the messages ... and then try to joke their way out of their performance ills by dissing the competition.

C'mon Gail.
You gotta win -- you know, put something solid up there on the board -- if you're gonna justify your continued play.

Girls can do political analyis too*, y'know. Serious stuff even. Did you see Hoosiers back in the day? Learn anything about the lower division teams taking on the big guys -- honest, non-rigged competition on the floor?

Sure we can play up at your protected levels.

And we can beat you too. (Co-ed writing leagues even -- no performance distinction on paper, if you can believe that. No special point for being a girl, no fair using your physical looks to gain some kind of advantage. Not in this game -- sorry.)


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* Quick question:
Is Kevin Dowd's work in the Times supposed to be a Slats Grobnik* character? I understand that columnist device -- the late Stebbins Jefferson at the Palm Beach Post wrote in the voice of her fictional classmate B.T., a regular man she would visit to have a voice-of-the-people style conversation whilst he pumped her gas.

WHen it works, like with Royko's Grobnik, it worked. Gave the writer an outlet to put down not their own thoughts, but those they understood were out there, and with no voice.

Dowd's Christmas letter columns, and now post-election wrap, written in the voice of a conservative elder brother isn't clear. Is she voicing his thoughts, or just turning over the column to him, as some readers assume?

Always suspected the latter, because the satire is not so clear, but now? I'm not so sure... Surely only a chick would write this?

To Sarah Palin: Mirror, mirror on the wall, you’re the fairest of them all.

Which, if it is Maureen Dowd's alter ego, is almost doubly sad. That the "women columnists" at the top of the Times are so pigeonholed as the witty womens' writers, they must assume a conservative male voice to write seriously about shared domestic issues, nevermind a serious foreign policy take.

Now really ladies, how sad is that?

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*Like many columnists,
Mike Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could "converse"; the most famous being Slats Grobnik, the epitome of the working class Polish-Chicagoan. Generally, the Slats Grobnik columns were two men discussing a current event in a Polish neighborhood bar. In 1973, Royko collected several columns as Slats Grobnik and Other Friends.