If nothing else, a pitiable soul.

Maureen Dowd, who truly doesn’t get it wrote in this past Sunday’s New York Times Op-ed:

“When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it.”

Quite telling. As a editorialist she’s little more than an attacker, as a journalist she is too intellectually lazy to understand why people have the positions they do. It’s simply enough that they do. What then (if anything) was her column about? Women. Not enough of them getting editorials published. Why? It doesn’t matter. Content doesn’t matter – there just aren’t enough women doing it.

She goes on to channel some invective on men generally as some sort of cause in itself, and discusses an exchange she had with editor Howell Raines on a column she didn’t want to write, calling it a tough moment. Understood, we all have them. Her conclusion?

“Men enjoy verbal dueling.”

Hunh? I suppose her alternative or explanation or thesis of description of opposites is what she does: insult and run away, adding nothing to the depth of understanding and nothing to the discussion. There is no dueling because there is no response – only potentates and the obedient in the world of the exchange (or non-exchange) of ideas.

This mirrors exactly the intellectual skill of children before they develop useful conversation skills. The best she can do is see sharp dialog as having cutting themes to it - which leads her immediately into dwelling on the theme of castration. Again it can only go back to the male-female binary paradigm as it’s understood and controlled by the shipwreck of present day feminism: ‘I hate you, you owe me, but you guys still need to make way for me. And be polite while you’re at it’

It gets better: she chimes in on the kerfuffle between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley. Estrich conducted a open lobbying campaign to get Kinsley to run her columns on the editorial page. Kinsley made the editorial choice not to and stood his ground in spite of his decision being paraded to potential humiliation in the prism of a feminism shakedown: to make him seem the chauvinist.

Dowd sides with Kinsley, citing only that Estrich’s writing is hum-drum. No other reason? It hardly seems worth the reference. I actually looks like a vehicle to bring us her real news: she IS news. She refers to both Kinsley and Estrich as her friends.
Again – no reason to mention it, other that to make the column’s subject less the subject, and generally about her.