NYT columnist Maureen Dowd has wasted lots of pixels over the years, yet she still manages to find creative ways to waste even more. In this week’s column, she takes a bizarre shot at Mitt Romney:
When the Romneys got married and moved to Boston in 1971 so Mitt could attend Harvard, they set up house in a suburb, befriended other young Mormon couples and kept to their cloistered, conservative, privileged, traditional, white, heterosexual circle.
Campuses were roiling with change — feminism, civil rights, antiwar demonstrations — but the Romneys were not part of that. They were throwbacks.
Or, they were the responsible majority. Outside the hippiedom that too many liberals of MoDo’s generation just can’t let go of, millions of Americans got educations, established careers, raised families and built communities. They stuck to tradition and passed it on their children. While the self-righteous hippies indulged and did their best to tear America apart, the Romneys and Americans like them kept the country going. Mitt Romney worked hard and was spectacularly successful. Apparently that’s not cool enough for Maureen.
Woodstock is over, MoDo. Stop living in the past.
MoDo doesn’t know that people like tradition, does she. That’s why generations of people have lived traditionally.
The Romneys were as sociable as they needed to be outside of their Mormon circle. Mitt was a dynamic organizer and social networker at Harvard Law, and socialized with other students and faculty in both the law school and the business school.
Bryan: The Silent Majority obliterated McGovern, who only got the “cool” state of Massachusetts. Cool as it was, that state had no problem educating uncool people like Mitt Romney and other Silent Majority types.
“…but the Romneys were not part of that. They were throwbacks.”
You don’t need to go any further Ms Dowd, I’m sold! I’m voting Romney for sure.
Government isn’t “cool” or “hip” and never should be. It takes self control to limit yourself to the powers you’ve been given and not play Sun King.
M Dowd and the Progressives and Liberals have really scrapped the bottom of the barrel with this one.But..Dowd is known for this.And to find fault with being White and Heterosexual is really showing her Out-The Box Leftism…and Secularism Anti-Americanism.97% of the country is heterosexual whether or not she and the Left want to except that or not…of course we know they do not.She also ignores the fact that Romney rejected his inheritances…That he spent two years as a missionary helping the poor…where as Hippies do nothing of the sort ..I know because I was one…until I woke up around 1971….when I realized I was being used by certain political entities that came around getting us involved with THEIR Political Agendas in sly manipulative ways.I was lucky to have a brain and saw through these Communist/SDS…Revolutionary Creeps…and I ended up voting GOP from 1972 on…and cleaned up my act at that time also.They were even at the Woodstock Concert..pushing Communist propaganda trying to enlist young folks there.Abbie Hoffman was one…Whom I met a few times…in the Lower Eastside of NYC and when he was off guard talked about the stupidity of hippies and Socialist Revolutions..as did Allen Ginsburg who I also met…These guys and many oters USED Hippies..who for the most part just didn’t want to work and just get high all the time…and justified that with pseudo-philosophies about Freedom and Spirituality and new beginnings…and Free love etc…but it was all really just BS.It was really just about no work…free stuff…getting high…and having as much sex as possible…which of course led to Free Clinics…Free food places…Free clothing places and digger Crash pads…all run by Socialists Political People..who would push Communist propaganda on hippies at the same time..and this whole mentality of entitlement grew from this no work..get high..have all the sex you want..to the inevitable..Socialist Communes…to their kids now becoming Occupy…and some becoming university Profs strongly Preaching Marxism to as many youth as possible.Dowd…is part of that movement…whether she was a Hippy or not I don’t know..Or she was a product of Hippies…or the Circle who used them or not I don’t know.But…she obviously is stuck in that same Mind set that I saw back in 1968 to 1971-2 that would attack folks like Romney and his wife.The same one that gave us Communist like Tom Hayden and his Treasonous Wife Jane Fonda.
MoDo and the rest of her claque have finished scraping the bottom of the barrel; they’re now reduced to digging into and sifting the dirt around the barrel for any little tidbits they might find.
Or lifting up the barrel to see if anything’s dug in under it. G-d, you think they’d get bored, or at least embarrassed at some point.
Reminds me of a discussion on this board a while back about generations. If you look at most of the “leaders” of the counter-culture back then, most of them were NOT of the baby-boom generation. They were older than the kids who acted on their theories. Examples include Timothy leary (b. 1920), Abbie Hoffman (1936), Charles Manson (1934), Allen Ginsberg (1926), Howard Zinn (1922), Noam Chomsky (1928), William S. Burroughs (1914), and others.
In other words, the Hippies and other counter-culturalists didn’t think of all that stuff by themselves – they were following their adult mentors. Those adults were using other people’s children for their social, political, and sexual experiments. Anything for the Revolution, I suppose…
P.S. – Maureen Dowd was born in 1952 so she was 18 in 1970. Maybe old enough to claim Hippie cred, maybe not.
Dowd was born in 1952. Now she’s 60.
NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER 30 – that’s the sacred message her hippie ‘movement’ drilled into each other’s heads.
That’s you, Mo.
An earlier philosopher said, if you’re young and not liberal, you lack a heart. If you’re old and not conservative, you lack a brain.
That’s you again, Mo.
Two for two – untrustworthy and brainless.
“Throwbacks” to the mindset of people who built the country, rather than “throwups” who tore it apart.
Dowd needs to go away. Or we should just ignore her.
Dowd and I are contemporaries. I was serving in the Marine Corps while she was still doing whatever or whomever. After the leftist protest idiots managed to get exams cancelled, I decided I had had enough of anyone like her, forever.
Can’t she go off and whine about how unfair life is again? Or how badly Michael Douglas treated her? I’m not sorry her life is an evolutionary dead end. She’s done nada for no one.
Remember when we used to feel ashamed about our youthful stupidity? Remember when we would do anything to hide those stupid actions from our children? Now, we are to honor our stupidity and in fact announce it with great pride to our children instead of guiding them away from our mistakes into adulthood. The sixties were a confusing time; some of us jumped in with both feet without a thought of the circumstances. Some of those causes were very worthwhile and life-changing and had a great impact on society. But, there were other causes we found to be very evil handed and also had a terrible and fatal impact on us. Why revisit them when we could learn from our mistakes? M Dowd makes it seem like there were not enough blood and lives lost in those days and anyone who did not participate was a coward. I say it takes courage to stand up and take a stand against hypocracy.
I stopped reading anything by this nasty piece of work a long time ago. How’s circulation for the New York Times doing?
There was a time when the NYT was available in every airport and every hotel I ever visited. That’s not true, any more. They’ve been substantially replaced by USA Today.
Some days, I think Modo must be a genius or have some incriminating photos on someone. How can such a mediocre writer hand a high-paying gig at the NYT?
The Left has done an amazing job of promoting the myth that it is the dominant force in American political culture and has been since the halcyon days of the ’60s. Sorry, but outside a few university towns and very small areas of big cities longhairs, hippies, and lefties were a miniscule minority and even referred to themselves as freaks. On most college campuses you had Freaks and Greeks but most were neither. Few of the “hippies” were poltical at all; that was the constant complaint from the radicals who complained that the hippies only wanted to get balled and high and wouldn’t take any “action.”
The soundtrack of the ’60s isn’t from Woodstock; few of the bands that performed at Woodstock ever had even a top 10 Billboard hit. At the height of its power, the anti-war, which was really the anti-draft, movement could mobilize at most a couple hundred thousand people in a nation of 200 million. Most of the people who went to demonstrations went because they were a good place to get high and get laid and the motivation for those who went for some poltical reason wasn’t leftist politics, it was personal opposition to being drafted. There’s a reason the so-called anti-war movement evaporated with the end of the draft. Gene McCarthy didn’t win the nomination in ’68, not even close, and Hubert Humphry didn’t win the election. Likewise McGovern, nominated because the Left out-organized the traditional Democrats, was steam-rollered electorally. Carter was an accident and by no stretch a Leftist at the time of his election. He was despised by the liberal BoWash estabishment. His trying to be accepted by the liberal establishment goes for to explain how ineffective he was as President and how crazy he has become since. I knew the man in Georgia; he was your typical conservative Southern politician and liberal only in comparison to Lester Maddox, a virulent racist, who preceded him. What he’s become since is a product of his becoming President. The at the National level the Left was consigned to the outer darkness until Clinton who gained prominence by pretending that he was just another Southern governor. He tried to let his freak flag fly in the first two years and provoked a counter-revolution that once again consigned the Left to the outer darkness, including the Democrat, not nearly all leftie in those days, loss of Congress for the first time in forty years. Now we have an outright communist pretending to be some sort of moderate and even with all his lies and a lapdog press they couldn’t hold power in Congress but two years.
The left has set itself up in the BoWash axis of evil and in Ecotopia and insist that they are the cool people; a willing media goes along with that insistence. It is said that a celebrity is someone who’s famous for being famous. The Left is like that; they are powerful for being thought to be powerful. The same is true of their storm troopers, the unions. They are creatures of the Blue cesspools and only know how to act there; they fold in the face of real opposition. The problem is; they rarely get real opposition even from Republicans who are scared of the cool people thinking ill of them. If Scott Walker had set up some WI unions for decertification and attacked their dues stream, easily done, before amending the collective bargaining law, the unions would have been as weak as kittens in opposing him, but that wouldn’t have been nice. When are Republicans going to learn to stay out of BoWash except to vote and hold committee hearings; you can get somebody to throw a good cocktail party back in the district, and if you give it, the contributors and lobbyists will come, or send someone – even better.
MoDo should try channeling Pauline Kael — she of the famous remark after Nixon destroyed McGovern in ’72. The leftist/chattering class bubble is much older than most people realize.
This is weird. MoDo is a beltway maven and as such, is a hero of yours – at least, she used to be a hero of yours when she was cheering on the Bush wars and tax cuts for the 1%. Now that she speaks ill of your cult master, she is a loser? Now that she writes words which cause you to render your garments, she is a loser? You folks cheer on the death of America, yet freak out when a mirror is turned inward towards your policies. Cult over country – always.
The cult has an absolute hold over your lives. Your children will learn of your allegiance to the breaking of America, and you will have to answer for it.
Can anyone tell just what in the name of Elvis dead on the can in Graceland this nut is talking about?
No, and neither can he.
Unfortunately, as Roger L. Simon noted just last week, there are scads of people who didn’t participate in the counter culture of the 60s and early 70s who now wish they had.
My old neighbors are a case in point. My lifelong best friend has two sisters a few years older than we are. Neither went to college. Both married young, moved to lily white suburbs, had children and slowly fell away from the religion they were raised in to fully embrace a new age feelgoodism. They spent years watching Oprah, reading women’s magazines and listening to news on the alphabet channels. They really think they missed something by not being radicals during the Vietnam years. and try to seem cool now by aping whatever values the self described cool people they see on TV espouse. As a result the politics they express are now to the left of where McGovern stood in 1972. This pair would eat what Dowd wrote with a spoon. My best friend who remained in the city to deal with the actual consequences of liberal policies in action loses her mind over how stupid her sisters can be about politics and how they still love Obama.
Life, it’s all timing and location, and whether you have indoor or outdoor plumbing to qualify as a quota queen. If Romney had gone to Stanford instead, been in Menlo Park at the VA along with Ken Kesey doing those CIA LSD experiments, he could’a been one of the founding members of the Merry Pranksters and the Hippies. I guess he was just too late to follow Timothy Leary out from Harvard to tune in, turn on, and drop out. He did find time to romp through the French countryside in ’68 on a draft deferment to do missionary work while Mohammed Ali was denied conscientious objectors status by his local draft board. Of course, Big Mo the equality hoe and her ya ya sisters are still exempt from that individual mandate to register with Selective Service on penalty of law and forfeiture of government benefits.
How the hell is this a criticism? Only someone like Maureen Dowd who has been hermetically sealed in her close-minded little lefty cocoon for the last three decades could make such an asinine statement. Lots of people didn’t become hippies because….oh what’s that reason…….THEY HAD RESPONSIBILITIES!The got jobs and moved on with their lives, most of which very useful lives. It may come as a surprise to the always naifish Ms. Dowd but there were lots and lots of people who strongly disagreed with 60′s style radicalism and thought they were mostly a group of preening, self-indulgent narcissists. (Which is a pretty good descrition of Ms. Dowd.)
I’m one of the youngest Baby Boomers, or one of the oldest Gen-Xers, don’tknowdon’tcare. But my oldest cousin was drafted and went to Vietnam, then re-enlisted and kept volunteering to go overseas. So that his six younger brothers didn’t have to. Like all the other REAL heroes, he came home and doesn’t talk about it much. But he did volunteer why he went off into the wilderness (Michigan’s UP) after he came back; it wasn’t that he was suffering but that he was tired of the venom from the MoDo-Hillary-Barack-Algore-Jane crowd. They make me sick. I’m on Cousin Mike’s side.
Bush did coke, got drunk, ducked his Roger Ramjet fighter pilot duties at the end of the Vietnam war (OK that was forged documents) and that was bad. Romney didn’t and that was bad. Palin got married and had kids and got elected mayor and governor and that was bad. OK, What do these people want?
“OK, What do these people want?”
A new bong and all the contraceptives they can get?
What do they want?
Power.
Control over you.
That’s all.
Ah, the Woodstockers. They like to claim a lot but really their contributions came in the 1970s. They gave us domestic terrorism, Disco (for which there is no forgiveness), bell bottoms, platform shoes, bad hair, bad hygiene and who can forget the pet rock.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end. Thank God, we were wrong about that.
Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, Genesis, Warren Zevon, Al Stewart, “The Bob Newhart Show,” “WKRP,” “Star Wars” (before it fell apart), a trio of cool sci-fi flicks with Chuck Heston…
I could go on all damned day. The ’70s were excellent! Disco was a short seizure. Compare it to the embarrassment of rap, which refuses to go away.
Throwback? You want a throwback?
My dad was injured by “peaceful” hippies throwing rocks at cops during a “peaceful” demonstration on a campus in 1970. He still has the scars on his face.
Send some old hippies over to my house so I can throwback some rocks at their goddam heads.
– dowdy now, hasn’t got a man and aging rapidly. Just smile, ignore her, Mrs. Romney, and enjoy the grandkids.
it really is this simple
As opposed to Bracky Obama who is living a hippie PRESENT…
– lovers despairing. Need reinforcement now. Rush “Zero Dark Thirty” to theaters this summer.
I’m a proud Mormon, but even I know that what she said was not at all condemning Romney and in no way is she stuck in “hippie-dom”. Since when are gender equality, civil rights, and other big POLITICAL movements the work of hippies? Did hippies win rights for blacks? Because if that’s true I guess we’re all just a country run by hippies!
No the point she was clearly trying to make is that he is a politician, who, in the midst of political action sidesteps away and just says, “eh” and allows politics to take their course.
If he is so devoted to our religion why has he failed to take action in any regard of some of our churches political beliefs? Gay rights, no say on that so far. Other hot topics like immigration? No real set opinion there.
So it’s really easy for Republicans who don’t entirely agree with some of the opinions of other stronger willed candidates to look at Mitt and say, he hasn’t said anything I don’t like yet! And just give him the vote.