The "marriage expert"

Yesterday I asked, what the devil is "a marriage expert."

The incomperable Bob Somerby tells us.

WHO IS MAGGIE GALLAGHER: Maggie Gallagher, “marriage expert,” is also a nasty, angry woman with a ripe, smut-lovin’ mouth. Example? In November 1999, she leaped into action when the press corps ginned up its phony Naomi Wolf flap. Many pundits played the smut card in their phony campaign against Wolf (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/3/03), and Gallagher brought an especially loud mouth to the crowded table. In a November 6, 1999 Washington Times column, the “marriage expert” directly addressed Gore. “So now I hear you've gone out and hired a feminist babe with big hair, friend of your daughter, to help boost your MQ (that's ‘masculinity quotient’ to you outside the Beltway),” she wrote. In the course of her column, she characterized Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar, as “this pretty little writer thing (don't get me wrong, smart too, gives real good pen) who's going to teach you how to be a man” and she said that Gore had been “looking for manly sex tips from a girl.” After an inexcusable comparison to Monica Lewinsky (such comparisons were required in Gallagher’s smutty cohort), our expert again called Wolf a girl: “Al, baby, the really big problem here is that you are going to a girl to get advice on how to be a man.” At the time, Wolf—the “girl,” who “gives good pen”—was a 37-year-old, world-acclaimed writer, the married mother of a young child. But so what? “Marriage experts” like Maggie Gallagher will continue to degrade our public discourse as long as their colleagues in the mainstream press corps prefer to stare off into air. Each evening, crackpots like Gallagher flood cable programs, where they trash the mainstream press for its disturbing, alleged “liberal bias.” The kookiness (and smuttiness) of the cable discussion makes our national discourse a joke, but mainstream scribes would rather eat live worms than comment on the endless degradation. Is Maggie Gallagher a “marriage expert?” In fact, she’s a smutty, foul-mouthed, loud, angry kook, whose type has made a sick joke of our discourse. But alas! High-minded typists of the mainstream press corps don’t care enough to take notice.

So now you know who's on the White House payroll providing "marriage expertise."