Bringing the property values down

The opinion pages of The Paper of Record has this weekly line-up of luminaries and their insights each Sunday:  Bruni (compares the Oscar "race" to the Republican primaries), Dowd (the GOP are fuddy-duddies), Douthat (liberal elites can't appreciate Ike), and Friedman (in a perfect world, oil companies would be benevolent).

Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you Ms. Dowd?

I was going to post over the weekend on the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist's decision, during a week in which the House GOP was holding, literally, millions of women's lives hostage over a few billion more in spending cuts, to use her column to accuse Dylan of "selling out" to repression in China. But I sighed and took my "yard waste" to the local dump instead.

In hindsight, that seems like a good decision, since James Fallows and his correspondents who actually know something about China and Bob Dylan, are corrosive.

>>Check out the Beijing set list - he played A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and Ballad of a Thin Man - those tunes are as "subversive" as anything he has written, and frankly, better tunes than his "protest" songs (The Times They Are A Changing). http://www.boblinks.com/040611s.html

What does Maureen Dowd want from Dylan exactly, and what evidence does she have that he altered his set list? He doesn't speak at concerts, the set list changes daily, and again, Gonna Change My Way of Thinking which opened both China shows, and Desolation Row from Shanghai are more thumb-in-your eye than Blowin in the Wind. http://www.boblinks.com/040811s.html

Dylan closed both China shows with Like A Rolling Stone (as he does all his shows). If the Chinese were really intent on shutting Dylan down, wouldn't they have crossed out that tune from the set list?

Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, from Slow Train Coming, opens with this lyric:

Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna put my good foot forward
And stop being influenced by fools

So much oppression
Can't keep track of it no more
So much oppression
Can't keep track of it no more

http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/gonna-change-my-way-of-thinking

It's from Dylan's so called "born again" phase, but do you think the Chinese were hip to that lyric? Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you Maureen Dowd?<<

And, no, I don't link to Dowd. Sorry, but you'll have to pay for the "privilege," assuming you've maxed out your NYT.com page views.

To add to the fun, I've been to many, many Dylan shows in recent years. I recall very few times that he's performed anything from A Slow Train Coming.

Comp Lit

Today's deep thought: Sweet Jesus I hate Maureen Dowd.

Electra

Maureen Dowd parodies herself?

As a descriptive matter it is in fact the case that many people yearn for politicians to respond to national security threats in a manner that fills certain psychological needs rather than in a way that represents a reasonable policy response to a problem. But normally when you hear this explicitly stated, it’s by someone like me accusing other people of implicitly wanting this. It’s rare that you see something like Maureen Dowd’s column explicitly making the point:

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.

Sorry, no. The Situation Room is not a Seminar Room, but it’s also not the Reassuring Dad room. It’s a place where the President meets with key officials to decide what to do in response to emergencies. The “moment to be president” starts when you swear the oath of the office and it ends when your successor takes office. And the job is to make decisions that reflect a realistic assessment of the risks, of the available policy options, and of the costs and benefits involved in the different options. Reassuring children is a job for parents. Treating adults like they’re little children is, perhaps, a job for newspaper columnists.

Right. Remember, if we'd wanted someone who overreacts to a crisis, we'd have elected John McCain.

Palin fantasies

It makes me throw up a little in my mouth just thinking about it, but I believe McCain gave Dowd an orgasm.

"Twisting gendor stereotypes"

So that's what Dowd calls emasculating male Democratic candidates and turning female candidates -- and the wives of the male Democrats (even when seemingly defending them) -- into shrill dominatrices.