I’ve never known. Anyway, I’ve discovered a blogger I’d not read before – a stroppy femmo who’s a great read – who seems to have similar views to mine. Go and have a good squiz around her site.
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Can’t say I ever had much of an opinion on Maureen Dowd, but I do note the passing of another renowned female columnist, Pamela Bone, whose essays were almost always worth reading, especially the ones I disagreed with!
I don’t agree with everything Dowd says, but I find her writing style clever and witty. I blog about every column if you are interested.
I agree with your views on MoDo, and that of the G-spotter, and Tim Blair! I struggle to understand why anyone would keep publishing her shtick. It’s clever and witty and surprising and brave and fresh …
… like John Greenfield.
Patrick, you agree with the g-spotter that the New Deal was a good thing due to the greater economic equality it led to?
Er, is that one of her views on MoDo?? I would have thought that was one of her views on the New Deal!!!
But I don’t see it as completely false, either. I suspect that the New Deal probably cost America quite a bit, especially in context, but that they got away with it due to the extraordinary circumstances, and notably the complete distortion of the economy due to the war.
As for the present, I don’t argue for the abolition of welfare, far from it! I actually see something like the Danish flexicurity so beloved of this site as a good answer, but targeted like Australian welfare (I regard unemployment benefits fixed relative to actual last salary as plain immoral, for example). Eg, I think that one of the key elements of flexicurity, namely the immediate but transitional only support for job-leavers (although I would restrict it to low-income job leavers) as an excellent support for increased structural flexibility – such as scrapping unfair dismissal for <100 employee-businesses.
I suppose I (somewhat carelessly) parsed your statement as just “I agree with the views of the G-spotter”.
Anyway, I only raised it because of our previous discussion on Kansan voters.
If you accepted the New Deal made working-class voters better off, then you were, by implication, accepting that for working classes to be voting for a party with economic policies that were quite the opposite wasn’t very rational.
I must have too legalistic a mind. That last paragraph just seems riddled with implicit assumptions that I would challenge.
Eg:
That the New Deal made the working class better-off over than relatively to the ‘upper’-class (this is not established to count as ‘better’-off);
That the Republican policies of today are ‘quite’ or at all the opposite of the new deal;
That the Democratic policies are in this regard distinguishable from Republican ones (ie that they will distribute more to poor people); and
That economic policies are the only rational factor in voting decisions.
In short, that last paragraph sums up just what was wrong with what’s wrong with Kansas (apologies to Bartels).
Well, I’d agree that latter-day Democrat policies aren’t radically different to Republican ones as far as treatment of the working-classes go, but I don’t think, given the history and basic philosophy of each party, that it’s unreasonable to suppose that they’d be more likely to look after the economic interest of said voters.
But, yes, it was a statement “riddled with implicit assumptions”. I originally wrote it while trying to acknowledge them, but it was an even less readable jumble that what I ended up with!
I don’t understand your knack of writing a comment that looks to me like almost complete agreement with me but then qualifying it with complete disagreement!
That’s ok – I don’t understand your knack of interpreting my “medium grey, qualified with a darkish tinge” as “white, qualified with a bit of black” :-)
Is this an attempt to placate the feminist bloggers?
Absolutely. I was thinking it was time to ‘reinvent’ myself.
I don’t mind Ms Dowd, I don’t always agree, but it would be a sad old world if we did.