Elena Kagan is, um, not gay. But that doesn’t mean Maureen Dowd will pass up the opportunity to phone in a juvenile, far-less-creative-than-she-thinks-it-is column about Elena Kagan being Not Gay. In fact, MoDo decided to write a column about how Kagan is so girly that she can’t possibly be gay! And even better, she wrote it as a silly fake letter from Joe Biden. Behold the trainwreck:
Folks —
This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe.
Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’ a girl’ girl. Just try dragging her out of La Perla! And I’m sure, under those robes, she’ll be rocking some Juicy Couture jeans and Christian Louboutin suede boudoir slides. Uh-oh. Did I sound gay there for a minute? Well, I’m not. And neither is Elena Kagan.
She went to Harvard, not Smith. It’ Elena, not Ellen. She barely drives, much less a Subaru. She’ never been spotted at Home Depot or the Meow Mix bar. And she doesn’t have Ani DiFranco on her iPod.
See, thank God we have MoDo around, as the supreme arbiter of OMG girliness, because otherwise we wouldn’t understand that ALL lesbians are the EXACT opposite of all of those things, and all majorly heterosexual women like Mo are too busy ogling Louboutin shoes to darken the doors of a Home Depot.
The thing that’s galling about this column is that MoDo, in her supreme idiocy, probably doesn’t think this column is homophobic, much less sexist. She’s just being “funny,” you guys. As Steve M. put it:
Put a gun to Dowd’s head and she’d swear with her dying breath that she doesn’t have a lesbian-hostile bone in her body — she’s just making light of other people’s real or imagined discomfort. Well, I must be having a reading comprehension problem, because all I’m seeing is Dowd’s discomfort.
Yeah, me too, Steve. Me too. I guess we’re just not savvy enough to catch the highbrow comedy routine MoDo’s pulling here. Then again, neither you nor I are, to my knowledge, the idealized, more-macho-than-thou Don Juans that live inside Mo’s fantasies, so we probably would not understand. We’re simply not her intended audience.
The other galling thing (which extends to most of her columns) is that Maureen Dowd is a living, breathing strawman, because she’s the quote-unquote liberal Times writer syndicated in many of the regional papers around the country. So, there are a lot of conservatives out there who read Dowd and think “God, what an idiot,” and therefore feel vindicated in their idea that their worldview is correct. The fact, of course, is that I can’t think of one well-read, well-educated liberal who thinks Dowd is anything but tedious, not to mention Not Liberal At All. Rest assured, wingnuts, there is common ground to be found between us on the fact that MoDo is an idiot.
I recall how upset she was a few years ago when she got muscled into playing softball by some friends. She hates the game, absolutely HATES it. She cried and cried — like a fragile, adorable little girl. She said the only thing worse was when she was forced to compete in the L.P.G.A. celebrity-lawyer classic.
She never watches the Rachel Maddow show. By 9 p.m., Elena’ usually snuggled up in bed in a lacy peach peignoir, scrawling “Mrs. George Clooney” in the margins of Blackstone’ Commentaries.
Ugh, shut up.
