Useful idiocy and the supercilious center
By 
I see MoDo is getting the “eventheliberal” citations she wanted and anticipated:
JOHN ROBERTS: A coup is still a coup
CHRIS COONS: That is literally ridiculous
ROBERTS: Well, you tell that to Maureen Dowd, because those are the words that she used
COONS: I will … the one attempted coup that happened in my lifetime was January 6 pic.twitter.com/WRRh1NQx6v— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2024
I know Paul has already gotten his shots in but what is particularly infuriating about Dowd’s bullshit is that Biden and the party’s “coup” was what Dowd had been advocating they do for weeks:
Maureen Dowd trolling for relevancy. Sad. pic.twitter.com/mC5f2tairh— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) August 18, 2024
And Dowd can’t even be bothered to give more than a quick handwave to a blitz primary feat. Zendaya and the Committee to Re-invade Afghanistan or a Love Island convention — the idea that Nancy Pelosi was sincerely committed to full-out Wrestlemania because she took a whole day to endorse the inevitable nominee and made some vague gestures to placate people like Dowd knowing full well that there was no significant challenge to Harris in the works is too silly to hold up to any scrutiny, and she understands that. And of course the “coup” language could be applied with more plausibility to any alternative path the Democrats could have taken. Dowd’s argument is that even when the Democrats do what she’s been demanding they do for months they’re still wrong no matter how they do it, because Hard Bored With Politics Pundit Law is that Dems are either in disarray or RIGGING everything and sometimes both at the same time.
I was pleased to see JMM call back to this classic, which had MoDo clocked going back to her Pulitzer days:
3/ Since I own the copyright and the publication is defunct I'm realizing there's no reason not to reprint it right here. Published April 19th, 1999.
"LIBERTIES," Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times, has become such a part of the New York-DC zietgeist that her Pulitzer…— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 18, 2024
More good lines than I can excerpt, but I’ll end with this:
Ultimately, there was always something odd and paradoxical about Dowd’s endless array of anti-Clinton zingers: if Clintonism was defined by an abundance of talent, appetite, and ambition at the expense of any real purpose or direction, then Dowd was the ultimate Clintonite.