AddieStan

From the redoubtable Linda Hirshman , who usually blogs at TPM Cafe , which is today plagued with some technical ailment, comes this response to today's Maureen Dowd column, "An Imperfect Feminist Test," and your blogstress's assertion that, in it, Dowd makes a valid point or two: Whaddaya know? This morning, as a thought experiment, Maureen Dowd contemplated a woman making a successful run for President. She’d like that, she says. She even hopes the "male reporters" in the media would behave if it ever happened. Presumably she includes herself in that group. Dowd’s candidate would have an easier time than the real female candidate running, because Dowd’s candidate is not a real person, but one of those women on the internet pornography sites. Maureen’s candidate has no brain, no record, no history, no family, no past statements, no existence except in her overheated imagination. The internet porn candidate would be perfect, because, having no brain she co

If there is another American writer as maddening as Maureen Dowd , your blogstress has yet to find her. While your cybertrix is hip to her own inner sexist, she winces when Dowd reveals her own, as she so often does when writing of Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton . Your Webwench has, by turns, both defended and derided Dowd, who holds court twice a week on the op-ed page of the New York Times . Today Dowd offers quite a good essay on her piece of NYT real estate about why Hillary Clinton's candidacy offers a less-than-perfect feminist test case for a female presidential contender (because of Bill , of course). But Dowd being Dowd, she can't help lay a few mines in her narrative landscape, as she does when she repeats, acknowledging its offensiveness, a heinous joke from a Penn Jillette routine: In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows tha