Kathleen Parker, Eliot Spitzer’s co-host for CNN’s much-anticipated Not Crossfire show, has a Washington Post column out today with the easily-overlooked headline: “Obama: Our First Female President.”
Parker — female, after all — is a little less cocksure in the piece itself, writing that Obama “may be our first woman president.” Parker’s diagnosis: Obama suffers from “rhetorical-testosterone deficit” disorder (RTDD?). Or rather, he “may be suffering” from it. Symptoms apparently include “chatterbox”ing, “deferring,” “weighing,” “considering,” and using the passive voice. (How might Parker diagnose her CNN co-host? I’d tune in to see that.)
The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, asked about Parker’s column by George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America this morning, took the opportunity to fault the president for what she calls his “anthropologist side of waiting and looking,” which, she said, is “not really a male or female trait.” Dowd doesn’t “think [Obama’s] main problem is a gender one” (Wha? Maybe I’ve buried the lede here?), identifying it instead as a “humanoid one.”
Obama: Our First Humanoid President.
I wish there was some way to declare a moratorium on all opinion pieces that can be boiled down to "Women are like (blank). Men are like (insert the opposite here)." It's asinine. Nothing could be less useful to our social discourse, whether the comparison comes in a Washington Post political piece or some local paper's "gee-whiz" culture column.
Dear everyone:
Just stop.
#1 Posted by Ian, CJR on Wed 30 Jun 2010 at 02:58 PM
Your Pulitzer-winning columnist, ladies and gentlemen.
#2 Posted by Mollie, CJR on Thu 1 Jul 2010 at 10:06 AM
I'm with Ian on this.
I can't believe that millions of intelligent people are struggling to find work, yet a privileged class gets to collect fat paychecks from legitimate media entities, and how do they treat this privilege? I would have never guessed "Weakly re-purposing the crap bits from late-'80s hack comedians."
What is next for the Brooks/Parker/Dowd axis? Dusting off old Gallagher jokes for column subjects?
"Why David, how right you are! 'Bomb' should rhyme with 'tomb'...but it does not!"
And to think that the New York Times once instituted a paywall not for the actual journalism, but for these worthless exercises in self-aggrandizement.
#3 Posted by TS, CJR on Thu 1 Jul 2010 at 01:43 PM