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The obituary of William Safire – longtime New York Times commentator and GOP literary henchman – raised a collective yawn. I think that misses the shift in Republican partisanship, from literary and savage to religiously savage. Maureen Dowd agrees that we should pay more attention to it, or at least to her.
The woman who made a career out of pointing to Bill Clinton’s penis – the Pulitzer committee angled to award her a 1999 journalism prize for not letting a precious drop of the story escape her gaze – laments Mr. Safire’s passing.
Ms. Dowd, a Manhattan maven, has fond memories of her Times colleague. She recalls repeatedly inviting her non-Jewish self to Mr. Safire’s manicured Chevy Chase home to celebrate the end of Yom Kippur:
I pestered him for years for an invite. He patiently explained it was just for Jews or people who were, or had been, married to Jews.
After years of pleading, including many protestations that I had had Jewish boyfriends and that I would one day find a Jewish husband, he broke down and let me come.
Which goes to show how accurate Ms. Dowd’s predictions are. The saddest part in her long goodbye is not about the passing of her friend and a tireless partisan, whom Dowd says was anything but a nattering nabob of negativism. It is her response when Bill admits that as a savvy Washingtonian and New Yorker, he doesn’t know what a "thong" is:
He was sitting in an armchair reading that bodice-ripping best seller, The Starr Report.
“There’s a word here I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”
I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.
Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”
He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”
Ken Starr’s salacious report on Clinton did tear a few zippers, if not bodices and blue dresses. That the question elicited a "flushed and stammered", yet knowledgeable response from the well-dated MoDo is breathtaking, and one I’m not sure I can swallow.
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The widely disseminated Starr Report can be read here or here.
The link to Ms. Dowd’s 1999 Pulitzer is to the Pulitzer site, which links to the ten columns, published January through November 1998, for which she won her award. The first is entitled, “Not Fit for Children“, the last, “So Don’t Like Me“. For once, I’ll take Ms. Dowd at her word.
Should she have told him it’s eye patch underwear?