UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal
Mollie Wilson O’Reilly April 24, 2014
Listen up, everyone, because Maureen Dowd has some serious thoughts about this weekend’s big double canonization. You’ll find them in her April 23 column: “A Saint, He Ain’t” (which, fortuitously, was published just after Alex Pareene’s latest blog post detailing “Why Friedman, Brooks, and Dowd Must Go”). It’s got all of that trademark Dowd style, which is what makes it so darn awful.
The trouble with Dowd’s column is not that she is (as you have probably guessed) critical of the decision to canonize John Paul II. The trouble is that she’s writing about it the way she writes about everything else: analysis via insult. Shallow thinking applied to serious subjects is her metier. It’s bad enough when her topic is politics — Pareene’s latest post reminds readers of the time she turned a misquotation of John Kerry into a meme, and it is depressing to contemplate just how prominently her smart-alecky-potshot approach figured in the 2004 presidential campaign.
But Dowd’s cute turns of phrase and offhand way with facts are particularly painful when she turns to writing about the church, as she does now and then, from her not-that-I-care-but-you-should-care-what-I-think perspective — and I find her shallow arguments especially irritating when I more or less agree with her basic conclusions.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.