The fiscaltimes finances

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012

Dowd extends the tour: It’s wonderful work if you can get it! Go ahead! Just check the dateline on Maureen Dowd’s thrilling new column:

DOWD (5/2/12): Libertine on the Loose

PARIS

It’s the most chilling warning you can hear in France: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out on the town, looking for a good time.

That’s right. The dateline says Paris—Paris, France! Maureen Dowd crossed the Atlantic, determined to get the full story!

The story, of course, concerns Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his extensive sex romps. Last Wednesday, Dowd’s dateline was less impressive:

“Greensboro, N.C.,” it depressingly said. The scribe had been forced to journey there to examine the Edwards sex romps.

After several days at the Greensboro Super 8, Dowd deserved the trip to Paris. That said, she has proven, through the years, that she will go wherever she must to chase down the world’s leading sex romps. Remember when she crossed the country to test Bill Clinton’s hot tub?

DOWD (8/23/97): Rub a dub dub

SANTA MONICA, Calif.

Call me crazy, but I had a funny feeling that I was never going to be invited to the President's hot tub. Michael McCurry, the White House press secretary, had said it belonged to the American public, so I considered just showing up one night at the northwest gate of the White House with flippers, a sand bucket and a towel.

My dermatologist, Tina Alster, was alarmed at the prospect. "Haven't you ever heard of hot tub folliculitis?" she asked. "It's an organism that causes an itchy, bumpy rash on hair follicles. And the President, who has to worry about rosacea, that Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields red-nose thing, should not be aggravating his blood vessels in a hot tub."

But then I came to California, home of hydrotherapy, aromatherapy, all therapy, and indeed, home of the President's Hot Spring Grandee seven-seater with 31 massaging jets, and I couldn't resist dropping by the showroom of the manufacturer that donated the hot tub to the National Park Service. I wanted a test soak, as they say.

I took some friends along so we could float a few theories about the iconic meaning of Bill Clinton installing a hot tub on the South Lawn—Jerry Nachman, the former New York Post editor who now works in TV; Dee Dee Myers, the former White House press secretary who now lives in L.A. and works at Vanity Fair; Barbara Hower, author and TV personality; Rebecca Liss, a reporter for The Los Angeles Daily Journal, and Mickey Kaus, a magazine writer.

For a fuller treatment of this nonsense, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/6/08.

“Call me crazy,” Dowd enjoined in that column. If you’re asking us, the honorific might be extended to “journalists” who were willing to join her as she lounged in the Clinton-like tub.

The Times is a cosmic, upper-class joke. Its denizens are basically out of their minds.

We liberals can’t seem to see this fact. Our “intellectual leaders” refuse.