And if wasn't for Donald Trump, it would seem she would have nothing to write about. She's great with snarky one-liners that cut to the quick. A stand up comedian who doesn't have to stand up.
But lately, after another hiatus in filing a "weekly" piece of output, Ms. Dowd seems to be traveling over the waves and setting her sights on the Old Country, the U.K. Last week she gave us a nifty profile of the newly elected Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, who at 38 is young, admittedly gay and of half-Indian descent. Hardly an O'Brien.
It was a good piece, and I wrote a comment to that effect. Unfortunately, my comments never seem to get published, despite filing them before the comment section fills up. Perhaps it is because I comment more about Maureen than the topics she has flapped her wings about.
Take today. Two weeks in a row for Ms. Dowd to file a piece, and this one is about Britain's Tony Blair, Nigel Farage and Brexit. The dateline is London. Maureen is still overseas and filing expense reports for meals presumably.
And again it is a good piece. Some digs of course to the folks back home, but a little more nuanced. Knowing that Ms. Dowd's column appears online as early as 9:00 p.m. on Saturday night, I was surprised, no shocked to see that this Sunday morning when I caught up to it, there were only 70 comments filed. It currently, at this Sunday dinner hour of 7:00 p.m. has 152. None of them are mine. Again. This despite telling Ms. Dowd I liked the piece.
The low comment count of course means the readership doesn't want to read about U.K. politicians with names like Leo and Nigel, but wants domestic spears thrown at our own. And if The Donald is the one the spears are being chucked at, all the better. Sex sells. Trump sells better. Ask Steve Colbert and his ratings.
Of course I did suggest that when she's not railing against The Donald her ratings suffer. Only 152 souls were stimulated enough to make comments, whereas if The Donald were being discussed the comment room is full and closed with something like 600 or so comments filed by very early Sunday morning. This of course means that when you give people something they want, a raking of The Donald over the coals, people will log on for it.
I also did point out that she spelled Ivanka as Javanka, unless of course I missed the joke and she was making a portmanteau of Ivanka and Jared, and she may well have been. I attributed it to the Times getting rid of layers of copy editors and other editors in a recent downsizing. This may not have been at all the case. See what happens when you don't know the whole story?
I did have one comment germane to the piece when I said ISIS is at war with us as much a we are at war with ISIS. It takes two sides to make two sides.
Perhaps it was my suggestion to Ms. Dowd that with two consecutive columns about politicians from across the Pond she might consider staying over there and retaking a position of someone who writes columns rather than phones them in while in Uber cars. She might learn to like bubble and squeak and curry takeaways. She did once receive a Pulitzer. There is a path to former glory.
It also may have been my suggestion that she's a good interviewer, and maybe could take the place of the long departed David Frost and work for the BBC. Additionally, I suggested that since the Times reporter Sarah Lyall came back to this country that she, Maureen, might be able to gain access to whatever space Ms. Lyall vacated and work from there. I bet it was nice.
Maureen could then become the player to be named layer in the transatlantic deal of switching correspondents. All of course before the trade deadline.
At this point I might of course have answered my own question as to why no one includes my comments anywhere.
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