Dowd: Just Let Girly Obama Be a Manly Man! [Columnists]

What do you do when you write a million columns unsubtly disparaging a man as feminine, and then it turns out that he talks sports and golfs exclusively with men? If you're Maureen Dowd, you just crank out another column.

The last time early-1960s advertising executive and New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd was so obviously baffled by a slight subversion of gender norms, noted masculine asshole Tom DeLay was gyrating in a feminine manner on the television.

This time, it's Barry Obama, the elegant and lady-like Democrat, who is, according to recent reports, excluding ladies from his inner circle, because they do not like to golf or talk about the football or play the basketball.

In her column on this important matter, Dowd simply ignores her own lengthy history of interpreting Obama according to her rigid "Democrats are fags and Republicans are real men" worldview. Instead, he is like presidents of old, who crack "racy" jokes with male aides. She quotes "a girlfriend" (Alessandra?) who wishes the uppity ladies would just let the president be a man with men in peace.

You would think someone who repeatedly called Obama "oBambi," and also butterfly, in columns dedicated to the argument that Hillary Clinton was the real man in the party, even if she pretended to have a vagina and ladylike tendencies (like those tears), would write a column expressing some sort of mild surprise that Obama is perhaps more traditionally masculine than she thought.

You would think she would remember the fact that last year she wrote that Obama is "the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style." And then, perhaps, she might revisit those words, and say "huh, perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Obama is not a girly man."

Instead, she (this is once again nothing unusual for Maureen) talks about how it is those cruel Republicans who wish to paint every male Democrat as a "Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy." It's a good thing no supposedly liberal columnists for supposedly liberal newspapers play along with that creaky old act!

And then she throws in a "Rahm Emanuel is a fag" laugh line for the hell of it.

Obama likes to play sports, watch sports and talk sports. (Even his favorite TV shows, "Mad Men" and "Entourage," are set in male-dominated worlds.) So the Obama aides who can do that, like Robert Gibbs, have a deeper personal connection with the president than someone like Rahm Emanuel, the former ballet dancer who prefers yoga to golf.

Yes, Maureen, we know that it is funny that a man would do yoga (is that funny, actually? is it 30 years ago?), but the problem with that little joke is that Rahm is part of the circle of men that Obama is reportedly more at ease with. The original stupid story was not "Obama excludes women and girly Rahm Emanuel from his inner circle."