Ryanitis: Dowd Loses Her Delicately Balanced Mind in Ryan Fearmongering

22 Aug, 2012 by Warner Todd Huston

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Usually I don’t write much about wholly meaningless people, but on Saturday, August 18, New York Times screedist Maureen Dowd turned in a particularly unhinged performance that just screams to be discussed. It might also scream that MoDowd’s Ryanitis is at such an advanced case of virulence that she might just need professional help to get over it.

MoDowd begins her piece discussing the prescient, important political theories of that highly consequential “metal rap guitarist,” Tom Morello. You may know — or you may not care — that Mr. Morello is part of the band Rage Against The Machine, a group that has been so vital on the music scene that they haven’t put out an album since the year 2000. I guess they are still hiding from the coming millennial bug that is sure to destroy the world as we know it.

Anyway, Mo quotes Mr. Morello’s hatred for all things Paul Ryan and Republican as if the opinion of yet another extremist, left-wing “entertainer” is something of note, but she soon abandons Morello’s ramblings to ramble on a bit herself.

What seems to get Mo’s inner goat the most appears to be that Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan has excited the conservative base. Apparently she finds this approval appalling. But appalling or no, she has time to put on her pop psychologist’s hat and imagine she can peer into the brains of every GOP presidential and vice presidential coupling since George H.W. Bush and has come to the conclusion that Ryan “looks like a bonus Romney son.”

Deep, eh?

Ryan, Mo ruminates further, sure seems like he emanates a “thoughtful, reassuring reasonableness.” But, below the surface, guess what Mo sees? Why, “a hysterical person,” what else?

It is, to use a phrase coined by French doctors, la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people. But the closer you look, the uglier it gets.

Ryan is “hysterical” and Dowd adds that he is coincidentally just like VP Dick Cheney! It might not surprise that Dowd has decided to make Ryan a junior Cheney. After all, Cheney was the man most hated by the left-wing establishment and Dowd is working hard, early to stop Ryan from assuming Cheney’s office by darkening him with Darth Cheney’s shadow. So, how are they the same? They both love to hunt.Didn’t you know that all hunters are “calm” on the surface but “hysterical” just beneath? Mo does.

Mo rages on so much about Ryan in her piece that no one can mistake her for a Paul Ryan-type. There is no calm for Mo’s surface. Her hysterics are right out there on the surface as opposed to hidden beneath.

Mo says that Ryan approves of rape, murder, killing grandma, starving children, taking away everyone’s money, hates his own religion, punches puppies, spits on small children, and once clubbed a baby seal to death — and I’m only joking about the latter three. Yes, hysterics are something Maureen Dowd is very, very familiar with.

She ends with a dilly of a closer.

Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence. A moderate demeanor is not a sign of a moderate view of the world.

So, then, perhaps the folks that claim that Barack Obama is a “full-tilt” Marxist, a hater of capitalism, the founders, the Constitution and everything American because he also seems to have a “no drama” calm demeanor. What do you say, Mo? Care to go to hysterics on our “calm” president? Or does your purulent pop psychology only go one way?

I thought so.