THE CURIOUS CASE OF MAUREEN DOWD:

Shot:

FBI Director James Comey stood before the nation and issued a list of Hillary Clinton’s astounding wrongdoings Tuesday as regards America’s national security — and then said he was not recommending prosecution because, in essence, what Mrs. Clinton did was “extremely careless” but not criminal.

As he spoke, I recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s peerless description in “The Great Gatsby” of a feckless wealthy couple: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy are pikers compared to Bill and Hillary. If one wishes to accept Comey’s contention that Mrs. Clinton is a careless but not criminal person, and one then considers her carelessness as a continuum with her husband’s careless conduct during his time in the Oval Office, then the Clintons have earned the dubious distinction of being the most outrageously careless couple this nation has ever known.

—John Podhoretz, “FBI just told us we’d be in bad hands with Hillary,” the New York Post, July 5th.

Chaser:

WASHINGTON — IT says a lot about our relationship with Hillary Clinton that she seems well on her way to becoming Madam President because she’s not getting indicted.

If she were still at the State Department, she could be getting fired for being, as the F.B.I. director told Congress, “extremely careless” with top-secret information. Instead, she’s on a glide path to a big promotion.

And that’s the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive.

—Maureen Dowd, “The Clinton Contamination,” the New York Times, July 9th.

Back in 2009, Time magazine asked “Is Maureen Dowd Guilty of Plagiarism?”

In her weekend column, Dowd sought to highlight the irony of the Republicans’ holding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s feet to the fire for not opposing Republican policies on torture aggressively enough. Interesting as this line of thinking might have been, it subsequently drowned in the backwash of controversy over her almost verbatim use of a 43-word paragraph that had already appeared in a column written by Josh Marshall on the political website Talking Points Memo.

The similarity was first noticed by TPM on Sunday, and by the evening a mortified Dowd had apologized, saying she had not read Marshall’s column but that evidently someone she knew had.

This time around, it’s repeat of a concept, not a direct lift. But in that same column, Dowd committed a crime far worse in the eyes of many leftist true believers than (likely unintentionally) stealing a metaphor for Hillary.

“You know what’s racist? The NYT’s Maureen Dowd just found out the hard way,” the Liberty Unyielding blog notes. Dowd’s crime?

I hope you’re sitting down while you’re reading this.

Later in the same column linked to above, she dared called Obama “Barry.” As in:

The president and his aides attempted to keep a rein on Clinton’s State Department — refusing to let her bring in her hit man, Sidney Blumenthal.

But in the end, Hillary’s goo got on Obama anyhow. On Tuesday, after Comey managed to make both Democrats and Republicans angry by indicting Clinton politically but not legally, Barry and Hillary flew to Charlotte, N.C., for their first joint campaign appearance.

The result? After delicate leftists cracked open vials of smelling salts and picked themselves up off their fainting couches, the hashtag “#PresidentObamaNotBarry” trended on Twitter and there were calls for Dowd’s ouster from the Times. Though as one person with a bit more common sense tweeted in respose, “So after Dubya, Slick Willie, Tricky Dick, etc., you’re telling me Barry’s off the table? Go find better outrages.”

Like midwestern pizza parlors, rocket scientists in hipster shirts and airline pilots who compliment their flight crew.