When Matt Drudge reported that Maureen Dowd was going to “trash” Sarah Palin in her upcoming op-ed piece, I couldn’t wait to read it. I knew it was going to be a second-rate imitation of Camile Paglia’s masterful trashing, nay, thrashing and slabberdashing of Katie Couric. But without Dowd’s piece, I had no proof. So I waited anxiously, half hoping the New York Times wouldn’t go out of business before the piece was published. It didn’t go out of business. One half of me was glad.
The piece was what I expected. But I did not recognize the big story until after meticulously parsing the article. What I discovered is supremely funny. It is one of the funniest things to have occurred in all of journalism. It’s like the emperor has no cloths-- or, less disgusting in this case, the emperor has egg all over her face.
In the piece, Dowd cites a Vanity Fair reporter named Todd Purdum. He, according to the piece, traveled to Alaska and learned that “the governor’s erratic and egotistic behavior has been as source of concern for people there.” “Several (Is it so surprising that there is more than one lesbian in Alaska) told me, independently of one another (this is what is so impressive to Purdum and Dowd, the independent nature of the concern) ,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, in fantasy or behavior, need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ – and thought it fit her perfectly.” I’m not making that up (except for my parenthetical comments), that is in Dowd’s piece.
So I was about to blog on the absurdity of insulting Sarah Palin because of the seemingly inexplicably coincidence of several unnamed people (lesbians, no doubt) of unknown credential or background supposedly telling [Purdum] independently (of all things) that they “had consulted”, not just looked up, mind you, but “consulted” the “definition of ‘narcissist personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”. It’s the independent consultation of the manual that strikes both Dowd and Purdum as noteworthy. This is where it gets hilarious.
It seems I've heard of the diagnosis before. But I couldn't immediately put my finger on it. Then it hit me. The mass “consultation” of the manual has nothing to do with any remarkable symptoms of mental illness displayed by Sarah Palin-- symptoms so outstanding that they trigger the primordial mass urge to "consult" a medical dictionary-- symptoms so severe that they bring an instant yet obscure diagnosis to mind to "several independent people". It’s not proof that Sarah Palin is crazy. It’s not even evidence—even slight. No, the mass “consultation” of the manual is due to one thing, and it has nothing to do with Sarah Palin. It is Michael Savage. He has been saying that Obama has ‘narcissist personality disorder’ for months now. And he tells his audience that it is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And because the liberals listen to Savage, but don’t want to admit it, they looked the disorder up— Sorry, I meant to say they “consulted the definition” in the manual. Maureen Dowd’s article is but a lame attempt to imitate Camile Paglia’s superb trashing of Katie Couric, but more than that, it is absolute and accidental proof that vast numbers of liberals listen to Michael Savage. And it is proof that Dowd is ignorant on a number of levels.
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