Maureen Dowd And The Tao Of Stupidity; Also, A Joke

There are essentially two ways of analyzing the world:

1. Personal: Everything happens because of decisions by individuals
2. Structural: Everything happens because of institutional and historical forces

Obviously, neither of these is completely right. But from what I can tell, it's much more #2 than #1. On rare occasions individual decisions can have a decisive effect—but for the most part, even the options of the most powerful people are limited. If you're the CEO of GM and want to build cars with a minimal environmental impact, you'll get about three feet before the shareholders toss you out and you're no longer CEO. Likewise if you're CEO of Viacom and want good journalism, though there you might only get three inches.

And yet, people near the apex of power almost always describe things in terms of individuals decisions, with no attention whatsoever paid to institutional forces.

With that in mind, let's examine a recent Washington Post profile of Maureen Dowd by Howard Kurtz:

"People who criticize me say I should have focused more on policy or numbers," Dowd says. She insists she is not a liberal columnist, has no overarching ideology and chronicles the political wars as a Shakespearean drama. "In American history," she says, "all of our great traumas -- Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra, Iraq, Harriet Miers -- came from presidents' personal foibles..."

What's interesting about this is (1) Maureen Dowd isn't an idiot but (2) what she's saying is truly idiotic.

Let's take one of her examples, Vietnam. Our involvement there covered the terms of six presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. And our policy through each of them was largely the same.

So...did each of these six presidents have the same personal foibles? OF COURSE NOT. Yet Dowd can say this without understanding how weirdly dumb it is, and Howard Kurtz can record it without understanding it himself.

I submit it is no accident Dowd and Kurtz have risen to the heights of their respective institutions. I further submit this is because institutions select for individuals who do not analyze institutions. This makes them, even the ones with some native intelligence, appear peculiarly stupid.

ALSO, A JOKE

Here's another part of the profile:

Dowd caught fire in 1998, the year of sex, thongs and audiotape, as her mocking style seemed perfectly suited to the impeachment melodrama.

After Bill Clinton had his dog neutered, he told the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that he saw the following column: "Buddy Got What He Deserved, by Maureen Dowd."

Back when all that was happening, Mike and I wrote this (unused) joke for Weekend Update:

A White House source today harshly criticized Bill Clinton, saying, "I find the president's relentless humping distasteful and embarrassing." Even worse, that source was Clinton's dog.