Gail Collins

In her Saturday column for the New York Times, Gail Collins, who has made a smug little cottage industry out of her obsession (a few dozen column mentions) with Mitt Romney securing the family dog in a hutch on the roof of his car on a family vacation over 20 years ago, finally, if reluctantly, referenced the fact that Obama ate dog as a boy in Indonesia. Romney's story was much worse, she insisted, in "Obama's Wonderful Town."

Collins, the paper's former editorial page editor, also fawned over revelations in an upcoming biography of Obama by David Maraniss excerpted in Vanity Fair.

Per her bio, Gail Collins at the New York Times "joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page." So she was hanging with the Old Gray Lady in 2003.

The columnist's presence at the paper that year is quite relevant. You see, Ms. Collins has brought up the 1983 story of Seamus, the Mitt Romney family Irish setter, who the presumptive GOP presidential nominee put "into a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Ontario," on dozens of occasions in her Times column in the almost five years since the story first appeared. Yet during those five years, it seems she has never recognized (and if she has, she certainly has not been chastened by) the existence an exceptionally positive dog-related Romney story printed in her employer's own paper on July 8, 2003. It follows the jump (underlines are mine; presented in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

The world (well, TimesWatch) was eagerly awaiting Gail Collins's return from vacation to see if the New York Times columnist would continue to obsess over Mitt Romney's dog Seamus, strapped in a crate on the top of a station wagon on a long-ago family vacation, in the aftermath of revelations that Obama ate dog as a child in Indonesia.

Not only did Collins shamelessly bring it up again, as she has a few dozen times in her column since 2007, but she led with her chin, asking the incredibly benighted question: "Did you ever notice how many of the Republican candidates seemed to have animal issues?" before the inevitable segue to Seamus, in Thursday's "The End of Newt."

The New York Times has previously reported on the dangers of the arcane problem of "epistemic closure," whereby the conservative movement (but evidently not the liberal one) suffers from "a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement....a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation."

Speaking of which...In Wednesday's edition of the weekly online chat at nytimes.com among columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins, posted under the heading "Moral Arguments," the more liberal Collins unwittingly provided Exhibit A of ideological intolerance, liberal-style.

Support the Second Amendment and gun rights? Gail Collins doesn't want your kind in her town. In her Thursday New York Times column, "More Guns, Fewer Hoodies," the paper's former editorial page editor dropped her trademark (attempts at) humor in her attempt to use the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida to call for severely limiting access to firearms: "Really, just leave us alone. If you don’t like our rules, don’t come here. Is that too much to ask?"

Collins, a sudden liberal convert to states rights, was notably mute on the recent cases of Meredith Graves and Marine Ryan Jerome, arrested in Manhattan under dubious circumstances for carrying concealed handguns.

Won't someone please make New York Times columnist Gail Collins happy, and bring up the tale of Mitt Romney’s dog Seamus? Collins is apparently frustrated that the image of Romney's habit of strapping the family dog to the roof of the car in a crate on family vacations to Canada has not become the iconic image of the Romney campaign (like the media tried to make Gingrich’s big bill at Tiffany's).

Since the Boston Globe revealed crate-gate in the summer of 2007, Collins has (according to a Nexis search) mentioned the dog's dilemma in 23 columns since her August 4, 2007 manifesto, “Haunted by Seamus.” The motif is only increasing in frequency as the 2012 campaign goes on. Here is Collins relaying the details in 2007:

New York Times columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks talked about “The Long Stagnation” in their weekly online chat posted Wednesday.

When Brooks, the paper’s idea of a conservative columnist, said he wasn’t impressed by the numbers participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest, compared to the figures generated at Tea Party rallies, Collins, the paper’s former editorial page editor, indignantly replied the Tea Party had no principles besides a "crazed" refusal to accept the idea of Democrats in power:

Former New York Times editorial page editor turned columnist Gail Collins made the front of Sunday Opinion with a (what else?) condescending and stereotype-filled story on Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Texas, rounded out with a cartoon of Perry as a cactus and an undignifying stack of headlines: “Rick Perry, Uber Texan – Meet the lone wolf of the Lone Star State. To him, Texas has all the answers and Washington is the enemy. Go Aggies!”

Clearly the Times isn’t afraid of offending those particular regional sensibilities.

It turns out retired CBS News anchor Katie Couric had at least one fan during her failed attempt to lift the network's evening newscast out of the ratings cellar: Gail Collins, former editorial page editor of the New York Times turned feminist columnist. Collins devoted her Saturday column to Couric’s significance as the first female nightly news anchor: "Katie Couric Moves On."

After hailing Couric’s (of course) "historic Sarah Palin interview," Collins declared Couric a "total success," ratings be damned. How so? By managing "not to screw things up." (The soft bigotry of low expectations?)

From my perspective as a charter of the progress of American women, Couric was a total success. The first great mandate for a First Woman is not to screw things up for the Second Woman or the Third. On that count, Couric did great. She was under incredible scrutiny and pressure, and she held up her end. There was never a point at which American viewers turned to each other and said: "Well, that certainly didn’t work out."

Gail Collins, the New York Times’s editorial page editor (2001-2007) turned feminist columnist, went on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show on Tuesday night to discuss the revelation that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger having a child with a long-time domestic servant.  Although Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and actor, hardly has a reputation as a social conservative, Collins nonetheless used him to tar the social right as hypocrites.

Maddow: But we’re sort of being confronted with the glass houses and throwing stones problem. I understand why people have glass houses. People fail. But why is throwing stones still part of, a main stream part of Republican politics?

COLLINS: Well, because there are people, a lot of people in the country who not only have very strong, you know, family values, but believe that somehow you can legislate them into other people`s families and they’re very powerful within the party. So, the poor Republican candidates, I must say, do get kind of stuck on this one because they toe this very rigid line about personal behavior when like most human beings, they’re failing to live up to it.

The Arizona immigration law on Thursday was the repeated subject of snide and belittling remarks by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe" panel. So, naturally, while discussing Wednesday's federal court ruling, New York Time's columnist Gail Collins continued the narrative.

Collins championed the federal government and sneered "You do not want state legislatures ruling these things," because basically, "They're horrible. They're all gerrymandered. They never get thrown out of office. They are all nuts!"

President Obama met with a group of prominent liberal commentators on Thursday to discuss the Gulf oil spill and the administration's response. The meeting came in the midst of a rare firestorm of criticism from the left over the president's response to the spill.

It was surely not coincidence that the journalists seen leaving the White House that afternoon--the New York Times's Gail Collins, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib--were some of the more prominent critics of the president's Oval Office address on Tuesday.

The meeting demonstrates two facts: the White House is trying furiously to spin media coverage of the federal response to the spill in the administration's favor, and the old White House double standard towards the news media persists.

David Brooks seemed to be having a coherency challenged moment during his latest scheduled conversation with fellow New York Times columnist, Gail Collins. First Brooks excused what Connecticut senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal falsely claimed about being a Vietnam combat veteran as an "accident":

As for Blumenthal, my guess is he survives his little brush with mendacity. The Connecticut Democrat accidentally said he was a combat veteran, when in fact he never served in Vietnam. Could happen to anyone!

A moment later, Brooks reversed course and admitted that Blumenthal lied but, eh, no big deal:

The claim is dishonorable, but everybody expects politicians to lie. One of the odd perplexities of an angry moment is that expectations are so low, politicians end up surviving scandals that would kill them in happier times.

New York Times editor-turned-columnist Gail Collins's Saturday column celebrated the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill and waxed on birth-control activist Margaret Sanger for several paragraphs, without touching on Sanger's racism and support for eugenics. The online headline: "What Every Girl Should Know About Birth Control."

Discussing purity crusader Anthony Comstock, Collins wrote:

One of his targets was Margaret Sanger, a nurse who wrote a sex education column, "What Every Girl Should Know," for a left-wing New York newspaper, The Call. When Comstock banned her column on venereal disease, the paper ran an empty space with the title: "What Every Girl Should Know: Nothing, by Order of the U.S. Post Office."

Sanger was the first person to publish an evaluation of all the available forms of birth control. As a reward, she got a criminal obscenity charge. She fled to Europe to avoid going to jail, and her husband was imprisoned for passing out one of her pamphlets. In the end, he got 30 days, and Anthony Comstock got a chill during the trial that led to a fatal case of pneumonia.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Thursday, to worry about "scary," fringe conservatives who will be appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington D.C. Picking out certain panels at the three day event, she fretted, "But, suddenly, we're back to nullification. All this sort of succession stuff. That part of it is very scary." [Audio available here.]

Collins portrayed those in the conservative establishment as simply trying to keep pace. The columnist dismissed, "The rest of it, you almost sort of a feeling [sic] that the movement has passed these people by, that these are sort of the '90s conservatives, who you know, are not quite- trying to race to catch up."

Scarborough derided the selection of conservative host Glenn Beck to be the keynote speaker for the 2010 CPAC. He allowed that there could be some "good people there," but added, "...They have Glenn Beck, a guy that called the President a racist who hated all white people, as their keynote speaker. And you sit there going, 'Really, is that who you want to project as the most important person of the conservative movement?'"

Five days after blaming the national guppy shortage for Democratic candidate Martha Coakley's struggles, the New York Times's editorial page editor-gone-columnist Gail Collins turned from denial to desperation in her first column since Republican Scott Brown's miraculous win in the special election to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat: "Democratic Silver Linings."

Poor Democrats, cheer up. There's always a bright side.

On the one hand, the Republicans have a new superstar, Scott Brown, the senator-elect from Massachusetts. On the other, he's already beginning to come off as a little strange.

During Tuesday night's victory speech, Brown veered off-script and offered up his college-student daughters to the crowd. ("Yes, they're both available!") As his girls laughed with embarrassment and his wife yelled at him to stop, Brown just dug deeper. ("Arianna's definitely not available, but Ayla is.")

It's like the butterfly effect, but with fish! A guppy shortage in Florida is having an effect on a special Senate race in Massachusetts, according to New York Times columnist Gail Collins, still determined to ignore the nationwide anti-Democratic surge.

Back in November, Collins reacted with dismissive sarcasm to the Democrats losing governors' seats in Virginia and New Jersey:

Although there is no way to deny that New Jersey and Virginia were terrible, horrible, disastrous, cataclysmic blows to Obama's prestige....The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine made it clear that the young and minority voters who turned out for Obama will not necessarily show up at the polls in order to re-elect an uncharismatic former Wall Street big shot who failed to deliver on his most important campaign promises while serving as the public face of a state party that specializes in getting indicted.

What’s on the mind of media types this Christmas season? Obama’s “great” speeches and the “atrocity” of Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Lieberman, says New York Times columnist David Brooks, an Obama supporter and Palin-basher whose neo-liberal outlook nevertheless places him at the right end of the paper's cavalcade of liberal opinion writers.

In his weekly Wednesday “Opinionator” exchange with fellow columnist Gail Collins at nytimes.com, Brooks provided a peek into a typical media Christmas, that is, “holiday” party:

He began with self-mockery:

Brooks: Tis the season for holiday parties, which means I’m spending a lot of time with the Beltway establishment. Let me tell you, you people who live outside the beltway are completely out of touch. We in the D.C. establishment are a wonderful group of really smart and intelligent people and if you guys don’t let us micromanage your affairs, you don’t deserve the happiness and wealth we could provide.

Collins responded with some sarcasm of her own from a liberal viewpoint:

The New York Times’s November 5 “Political Points” podcast recited a full 30-second excerpt from Gail Collins’s Wednesday column blaming not Obama, but bad Democratic candidates, for the party’s huge losses in governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey.

The paper’s chief political reporter Adam Nagourney agreed that New Jersey and Virginia weren’t necessarily predictive. Four minutes in, Adam Nagourney emulated Collins by also throwing the two losing Democrats under the bus, while repeatedly warning people not to overstate the results:

Remember that we’re talking about here are two states, not a lot of voters, one congressional district in upstate New York. Micro-wise, one thing we do want to pay attention to here is, and again, don’t overstate this -- independent voters who backed President Obama in Virginia and New Jersey last time went to the Republican gubernatorial candidates this time. Now, does that mean that they didn’t, that they’ll vote for, you know, whoever votes against Obama in 2012, or for Democrats, or Republicans congressional, for Republicans next year? No. I don’t think so.

The New York Times offered a post-election column to match Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post in its aggressive insistence that the election results meant absolutely nothing, especially to Barack Obama. In a Wednesday article -- mockingly titled "Hark! The Voters Speak!" -- Gail Collins said Creigh Deeds was a rural buffoon, and Jon Corzine was an urban nightmare:

Although there is no way to deny that New Jersey and Virginia were terrible, horrible, disastrous, cataclysmic blows to Obama’s prestige. No wonder the White House said he was not watching the results come in. How could the man have gotten any sleep after he realized that his lukewarm support of an inept candidate whose most notable claim to fame was experience in hog castration was not enough to ensure a Democratic victory in Virginia?

Liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins appeared on Monday’s Good Morning America to complain that one of the biggest unresolved issues for women is a lack of government-provided pre and after-school care for children. She complained, "And we still have not come near dealing with the question of who takes care of the kids if both parents are out working."

Highlighting the favorite bogeyman of the left, Richard Nixon, the New York Times columnist whined that in 1971, "Congress passed a bipartisan bill giving quality early childhood education and after-school programs for any family that wanted them in the entire country." She lamented that the legislation was vetoed by President Nixon.

Collins, who was promoting When Everything Changed, her new book about the role of women since 1960, blurted, "I can forgive him [Nixon] for Watergate before that [the veto]." Co-host Roberts prompted the columnist, whom she never identified as a liberal, to tout the benefits of the sexual revolution: "And you also said, which I never thought about until I read your book, the sexual revolution was really helped women and explain why that was."

Bush's fault!

Liberals love to blame former president George W. Bush for such a wide variety of perceived woes that it has often turned into a joke.  Don't like the current deficit? Bush's fault! Polar ice cap might melt in a century? Bush's fault! A baseball playoff game is called off because it was snowed out? Bush's fault!

The above are all jokes but to Gail Collins of the New York Times it is no joke. Bush's fault! And in her latest blame Bush rant, Collins blames Bush for the unlikelihood of the current Cap and Trade bill  being passed by the Senate. Bush's fault! But in this case is that a bad thing if a high tax bill doesn't pass?

What kicked off Collins' latest rant was saying farewell for awhile to David Brooks in their periodic The Conversation column in which they discuss matters back and forth. Collins will be gone for a few weeks to go on a book tour but before she leaves she takes one final blast at her obsession:

Speaking of jerks, I’m afraid I’ve got to depart on a negative note because I need to register a long wail of pain and rage. It’s about George W. Bush.

Though O.J. Simpson was sentenced for robbery and related crimes yesterday, thirteen years ago he walked on a double-murder charge. That might be an isolated case, but Gail Collins apparently believes there are tens of millions of murderers roaming free in America.  We call them by a different name: hunters.

Collins made her inane hunting = murder analogy in her column today in the course of taking one more gratuitous swipe at Sarah Palin.  The gist of The Senate, Snowe and Dinkytown is that in a Senate where Democrats will fall one or two seats short of the magic 60, the few moderate Senate Republicans will play a crucial role.  Collins focuses in particular on Olympia Snowe of Maine.  And while wondering why McCain didn't choose her as his running mate, the columnist gets off her smear on Palin, and hunters in general [emphasis added]:

Got to be good looking
'cause he's so hard to see
Come together right now
Over me—The Beatles, "Come Together" (1969) [YouTube]

Bob Herbert just doesn't get it.  As Noel Sheppard has noted, in his NYT column today Herbert accuses Barack Obama of "lurching right when it suits him, and . . . zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash." The NY Times columnist goes on to condemn the candidate for "pandering to evangelicals;"  agreeing with Justices Scalia and Thomas on a "barbaric" interpretation of the 8th Amendment; and playing a "dangerous game" with his "shifts and panders."

No, no, no, Bob!  That's not what's happening at all.  Obama isn't flip-flopping.  He's simply fulfilling his pledge to bring us together. What makes Herbert's obtuseness all the more infuriating is that enlightenment was just a stroll down the corridor away, to the office of Gail Collins.   Herbert's fellow Times columnist explained what is really going on during her appearance today on Morning Joe.

View video here.

It's one of the great MSM rituals of presidential politics: the labeling of leading Dems as "moderates" or "centrists." Gail Collins honors the tradition in her New York Times column of today. Now it's true that Collins ostensibly speaks more of Obama's tone than of his politics. But, ultimately, as you'll see, she melds the two to portray a thoroughly moderate man. We'll do a reality check, but first let's look at the excerpt from Collins's column [emphasis added]:

Barack Obama turns out to have a positive genius for making moderation sound exciting and is perhaps the only politician in American history who can get a crowd all worked up with a call to politeness. “We can disagree without being disagreeable,” he said in his New Hampshire farewell, drawing a roar of approval.

In a country where the spoils go to the loudest shrieker, this is absolutely revolutionary and very important. Most Americans want a moderate government, but nobody has ever before been able to make moderate seem interesting, let alone sexy. (Remember Joseph Lieberman.)

Gail Collins might not be as crude as Billy Shaheen. But in her own Grey Lady way, the NY Times columnist has recycled the insinuation that transformed Shaheen into an ex-Hillary co-chair.

Let's first have a look at Shaheen's statement, as reported by the Washington Post:

"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight ... and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use." Shaheen said Obama's candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions. "It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen said. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

Compare and contrast with this paragraph from the end of Collins's column of today, "Barack’s Blast From the Past" [emphasis added]:

OK, this is getting downright weird. Not one, not two but now three Gail Collins columns within three weeks dealing in one way or another with Rudy Giuliani's sentimental attachments. On November 8th came the suggestively-headlined "Pat Loves Rudy," about the Robertson endorsement. As observed here, that column contained Collins lurid allusion to Rudy "busy committing adultery." Just two days later, as noted here, Collins captioned her column about the Kerik indictment "Rudy and Bernie: B.F.F.’s" ["Best Friends Forever," in the lingo of groovy gals like Gail].

Just two days ago, Gail Collins christened her column about the Pat Robertson endorsement "Pat Loves Rudy."

As I observed then, "a conservative columnist writing the equivalent might well be condemned for making an unsubtle appeal to homophobia. But Collins will surely get a pass in PC quarters, since it's a well-established fact that liberals are incapable of prejudice."

Then comes today's column -- and I'll be darned if Collins hasn't done it again.

Over the course of his political career, Bill Clinton was literally and figuratively embraced by countless pastors, most of whom presumably went to their pulpits on Sunday to preach traditional values, including marital fidelity. If memory serves, neither Gail Collins nor other liberal pundits noted any irony in people of the cloth endorsing the spectacularly straying Clinton.

But let a preacher praise a Republican with a personal history, and Gail Collins thunders like Billy Sunday with a bad migraine. Here's the opening paragraph of her "Pat Loves Rudy" in today's New York Times [emphasis added]: