Maureen Dowd? Token airhead?

Or to put it another way, conservative pundits would go nuts if Bush met with Liberals because the rightwing is much more concerned about ideological purity than they are about practical execution.

They are the commies of the 21st century.

Today's group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Gerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.

Ugh. Hacks nearly to a person.

Something about the ideology and intellectual seriousness, I suppose.

With the periodic exceptions of Dionne and Maddow (who is getting shallower by the day) that list is filled with the laziest of "liberals" who recite what Bob Somerby correctly calls "novels". Rich, while a superior writer, is a second-rate thinker who is awful easy with the glibest kind of liberal contrarianism. Dowd is a fucking wreck and an idiot to boot. Robinson, well, you'd have to wake him to write something that isn't trite.

It SUCKS that this is what people think represents the "liberal" part of this country, to say nothing of the left.

A good group of actually intellectually honest writers would include Krugman, Katha Politt, Alterman, Thomasky, Conanson, Greenwald, Amy Goodman -- if you had some of these people in there, then you can throw in the pompous idiots who went.

Between last night and today, the only TV host was Rachel Maddow? And the only radio host was, um, Rachel Maddow. Everyone else was dead tree journalism. Interesting.

But why Maureen Dowd? Does she ever even write about policy?

Gee, you think we can expect another column filled with pop-psych drivel from Dowd after this meeting?

Much more worried about the Village Idiocy factor of both meetings than I am the ideology of the participants.

Good to see Rachel getting some love, but Obama kissing the ring of "sensible centrists" like MoDo The Red and David Brooks makes it look like he's paying his respects to the people who really run Washington, and if Obama's more interested in making the Village happy than doing his job, we're screwed.

Need I even say, "They" will say that Obama needs to shun his left flank to be more centrist and new-thinking/whatever, but that collaborating and conceding to the Right will somehow express the same wonderful accomplishment -?

Steve Benen quoted Jonathan Chait: "Would conservatives have reacted with the same equanimity? No, I think they'd have gone nuts. And the reason is that they wouldn't have confidence in Bush or McCain to be surrounded by liberal ideas without being deeply influenced by them."

I think there is a simpler reason that "conservatives" would have "gone nuts". "Conservatives" don't just disagree with "liberals" -- "conservatives" HATE "liberals".

Indeed, the only real content of the fake, phony, trumped-up, scripted, teleprompted, corporate-sponsored, made-for-talk-radio pseudo-ideology known as "conservatism" in America today is hatred of "liberals".

The reaction from "conservatives" if Bush or McCain met with leading "liberal" pundits would be similar to the reaction from mid-1930s German brownshirts if Hitler met with leading "Jewish" pundits.

The right wing would go nuts if the table was reversed because, as we all know, right wingers believe that if you talk to somebody, you must therefore agree with everything that person says.

[...]the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd,[...]

Dowd, but not Herbert or Collins, from NYT? What the heck? Dowd should have been included with the crowd last night. Oh, and BTW... I notice that he had the crowd last night *to dinner* (shades of McCain's BBQs?) but not a word about feeding the hungry left-ish...

Bubble-Boy talking with Liberals? Now there's a laffer.

Now he needs to embrace new media and have an ice cream social for influential bloggers, given his base is more connected to them than print dinosaurs.

Rich and Maddow aren't bad, but the rest of them are mostly hacks (Maureen *Dowd*, jesus.) And certainly none of them are as progressive/left wing as last night's were crazy right.

So it does seem to be part of a pattern; in the name of 'reaching out', the right wing gets sucked up to, while the left is ignored except for the safely moderate and 'centrist' ones.

It's not a big deal in itself (it's a bunch of writers), but part of an unsurprising trend.

I have to agree with goethean, Jay B and the others. Dowd? An oblivious embarrassment.

Robinson and Dionne? Just because someone's not a neocon hack doesn’t render them a non-hack.

"Center-left? Ron Brownstein is MARRIED TO McCAIN’S COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, for heaven’s sake.

Why no Krugman? And Maureen Dowd?! Jesus Christ!

Kissing the Ring? Or Charming Them?
I don't think President-Elect Obama was so much swearing fealty to the Washington press corpse, so much as flattering them. Getting in there pre-emptively to give the impression he cares deeply about them and their excellent work. Showing that he's as intelligent and discerning as Democrats have said he is. Validating their exalted status.

And so, they'll give him better press than if, say, "he came into town and trashed it, and it's not HIS town." This is particularly critical for cranky dilettants like MoDo.

Smart. Pro-active. Strategic. Just like Democrats have been saying.

I notice that he had the crowd last night *to dinner* (shades of McCain's BBQs?) but not a word about feeding the hungry left-ish... -- myself,
@13:28

*That* will "larn" me not to read from top down but from bottom up.Or, at least, not to comment, until I've read all postings. I only just now saw that the feeding last night was on George Will's dime, not Obama's. As, very likely, was the list of the invited-s.

But now I have to wonder... Who put together today's list?

Re Krugman's exclusion. All the people whose names we'd seen -- on both sides of the pundicky divide -- are pundicks first and foremost; opining -- in print and on air -- is the only thing they ever do. Krugman, OTOH, is different; for him, the op-eds are just a bit on the side, not his reason for existence (don't ask me to write it in proper French; I don't do French). He's an academic first and pundit second. And, now that he's a Nobel laureate too, I doubt he'd descend as low as to flap his gums in the company of mere "opinionators"... As he's said before, Obama consults with him *in private*.

It was already reported that Krugman was invited but declined to attend.