scary lady with a sour puss

Mary Matalin and her husband, James Carville, were always an odd pair – he with his aw-shucks, down-home, pass-me-the-hush-puppies manner and her with a stick up her ass the size of a redwood and a face that always looks like she’s just gotten a whiff of a particularly pungent fart. As a couple they have all the charm of a mongoose and a snake.

Carville makes the Ragin’ Cajun act work for him. Matalin is vile enough that, were she the last woman on earth, most men would opt for celebacy.

That latter fact came home to roost again today with Meet The Press.

Timmy-Boy Russert allowed “Shotgun Dick” Cheney’s” Dragon Lady plenty of room to flat-out lie in defense of the trigger-happy, stonewalling Veep.

I’m always uncomfortable when reviewers attack people for what they wear, and in this case there was a great deal made of Matalin’s brooch. Okay, calling that thing a brooch is insulting brooches the world around. Arianna Huffington, calling the whole episode “The Mary Matalin Horror Show,” likened her attire to Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty and included side-by-side images to back up the comparison. Effective.

Meanwhile James Wolcott’s post, Mary Quite Contrary, read as follows: “I only caught the bitter end of Meet the Press so I'm not sure what provoked Mary Matalin's pout-fest, but she made quite a petulant spectacle of herself, shaking her head from side to side in silent, lemon-puss disagreement whenever Maureen Dowd and David Gregory made mildly critical comments about Shotgun Cheney. Even without the immature pouting and pissy expression, Matalin would have been a car wreck in repose: With a bad haircut topping a mistaken facelift and a ghastly floral pin that looked like spray-painted aluminum, she looked like the Beltway's Madwoman of Chaillot. Maybe defending the defensible is getting to her, and the acid reflux has gone to her brain.”

Lady MacCheney, as one blog called her, gave a typical Bush/Cheney song and dance: it’s all the fault of the liberal media. She claimed that the vice-president did not send underlings out to blame Harry Whittington for hunting accident – an odd claim since Matalin was one of the chief underlings sent out to do just that.

Of course the vice president wasn’t drinking, she claimed, although she was several thousand miles away at the time AND Cheney admitted to drinking a beer at lunch. Anyone who knows him can tell you – Cheney doesn’t drink, Matalin ranted. Except for the facts that the vice president was charged on two occasions with driving while under the influence of alcohol during his younger years AND several witnesses said this past week that after he returned from the hospital Saturday night, Cheney fixed himself a cocktail at the ranch bar.

Watching Matalin pout and priss was painful – especially as NBC reporter David Gregory and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made salient point after salient point. At one point she accused Gregory of going on a four-day jihad in the White House press room. When Gregory pointed out that her reference to the term “jihad” was at best unfortunate, she spat back with particular venom: “Oh, OK...were you saving up for that line?”

Dowd war particularly insightful (compiled by Huffington):

“The reason this story has evoked such fascination is because the vice president is like the phantom. You know, we hear the creak of the door as he passes, but we don't really know what he's up to. We don't know his schedule. We don't always know where he is. We don't know what democratic institution he's blowing off at any given minute, and so this allowed us to see how his behavior and judgment operated pretty much in real time -- with the delay, but pretty much in real time. ... And it covered all the problems of the Bush/Cheney administration: secrecy and stonewalling, then blowing off the rules that are at the heart of our democracy, then using a filter to try and put the truth out in a way that would most suit their political needs, and then bad political judgment in bungling a crisis. I mean, if there's one thing the Republicans are great at since Reagan, it's damage control. But he is such a control freak, you know, he doesn't even care about the damage. ... Mary, it isn't only the press. He blows off the FISA courts, he blows off the Geneva Conventions, he blows off the U.N. to go to Iraq. He wants to blow off everything. He's got a fever of about presidential erosion just the way he had a fever about going into Iraq.”

It struck me that watching Mary Matalin work overtime trying in vain to spin the week’s events to a place where it might, MIGHT, not be damaging for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, that this was what it was really all about for this administration: an especially disagreeable woman with an expression that shows just how foul-smelling her job really is. Sometimes, when you work so hard to spin bullshit, all you end up with is a bullshit frappe.

More soon.