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We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.

Maureen Dowd

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Maureen Dowd
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 14
Columnist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Maureen Brigid Dowd
People
Famous
Infamous
Admire
Pressed
Fame
Soap
Public
Happier
Lives
Opera
Makes
Noses
Riveted
Better
Glass
Reassures
Hard
Glasses
Operas

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Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.
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The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.
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I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'
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The idea of American exceptionalism doesn't extend to Americans being exceptional.
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Personally, I've decided to stop evolving.
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Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.
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I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.
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President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.
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My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.
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Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.
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As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'
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Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month men have raging hormones every day.
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IT is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures. Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.
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Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.
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As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight.
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And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
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A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.
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The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
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The Clintons want to do big worthy things, but they also want to squeeze money from rich people wherever they live on planet Earth, insatiably gobbling up cash for politics and charity and themselves from the same incestuous swirl.
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Are women necessary? Not with Ava around
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