Maureen Dowd Goes Borderline Anti-Semitic: 'Neocons Slither Back'

Maureen Dowd, on the eve of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year, decided to write a column dripping with anti-Semitism to attack Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hardline positions on the Middle East and national defense. In her rant, titled “Neocons Slither Back” Dowd used ancient anti-Semitic imagery.

Speaking of Ryan, Dowd wrote:

Ryan bemoaned ‘the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration. American foreign policy,’ he said, ‘needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose.’

Then she slimed: “Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor.”

Forget the fact that Senor was a spokesman for Paul Bremer, who, as an associate of Henry Kissinger, was a realist, not a neocon. Bremer was not a hit with neocons. The image of the puppet master was one with which Hitler was quite familiar. Ironically enough, Dowd’s pals at Media Matters vilified Glenn Beck when he used the phrase against George Soros.

Dowd continued, “A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.”  It’s all Israel’s fault that Romney and Ryan want to have a strong America?

Any other obvious Jews Dowd wanted to target? “Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, weighed in on Fox News, slimily asserting that President Obama should not be allowed to ‘slither through’ without a clear position on Libya.”

But Dowd has waxed eloquent with anti-Semitic imagery before:

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are ‘mad and bent out of shape’ at blood-sucking banks.

Dowd has been vicious for years, but her anti-Semitic language adds a new, ugly patina to her image.