Dowd and Two Tonys

Maureen Dowd's column, "A Tale of Two Tonys, Exiting Beleaguered," is truly bizarre.

Yes, Dowd's columns are always strange. It's normal for her writings to reveal some personal emotional instability. Her vulnerable little girl routine is usually accompanied by incredible arrogance and self-indulgence -- an odd mix for a woman her age.

Dowd is the perpetual adolescent -- grown up but still a child.

I guess that's why she rates as the queen bee lib. She exhibits all the angst and the whining that characterize the lib elite. She has meaningless babble down to a science.

Her rambling analysis of the lives and times of Tony Soprano and Tony Blair has all the import of a mediocre Freshman English essay.

She talks about Blair through the lens of The Sopranos. Dowd finds parallels in the fact and the fiction. Then she lapses into a discussion of David Chase with the depth found in aTV Guide article.

She writes:

They’re both going out, not with a bang, but with a bing.

As they go dark, the two Tonys are bitter, paranoid and worn down by their enemies and scheming erstwhile allies. They both live in a bleak universe of half-truths, compromises and betrayals, a world changed utterly by the violence they set in motion. They were both brought low by high-stakes mistakes.

...Tony Blair fears the feral beast. Tony Soprano is the feral beast.

The two Tonys found that their skin was never thick enough. And they stumbled into trouble with their Juniors, Junior Bush and Junior Soprano. Before he steps down in two weeks, Tony Blair decided to let loose with one of those self-pitying Tony Soprano-style rants that drove Dr. Melfi to terminate him. Call it No. 10 Downer Street.

...On his first visit to Baghdad Monday, Gordon Brown vowed never to repeat his partner’s mistake of politicizing intelligence to go to war. We’ll have to wait to see if David Chase, the Garbo of cable now pursued by a feral beast of disappointed “Sopranos” fans, is feeling as paranoid and thin-skinned as the two Tonys, and as deeply surprised by the consequences of his actions.

Mr. Chase, an apocalyptic tease, gave us a gimmicky and unsatisfying film-school-style blackout for an end to his mob saga, a stunt one notch above “It was all a dream.” It was the TV equivalent of one of those design-your-own-mug places.

Even though I loved the first few years of “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase always struck me as passive-aggressive. The more fans obsessed on his show, the longer his hiatuses would grow and the slower his narrative velocity moved. His ending was equally perverse, throwing the ball contemptuously back at his fans after manipulating them and teasing them for an hour with red herrings — and a ginger cat.

So Dowd compares the "beleaguered" Tony Blair to the "beleaguered" Tony Soprano. She weighs in with some armchair psychology on David Chase.

So what?

What's the point?

Bottom line: Dowd was left unsatisfied by the final episode of The Sopranos, I think.

Or maybe she was left unsatisfied by Tony Blair.

It could be that Dowd is leaving the ending of her column open to interpretation. We are supposed to fill in the blanks.

Why the open-endedness?

She may want to keep her options open as far as a future movie deal goes.