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WASHINGTON Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing. (snip) He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side. Campaigning last weekend, Palin cast their Democratic rival as “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s...

MoDo's off the plane Howard Kurtz hangs out in the press tent at Oxford, Miss., and learns that one famous columnist will not be flying on Straight Talk Air. Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC's Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane.) http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0908/MoDos_off_the_plane.html Maureen Dowd Reacts To Being Tossed From McCain Plane http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/01/maureen-dowd-reacts-to-be_n_130863.html Earlier this week, we learned that the McCain campaign...

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick. So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin. Sheer heaven. It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of...

I've been to a lot of conventions, and there's always something gratifyingly weird that happens. Dan Quayle acting like a Dancing Hamster. Teresa Heinz Kerry reprising Blanche DuBois. Dick Morris getting nabbed triangulating between a hooker and toes. But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling fairy-dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult with Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru. "What is that feeling in the air?" I asked him. "Submerged hate," he promptly replied. There were a lot of bitter Clinton...

In the dead of night in a small hideaway office in the deserted Capitol, a clandestine meeting takes place between two senators with one goal. They grin at each other as they lift their celebratory shots of brutally cold Stolichnaya. “Our toast to The One,” they say in unison, “is that he’s toast.” “Obama should have picked you, Hillary,” John McCain tells her. “It isn’t fair, my friend. But it just makes it easier for me to whup him.” “Don’t worry, John, I’ve put it behind me,” Hillary replies. “I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very...

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention. You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama. Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism...

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely...

Not since Iago and Othello obsessed on the comely Cassio, not since Richard of Gloucester killed his two nephews, not since Nixon and Johnson glowered at the glittering J.F.K., has there been such an unseemly outpouring of boy envy. (blah, blah, blah - insert 16 column inches of tripe here...) McCain could dismiss W. as a lightweight, but he knows Obama’s smart. Obama wrote his own books, while McCain’s were written by Salter. McCain knows he’s the affirmative action scion of admirals who might not have gotten through Annapolis without being a legacy. Obama didn’t even tell Harvard Law School...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Barack Obama must continue to grovel to Hillary Clinton’s dead-enders, some of whom mutter darkly that they will not only not vote for him, they will never vote for a man again. Obama met for an hour Tuesday with three dozen top Hillaryites at a hotel here, seeking their endorsement and beguiling their begrudging. He opened the session by saying that he knew there had been frustration about what they saw as sexism during the primary. The Los Angeles Times reported that Hillary die-hards want to enshrine a whine in the Democratic platform...

"In her column last Wednesday, Maureen Dowd wrote that a Democratic lawmaker privately asked Gen. David Petraeus why there weren’t more Democrats in the military, and he replied, “There are more than you think.”

Did presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign plant a fake story accusing itself of campaign finance irregularities, in order to portray itself as victims of right-wing allegations about the campaign’s successful Internet fund-raising? In a July 8 2008-article "Bogus Dowd Column spreads quickly" PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, reported that blogs and chain e-mails were spreading a Maureen Dowd New York Times column that claims the Obama campaign got suspicious contributions from Iran, Saudi Arabia and China. "But the column is a fake," reports PolitiFact. The New York Times also disowned the...

Barack Obama may make it to the Rose Garden, but he’ll still be an orchid. For all his attempts to act like a sturdy American perennial, he’s a genuine hothouse flower, and everything he is and does is cultivated... ...Whether Obama was irritated that he had slipped up and exposed his daughters or was annoyed that his kids were exposing more delicious details about his finicky, abstemious tastes, we’ll never know....

Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist. This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News: “Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Actually, that sounds more like W. The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove....

Maybe it was the proximity of Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but something caused Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington to leap out in South Dakota. Venturing into Daschle-Obama territory, she inadvertently and inelegantly illuminated her thinking on why she wants to keep running as long as she can: stuff happens. In politics, there are many unpredictable and unsavory twists and turns. That’s why she’s hanging around, and that’s why she and Bill want to force Barack Obama to take her as his vice president, even if he doesn’t want her, even if Michelle can’t stand her, even if she has to stir...

“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”“Besides that, Hillary. Seriously, you don’t want your delusion to put John McCain in the White House. Or maybe you do. You have no shot. I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party...

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton. After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place. Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana...

Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there’s something eerie going on in this race. Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan. Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura? It used to be that he was incandescent and she was merely inveterate. Now she’s bristling with life force, and he looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke. A man at...

Barack Obama, who says he listens to Jay-Z along with his “old school guy” favorites like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Temptations, alluded to the rapper’s 2003 hit “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” on Thursday to sweep away concerns about his pugnacity. After conceding that the Philly debate was tough, he brushed the imaginary lint of Hillary, George and Charlie from his shoulders, in a wordless reference to Jay-Z’s lyrics in his anthem about not letting anyone crimp your ride as you cruise from the bottom to the top: “Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off...

I'm not writing this just because I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.) My family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren't bitter; they were bonding. They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket. Behind...

NEW YORK - Democrats getting jittery about the alienating effects of the endless soap opera they call their campaign should buck up. These "hand-wringers," as the Hillary strategist Harold Ickes calls them, are not seeing the larger picture.

Democrats getting jittery about the alienating effects of the endless soap opera they call their campaign should buck up. These “hand-wringers,” as the Hillary strategist Harold Ickes calls them, are not seeing the larger picture. Hillary is cruelly misunderstood, and she deserves more credit for her benevolence. Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.” The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison...

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood. The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.” “I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,”...

I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters. I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but...

If this is truly the Decline and Fall of the Clinton Empire, it is marked by one freaky stroke of bad luck and one striking historical irony. How likely is it that a woman who finally unfetters herself from one superstar then finds herself eclipsed by another? And when historians trace how her inevitability dissolved, they will surely note this paradox: The first serious female candidate for president was rejected by voters drawn to the more feminine management style of her male rival. The bullying and bellicosity of the Bush administration have left many Americans exhausted and yearning for a...

Suddenly, everyone was in the mood for love. Would the scream team turn into the dream team? After Thursday’s Democratic debate, CNN’s Carol Costello said there were “heart palpitations” and “ripples of joy” in the glittery Kodak Theater audience at the idea of a Hillary-Obama or Obama-Hillary ticket, after he was gallant with her and she laughed gaily with him. How could Hollywood not fall in love with Hollywood’s favorite plot? After lots of sparking and sparring, the couple falls into each other’s arms in the last scene. The would-be matchmakers didn’t seem to know that in Hollywood, couples who...

Maureen Dowd flew on Air Force One with President Bush and survived. The notorious Bush-bashing New York Times columnist fell ill during a recent trip to Israel and was cared for by White House doctor Richard J. Tubb, the Washington Post reports.A press aide arranged for Dowd, who sufferred from what sounds like dysentery, to see Tubb at the "over-the-top $3 billion luxury hotel" where Bush stayed in Bahrain. Dowd then skipped the press charter to the United Arab Emirates and hitched a ride on Air Force One, "where she visited the doctor once again in his [onboard] office near...

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes. A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?” Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t...

The Democratic race — three lawyers married to lawyers who talk too much. Bill very much wants to be in the White House again. “Miss Bill? Vote Hill!”. By the time Bill and Hill are finished, you could be forgiven for thinking that she had personally forged the peace accord in Northern Ireland while socking away the $127 billion Clinton budget surplus and dodging bullets en route to ending ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Has Hillary truly changed? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask..? Would...

Both Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have columns today. Rich has little to say about the Iraq War. He stresses Obama opposed it and Hillary did not. Presumably, this is enough for Frank Rich and Pinch to switch sides. Here is a quote from Rich: ”…But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they...

The reference alludes to my old “Maureen Dowd Two Minute Mock” feature on Mensnewsdaily.com which ran in 2003 and 2004. Ms. Dowd, the ancien debutante of the New York Times, is the perfect embodiment of all things that conservatives despise. Her reflexive leftism, misandric inclinations, disdain for America, obsession with race, devout elitism, and appalling self-righteousness made her an obvious target. Yet these attributes are also why she so exhausts. As with most leftists, there’s simply no there there. Irrational garbage can only be bashed for so long before the drowsiness sets in. Eventually, her piñata disintegrated into diversity flag...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it -- George Satayana. Well and good. But being a prisoner of the past presents dangers, too. Stay tuned for an example of how reliance on a corollary of Satayana's rule went horribly wrong for the U.S. Maureen Dowd's column of this morning "W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D." is the latest example of what passes for MSM wisdom on Iran. In a nutshell, the argument goes: we attacked Iraq over ill-founded concerns about WMD and got bogged down. So perish the thought of using force to prevent Iran from acquiring a...

October 7, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist I Did Do It By MAUREEN DOWD Washington O.K., folks, you want the truth? The whole truth and nothing but? After all this time, you’re still dying to see the mystery solved? Fine. I did it. Everything A. said — let’s just use the initial because it’s still hard for me to speak the name of my victim and tormentor — was true. I did what I had to do and I didn’t care if it ruined A.’s life. I didn’t even care if people thought it was obscene. I knew I was misusing my...

Posted Friday, December 7, 2001 Key West paper drops Maureen Dowd after readers complain Elizabeth Halbe writes to MediaNews: "My local paper, the Key West Citizen, has been running columns by Maureen Dowd on a weekly basis. While always well written and full of pointed humor, they have drawn (of course) the wrath of some ultraconservative readers. Today the Citizen printed a reader's call insisting that since she is a 'liberal extremist' her column be dropped from our paper, followed by an editor's note that Dowd's column is being discontinued in January." Halbe wants an explanation, and MediaNews called ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman. The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the Web site's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. The...

The New York Times' subscription-only online service TimesSelect could be nearing its end. Long a favorite of Times Co. Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and President Janet Robinson, insiders say a growing chorus of people within the paper are lobbying to shut down the two-year-old service, which charges Web visitors to access columns from David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof and Thomas L. Friedman. "It a hot potato," said one insider. "There's a lot of pushing to do away with it." Indeed, even several of the columnists who make up TimesSelect are said...

An editorial in the New York Times says Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff members have been "belligerent," "ideological" and "shadowy." Also "extralegal" and "dastardly." And his position, writer Maureen Dowd says, is "bordering on lunacy." But the attack will get no response from the White House, according to spokeswoman Dana Perino. She was answering a question from Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House, who asked: "Yesterday New York Times published a column which contended that Vice President Cheney is – and this is a quote – 'bordering on lunacy' and referring to him as 'crazy Dick.'...

Ali Allawi's memoir The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace certainly deserves the praise and attention it has been getting (even from writers like Maureen Dowd, so eager to score cheap points against the Bush administration that—even while rebuking others for having insufficient grasp of Iraqi reality—she confused the author with his cousin Iyad Allawi and called him a "puppet" into the bargain). The book is written with a very strong combination of heart and mind by someone with an enviable command of English who both knows and cares a good deal about Iraq. He does not...

April 5, 2007 | As he tells it, Matthew Dowd's conversion from true believer in George W. Bush to disenchanted critic is a chapter in a "Pilgrim's Progress" through the wilderness of this world. His long quest for agape, as related to a New York Times reporter, begins about a decade ago with Dowd in the Slough of Despond, "frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides," when suddenly a great-hearted figure appears who lights a candle in the darkness. "It's almost like you fall in love," Dowd professed. But his dream turns to...

AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 — In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal. A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist....

NEW YORK Denis Collins, the juror in the Libby/CIA leak case who delivered a post-verdict commentary for the press, spent about a decade at The Washington Post. Today, after a night on cable TV shows, he re-appears with a massive recounting of his experience at the Huffington Post blog. His story is billed as "INSIDE THE JURY ROOM: WHAT THE JURY THOUGHT, DAY BY DAY, WITNESS BY WITNESS, AT THE SCOOTER LIBBY TRIAL" by Denis Collins, Juror #9. It calls it "unedited" impressions, memories and facts. Other jurors' names are changed. The New York Times today reports that he is...

Barack Obama looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad. So there he was, trying to meet the deep, inexhaustible needs of both Iowa activists and the global press behemoth on his first swing across the state, while giving up cigarettes. He was a tad testy. “I’ve been chewing Nicorette all day long,” he told reporters at a press conference in Ames on Sunday, where he was getting irritated at suggestions that he lacked substance and at the specter of his vanishing privacy. The Illinois senator didn’t have on an implacable mask of amiability, as Hillary...

NY TIMES edit queen Maureen Dowd unloads on Barack Obama in her Wednesday filing. On the trail in Iowa, Dowd writes: "Obama's so slender his wedding band looked as if it was slipping off... there was a wariness in his dark eyes." When a reporter asked him Obama whether he'd had a heater in his podium during his announcement speech in subzero Springfield, Obama hesitated. Dowd slings: "He shot a look that said, 'Are you from PEOPLE magazine?' before conceding that, unlike Abe Lincoln, he'd had a heater." Dowd describes Obama as a "tad testy" as he was "traipsing around...

Curtis is a political science professor whose most recent publication is on the politically correct topic of multicultural education. Over recent years, her behavior has been a caricature of an academic radical: shortly after 9/11, she wildly (and, of course, without any evidence) condemned an alleged attempt “to silence professors who encourage students to probe the history of U.S. foreign policy in the effort to understand the September 11th attacks.” She protested efforts to remove from the ranks of the nation’s faculty those “who feel shame, fear and anger over the violent suppression that the United States has undertaken in...

It was impossible not to wonder what the luminaries were truly thinking, as they sat listening to fugues of Bach and Brahms and ecomiums of the ordinary guy leader. Nancy Reagan's expression behind her big square sunglasses did not disguise the gloating words visible in the bubble over her head: 'And they call this a funeral?' It could not compare to the Prince of Wales treatment that her husband had for his state funeral.Nancy, hypersensitive to any slights to her Ronnie, would not have been pleased with Ford's interview to Michael Beschloss in Newsweek, in which he blamed Ronald Reagan...

Maureen Dowd: Will Hillary or Obama take the cake? SO the question of the moment is: Which would be a greater handicap in a presidential bid, gender or race? The answer will depend, of course, on how manly the woman, and how white the black. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama both straddle two worlds, trying to profit from both. Despite her desire to seem far more experienced than her rival, Hillary's role in high-level politics has been mostly that of a spouse - a first lady who felt that she got elected too. The Yale-trained lawyer had one...

The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties.W, Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.Far from being run out of town, the defense czar has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday's tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19 gun salute, and Old Guard performance in Revolutionary War costumes, & John Phillip Souza music. Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Medal...

RUSH: Here we go with Barack Obama. As you know, he was up in New Hampshire -- do you know, by the way, TV ads for Barack Obama are going to start airing this weekend? Presidential ads for Barack Obama in New Hampshire start airing this weekend. Hillary, I think, is starting to get panicked because she's called up all of Bubba's old buddies, Carville and Begala and Joe Lockhart, she had them over to dinner to discuss what to do about this. Her team wasn't there. They're all one team, of course, but publicly Carville and Begala have said,...

Haunted by the Past By MAUREEN DOWD Published: November 1, 2006 Many Republicans have been tut-tutting about the author of “The Audacity of Hope” having the audacity to hope. “I think people might want a little more experience than that, given the nature of the times we live in,” Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity. Charles Krauthammer wrote that, despite Senator Barack Obama’s charms, he could not win in ’08: “The reason is Sept. 11, 2001. The country will simply not elect a novice in wartime.” But if there’s one thing W.’s reign proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, it...

Just as the Dow Jones has hit a new high, the 'Dowd' Jones has reached a new low. In her pay-to-read column this morning, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times analogizes the relationship of Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to that of preacher Ted Haggard and a male prostitute.Setting the titillating tone with her headline, "A Wartime Love Story", Dowd writes: At the heart of every administration, there is one relationship above all others that shapes history . . . W. is the hood ornament, but Cheney & Rummy are the chitty chitty bang bang engine of this...

I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections. But when I walked into Colbert's office at The Colbert Report, just off...