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The New York Times and John McCain really don't seem to like each other all that well and it appears the disagreement may have spilled over into a campaign plane ban for Times columnist Maureen Dowd. McCain Campaign chief Steve Schmidt scalded the New York Times just last week in a conference call where he ripped the paper and screamed bias. "Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization," Schmidt said. "This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for...

Barack Obama's desultory debate performance has left Maureen Dowd in the dumps. Her weekend column is a laundry list of woulda-coulda-shoudas that, had only Obama followed, would have led him to victory. Dowd's biggest beef is Obama's failure to have goaded McCain into a damaging display of ill-temper. Just for fun, let's meander through Maureen's analysis. "The president . . . is so insecure that he could only choose a vice president he knew would never hold his title." The MSM portrayed Bush 41 as lacking in self-confidence by taking, in Dan Quayle, a VP who wouldn't overshadow him. Now...

Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has ventured to Alaska to better understand the life of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. "I feel like Jack London," she said from her hotel room as she finished her Kegel excercises. "This place is dreadful. Yesterday, I broke a heel on my Manolo pump and I was horrified to discover there is not a Saks anywhere in Wasilla." Dowd was forced to continue wearing the broken shoe rather than face the horror of shopping at Walmart. She also complained about the lack of good men in the small town, despite...

I’ve been in Alaska only a week, but I’m already feeling ever so much smarter about Russia. I can’t quite see it from my hotel window, but, hey, I know it’s out there somewhere, beyond all the stuffed bears and cruise ships and glaciers and oil derricks. The proximity of the country from which William Seward bartered to buy Alaska for $7 million — Seward’s icebox — is so illuminating that I suddenly realize that we would commit a grave error by overestimating Russia’s economic strength. After all, it represents only 2.8 percent of the world’s G.D.P., even though its...

To paraphrase world renowned environmentalist Smokey the Bear, only YOU can stop the hate-filled liberals, their unethical handmaidens in the media, and protect your nation in the process. When asked several months ago, why he might be considering voting for and supporting the Republican nominee for President, Connecticut now-Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman said quite simply and truthfully, “because this is the most important election of my lifetime.” Joe Lieberman was born during the middle of World War II. He has lived through the Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam. With that life and experience behind him, he still said...

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...

For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real - other people really do look more attractive to us if we have been drinking. Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to just the opposite sex among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study - they also rated people from their own sex as more attractive. Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka equivalent in alcohol to a large glass of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer. After 15 minutes, the...

The ostensible subject of Maureen Dowd's column of this morning, Yes, She Can, is the way that Hillary, with a big helping hand from Bill, is undercutting Obama and casting a shadow over his upcoming convention. But did Maureen bury the lead? Tucked down as her 12th paragraph comes this [emphasis added]: The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic behavior is “disgusting.” But they’re too filled with delicious schadenfreude at the wave of buyer’s remorse that has swept the Democratic Party; many Democrats are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain,...

"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.”

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....

The French are different from you and me. Yes, they have Sarkozy. And they have Carla. And they have “the Carla effect,” as it’s known in Paris. If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The...

In grim times, a bitter Hillary clings to bitter voters who in grim times supposedly cling to guns, religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like them. Mining that antipathy, the New York senator has been working hard to get the hard-working white voters of hardscrabble Appalachia so she can show that a black man can’t yet be elected president. Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.” Fast Barry shot some pool Monday afternoon at Schultzie’s Billiards in South Charleston, including prophetically sinking an eight-ball...

As accusations against Americans go, surely there's none more serious than that of responsibility for 9/11. Yet Maureen Dowd has seen fit to level just such a charge against Condi Rice en passant: as a simple afterthought, no explication or justification offered. There I was this morning reading Maureen's musings on yesterday's hearings with Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. Pretty standard Dowd fare: a couple Shakespearean quotes pressed into service, a snippy sobriquet [dubbing Petraeus and Croker the "Surge Twins"], when suddenly came this [emphasis added]: "A confused Chuck Hagel asked the pair: 'So, where’s the surge? What are we...

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off. It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams. "It's like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over...

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...

As its Hollywood-borrowed headline There Will Be Blood suggests, the gist of Maureen Dowd's column today is that appearances of that icky post-debate clinch notwithstanding, there is no love lost between Hillary and Obama. The junior senator from Illinois won't agree to run as Hillary's vice-presidential candidate. Or as Maureen metaphorically puts it: Why would Obama want to follow in the frustrated footsteps of Al Gore . . . being third banana to Billary? Along the way, Dowd appears to break some news of a confrontation between the two that one camp views as having been physical . . .

Is America ready for a New Age pundit? There's been much scrutiny of the respective religions of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. But do we need to reconsider Maureen Dowd's fitness for op-ed office in light of the revelation that she has apparently embraced New Age spirituality, even undergoing a New Age "exorcism" complete with swinging crytal? I kept waiting for Dowd to say it was all a joke -- but she never did. Her column of today, "Am I a Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon?", describes her experience, conducted by one Faith Green: "a pretty, curvy 31-year-old green-eyed...

Talk about the dog that didn't bark . . . As soon as I realized that Maureen Dowd's column of today, "Rush to Judgment" was indeed about Rush Limbaugh's recent observations about Hillary's looks, I braced myself for the backlash. Surely Dowd would seek to unload on Rush for having said, in commenting on an unflattering photo of Hillary [displayed here] that turned up on Drudge, "will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Added Rush “men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it’s not that way...

Who'd you bet on in a Mixed Martial Arts match between Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd? You might get the chance. Earlier this week, Krugman called Barack Obama a "sucker" and a "fool," while praising Hillary. Today, Maureen Dowd goes after Paul's girl, calling Clinton every name in the headline and a few more. The theory of Dowd's column today is that while Hillary knows how to shake Barack Obama with her ice-cold demeanor, Rudy will revel in the combat with Clinton. Excerpts from "Shake, Rattle and Roll" [emphasis added]:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi. Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter. She has continued to flick the whip in debates. She had to do it again in Vegas, this time using her voice, gaze and body language to such punishing effect that Obama looked as if he had been brought to heel. Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t even be looking for a chance to greet Hillary, as Obama always does. Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t care if she iced them. But she can tell that Obama does care, ...that he responds to the sort...

By Mark Finkelstein | November 14, 2007 - 07:05 ET Q. Who could possibly be "surprised" that in choosing women to date, men tend to prefer beauty over brains? A. An Ivy League professor. We learn this from Maureen Dowd's column of this morning, "Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?"

OK, class, someone tell us: what's been the attitude of the New York Times and the elite media at large toward democracy-building in Iraq? What's that, Johnny? That it was naive for George Bush to imagine that democracy was attainable in a Muslim country riven by religious and ethnic factions? Correct. OK, then, who'd like to predict the Times's reaction to Pres. Bush's measured response to the curtailing of democracy in Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, perhaps our most important ally in the region in the war against terrorism? What's that, Janie? Pakistan being another Muslim country riven by religious and...

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...

Last week I went to dinner with an eligible doctor. As we were finishing the main course, I struck up conversation with the owner (Marco) in Italian – I speak five languages. My date nearly choked on his linguini and spent the rest of the date mute. I had committed the worst dating faux pas: I had outshone my suitor. Yet it would seem I am not the only woman who is wondering whether it is time to hang up her brain and turn into a Stepford Datee. In America research shows successful young women are hiding their accomplishments for...

I would defy anyone to label Maureen Dowd by party affiliation or ideology. I've known her and worked closely with her for 20 years and I can't tell you the answer to either one -- Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times What would be worse: that when Times editorial page editor Rosenthal claims not to know Maureen Dowd's politics he's not being honest -- or that he is?Today's Times contains a long column by Rosenthal responding to reader questions. Here are annotated highlights in addition to the Dowd rib-tickler: The news report produced by the news...

Figures. Who else would be Mika Brzezinski's ink-stained doppelganger but Maureen Dowd? "Morning Joe" has apparently introduced a new feature, "Three Things to Read Today," in which each of the panelists recommends an item from that morning's newspaper crop. Willie Geist went first today, and being the pop-culture maven he is, suggested the New York Post's coverage of the sexual harrassment lawsuit that a former female New York Knicks employee has brought against coach Isiah Thomas. Then it was Mika's turn.View video here. JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mika, what are you looking at? MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I was reading Maureen Dowd. And of...

The New York Times intends to recoup a portion of the revenue lost to its elimination of most online subscription services by enlisting all reporters, columnists and editors in what will be called The New York Times Premium Stoplight Squeegee Service. Although not mentioned in the official announcement of the demise of TimesSelect, Network World has learned of the newspaper's windshield-washing plans through a Times reporter who asked to remain anonymous for fear of "losing this sorry-ass job." "You gotta be friggin' kidding me," the veteran reporter told Buzzblog. "Why can't we sell hot dogs or Italian ice on the...

Projection: The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others. Maureen Dowd's columns are as much pop psychology as political commentary. The NY Times columnist understands virtually everything in terms of the underlying impulses of the id, ego and super-ego. When it comes to Republicans' presidential preferences, Dowd's idée fixe is that they seek father figures -- strong men who will dole out discipline and authority. But could this ultimately be the projection of Dowd's deep-seated desire for a strong man of her own? Take today's [p.p.v.] opus, Old School Inanity, in which Dowd twice trots out her...

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.'...

Rules require link only http://www.theolympian.com/opinion/story/117372.html

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...

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...

Did Maureen really mean to call Hillary "feral"? As in: "a domestic animal [such as the razorback pictured here] that has returned to the wild and lives without human attention"? We'll take Dowd at her word. In Where’s His Right Hook? this morning, Dowd describes Barack Obama as being "bullied" by "the feral Hillary." Yikes. Dowd reports on a recent interview with Obama, to whom she variously refers as "Obambi" and "Barry," and lets us know she found herself, sitting across from him, feeling like the "nun [in the "Bells of St. Mary"] who teaches a schoolboy who’s being bullied...

Is there any canard against President Bush more tired than the notion that he ignores the Establishment Clause, or as his liberal critics tend to put it, the "separation of church and state"? Maureen Dowd offered a classic exemplar of the criticism on this morning's Meet the Press, telling Tim Russert that: "W has sort of merged church and state while trying to keep them apart in Iraq." Russert didn't ask Dowd to substantiate her assertion. But when Bush antagonists are pressed for proof, they typically point to the president's Faith-Based Initiative and the manner in which the W...

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...

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...

Was Barack Obama serious or was he just joking when he told Maureen Obama that he was sensitive about his ears? Listen HERE (fast forward to about 7:35) and decide for yourself. Is there also a VIDEO clip of this incident. The expression on Obama's face would probably reveal the answer.

RUSH: "Iowa Democrats say notoriously disciplined Sen. Hillary Clinton may need to loosen up if she wants the state to support her presidential plans. Gordon Fischer, the former Iowa Democratic Party Chairman, said Clinton's carefully controlled demeanor might prevent her from connecting with voters, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday. 'I don't know that you can win in the Iowa caucuses and be a control freak,' said Fischer, who supports the presidential ambitions of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. Fischer said [that Hillary] can improve her chances by visiting every county in the state before the Democratic caucuses, which are...

Maureen Dowd plays the false indignation card in her pay-per-view column of today, What’s in a Name, Barry?The gist: those mean Republicans are trying to tar the rising star of the Democratic party [legally-mandated descriptor] by making malign associations with his moniker. The GOP's latest mischief - letting people know that the middle name of the junior senator from Illinois is "Hussein." Bunk. Any possible shock value in the Barack Hussein Obama handle has already largely faded. And this being a nation that likes to see itself as open and accepting, I'd say that, should he stay in the race,...

I felt myself cringing from the very beginning of Maureen Dowd's column this morning. You had a dread sense of where this story was headed when Dowd opened by writing "Nick Rapavi’s family and friends described him as a tough guy with a selfless streak. He’d wanted to be a Marine since high school, and his dress uniform had a parade of medals for heroism in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a Purple Heart." Sure and sadly enough, Dowd informed us that "the kid described as being 'full of life' died Friday in Anbar Province, the heartless heart of darkness in...

And here I thought I was joking. Yesterday, I closed this item on Maureen Dowd's column - in which she longed for an Iraqi dictator to whom to surrender - by wondering whether we should "look for Dowd to pop up in Baghdad sometime soon, leading a 'Bring Back Saddam' movement?"But the appeal of bringing back Saddam is apparently no laughing matter in liberal circles. In today's Los Angeles Times, New Republic editor Jonathan Chait - he of "Bush Hatred" fame - has written a column entitled, yes, "Bring back Saddam Hussein." I kept reading for a clue that this...

And here I thought liberals like to pose as champions of human rights . . . But consider Maureen Dowd's idea of an Iraq solution: find brutal dictators to whom we can surrender and who will impose "law and order." Working model: the US capitulation to the Communist dicators of Hanoi.The title of her subscription-required column of this morning, No One to Lose To, says it all. Dowd's biggest regret is, yes, that there's no obvious thug, or thugocracy, to whom to surrender. Dowd approvingly quotes Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote “A Bright Shining Lie”...

Those who say that men don't like women with brains and careers are misleading women, says New York columnist Christine B. Whelan, author of "Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women," published this year. Ms. Whelan, 29, says she wrote the book, in part, to respond to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's claim in her 2005 book "Are Men Necessary?" that success decreases a woman's chance for marriage. "This isn't good news," Ms. Whelan said about reading the book when she was single and had just finished her doctoral degree in economic and social history. "The social scientist in me...

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...

Here at NewsBusters, the last thing we'd want to do is sow discord among the liberal house columnists of the New York Times. But present purposes oblige me to let Bob Herbert know that his colleague Maureen Dowd doesn't read his column. That's the only way to explain Dowd's claim in her column this morning that the people "tut-tutting" about Barack Obama's presidential ambitions are Republicans. According to Dowd, those mean GOP types are putting Obama down because of his lack of foreign policy experience. You, mean, Maureen, as in this statement?: "In an appearance on “Meet the Press”...

THINGS have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president. In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry "stay the course." A presidency built on message discipline (Message: "Stay the course") is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging. Of course, the administration has never really said what "the course" is, so it was never really...

by Mark Finkelstein October 21, 2006 - 18:42 Be it her politics - or perhaps her personality - one thing is clear. Some big-time MSM women columnists don't dig Hillary. Yesterday I described here how the LA Times Rosa Brooks described Hillary - in the context of her support for legislation authorizing torture in ticking-bomb type cases - as having "hit bottom"and "fallen as low as it's possible to go." Today Maureen Dowd weighs in - with a vengeance. The central thesis of the subscription-required Obama’s Project Runway is that the Illinois senator needs to decide whether he is content...

by Mark Finkelstein October 4, 2006 - 07:35 It's a shame Audie Murphy isn't around. Maureen Dowd might finally have met her soul mate. You've surely noticed the phenomenon. When it comes to candidates, the Democrats love the military. From Mr. 'Reporting for Duty,' to a crop of Iraq and Afghanistan campaign veterans running in recent election cycles, the party of McGovern likes to combat its anti-war image by running the roughest, toughest GIs and jarheads it can find. And woe to the Republican who hasn't served. Dems will deride him as a chicken hawk or worse. Maureen Dowd's pay-per-view...