On Maureen Dowd

A reader writes:

Your favorite ranting Republican falls into a trap that most Republicans do - they assume that since the Republican Party really does have reporters and newspapers in their pocket, that the Democrats must, too.

This is laughably, lamentably false.

What's even funnier is the idea of Maureen Dowd carrying water for the Democrats. She wrote a column attacking Hillary because she doesn't like the Clintons. She won a Pulitzer making nasty, catty cracks about their marriage. She wrote a lazy, superficial, rather mean column on Barack Obama recently that was merely a clutchful of unsupportable observations about what she assumed he had to be feeling. She wrote a series of columns pretending to be Al Gore's bald spot. She so totally emasculated poor Al that she (and that other liberal water-carrier Frank Rich) made him a joke by the time Election Day came around in 2000.

This is the woman who's doing the Democratic Party's dirty work?

Point well taken. I've had my ups and downs with MoDo, but this must be said, I think. She was dead right about the Clintons, and was dead right about Bush and Cheney - long before I was. In the heat of the post-9/11 crisis, I couldn't forgive her for ridiculing the president in wartime. But she was much more perceptive than me. She is no shill for either side. She can grate, and she barely manages any coherent political philosophy. But as an observer of human nature and its centrality in politics, she's remarkably acute.

(Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty.)