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Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to blast New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, calling her “a neurotic dope." “Wacky @NYTimesDowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column. A neurotic dope!” Trump tweeted.

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH damn that Catherine Zeta Jones

(NBC) - Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering photo of the wife of rival Ted Cruz, a rare move for the Republican front-runner more known for his boasts than backtracking. "Yeah, it was a mistake," Trump told New York Times. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it." The retweet set off a war of words between the two candidates, and gave fresh fuel to Democratic candidates and other critics who marveled at a Republican presidential race that had descended into a fight over the candidates' wives. Trump retweeted the photo compilation showing an...

Donald Trump admitted to The New York Times on Saturday that retweeting an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz was a mistake and that he would not do it again if given the opportunity. "Yeah, it was a mistake," he told columnist Maureen Dowd. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it." Dowd was asking about an incident last month in which Trump retweeted a picture of Cruz, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's wife, during a spat involving a nude photo of Trump's wife, Melania, that was circulated by an anti-Trump super PAC.

After running as a man last time around, Hillary Clinton is now running as a woman. Matthew Dowd, the former W. strategist who became an independent, says Hillary got it backward: She should have run as a woman in 2008, when she was beating back a feminized antiwar candidate. And she should have run as a man this time, when Americans feel beleaguered and scared and yearn for something "big and masculine and strong," as Dowd put it. Despite the deafening dearth of excitement among younger women, Hillary has cast herself as Groundbreaking Granny.

I’m trying to tell the freshly minted pol that Megyn Kelly had the right to ask him a question in the debate on how he talks about women, and that she should be tough on the front-runner. He’s not buying it. In fact, in his stubborn “I win, you lose” way, he has an assistant come over to hand me a printout of Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine piece headlined “How Roger Ailes Picked Trump, and Fox News’ Audience, Over Megyn Kelly.” But the 69-year-old is trying hard not to bare his claws at any women right now. His wife,...

WASHINGTON — SOMEWHERE in Smithsonian storage sits a portrait of Bill Clinton with two odd features: He is standing next to a shadow meant to conjure Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, and he is not wearing his gold wedding ring.

When David Axelrod published his memoir he hoped it would be seen as a respectable political memoir. Naturally, everyone just wants the bitchiest dish.President Obama despises Maureen Dowd—absolutely loathes the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. He’s annoyed by Mitt Romney. And the president’s messaging guru and top gun, David Axelrod, has little regard for Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile chief strategist. Those are a few of the gossipy take-aways from Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axelrod’s hotly-anticipated (by political junkies) memoir that goes on sale today. Yet those anecdotes represent just the sort of slicing and dicing of...

THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while. NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division. But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.

I WENT Friday morning to see “Selma” and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend — an effort that was duplicated for students around the country. The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the “Selma” director, Ava DuVernay. The horrific scene...

The White House likes to use a phrase of tingling adventure to describe the president's recent penchant for wandering the country talking to people: "The bear is loose." There are three problems with this unbearable metaphor: Barack Obama is not in captivity, he's not a bear and he's not loose. As Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire, it was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." When our whippetlike president travels on Air Force One from staged photo-op to staged photo-op and then to coinciding fundraiser to coinciding fundraiser, encased by the White House travel behemoth and press centipede,...

Maureen Dowd, author of “Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk”, speaks during a panel discussion during a luncheon at the Book Expo America convention, Saturday, June 5, 2004, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Brian Kersey) I never smoked marijuana before, and Maureen Dowd‘s haphazard experience with a weed-laced candy bar in her Denver hotel room certainly isn’t motivating me to book a plane ticket to what is soon to be dubbed the “Mile High State.” The New York Times columnist was in Colorado reporting on the state’s first months of legalized marijuana use when she decided to take what she later learned...

Maureen Dowd travelled to Colorado in January, ate a bit too much of a marijuana-laced chocolate bar and proceeded to have a Valley-of-the-Dolls-style meltdown in her hotel room. Here's how she describes the experience in her Wednesday New York Times column: "I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn't move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the...

Why are my posts about Maureen Dowd being deleted? Was posting a picture of Katherine Zeta-Jones now forbidden?

The year is 2084, in the capital of the land formerly called North America. The BlackBerrys that were pried from the hands of White House employees in 2013 are now piled up on the Potomac as a flood barrier against the ever-rising tide from melting ice caps. Their owners, unable to check their messages, went insane long ago. Because there was no endgame, the capital’s hunger games ended in a gray void. Because there was no clean bill, now there is only a filthy stench. Because there was no wisdom, now there is only rot. The instigators, it turned out,...

WASHINGTON — On the most deadly day here since Sept. 11, 2001, with the capital reeling over the sadly familiar scene of a mass shooting by a madman, the chief executive stepped to the microphones and captured the heartbreak. It wasn’t the chief executive of the nation. It was Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief operating officer of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, where three of those injured were being treated. “There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate,” she said, her voice stoic but laced with emotion. President Obama also gave a...

“If I wanted to be secretary of state,” Collins observed, “I would not go on television and perform what was essentially a political role.” Collins drew up a list of questions to ask Rice at their one-on-one hourlong meeting slated for Wednesday. She wants Rice to explain how she could promote a story “with such certitude” about a spontaneous demonstration over the anti-Muslim video that was so at odds with the classified information to which the ambassador had access. (It was also at odds with common sense, given that there were Al Qaeda sympathizers among the rebel army members that...

On Tuesday, Egypt's chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants against eight US citizens. Their purported crimes relate either to their reported involvement in the production of the Internet movie critical of Islam that has received so much attention over the past 10 days, or to other alleged anti-Islamic activities. One of the US citizens indicted is a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity. According to the Associated Press, Egypt's general prosecution issued a statement announcing that the eight US citizens have been indicted on charges of insulting and publicly attacking Islam, spreading false information, and harming Egyptian national unity. The...

Maureen Dowd meets anti-Semitism charge By DYLAN BYERS | 9/16/12 6:42 PM EDT New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd set the Jewish political community on fire today with a column about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals that, according to her critics, peddled anti-Semitic imagery. Dowd fairly observed that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy, but asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a "neocon puppet master" who was leading the neocon effort to "slither back" into power. Such language, to say nothing of the questionable legitimacy of her claims, struck experts on...