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I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska. But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties. Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions. So Newt took it upon himself...

I absolutely hate liberals....

In the spring of 2008, I was sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and a tall, straight, fine-looking woman, about eighty-five years old, mysteriously stopped at my table. We were complete strangers. She was holding a copy of the New York Times in her hand. "Did you read that woman today?" she said. "I think she's mad." And then she walked out, without another word.

STEINEM TOUTS KENNEDY FOR NY SEAT - IN HOUSE By BRENDAN SCOTT in Albany and MAGGIE HABERMAN in New York January 3, 2009 -- Feminist icon Gloria Steinem yesterday said Gov. Paterson should appoint Rep. Carolyn Maloney to the Senate - and ask Caroline Kennedy to run for Maloney's House seat instead of the Senate. Maloney, 60, who represents Manhattan's East Side and part of Queens, has been quietly pushing her case for the seat being vacated by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton even as Kennedy, 51, has received more attention. Steinem put forth her idea, unsolicited, as Maloney was honored...

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women." I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it,...

In Iraq, as Yogi Berra would say, the future ain't what it used to be. Now that the election's over, our leaders think it's safe to experiment with a little candor. President Bush finally acknowledged that the Iraqis can't hack it as far as securing their own country, which means, of course, that America has no exit strategy for its troops, who will soon number 150,000. News organizations led with the story, even though the president was only saying something that everybody has known to be true for a year. The White House's Iraqi policy has gone from a total...

EXTERIOR BRIDGE OVER POTOMAC RIVER - NIGHT CLOSE SHOT - Rummy is standing by the railing, staring morosely into the water. The snow is falling hard. Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he wheels around and wrestles an old man with wings into a headlock. OLD MAN: Ouch! Tut, tut. When will you learn that force doesn't solve everything? RUMMY: Who the dickens are you? OLD MAN: Clarence, Angel First Class. I've been sent down to help you. RUMMY, squinting: You're off your nut, you old fruitcake. You can't help me. I was a matinee idol in this town, a...

On the first day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree. Not knowing Osama's address, Rummy hastened to 'Potamia - and a mess, exhorting his pal Cheney, "Let's bomb Baghdad again, golly gee!" On the second day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me two dead-ender turtle doves (Colin and Kofi), flowers and chocolates from the ninny Chalabi, and a billion Arabs mad at me. On the third day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me three French henpeckers and imaginary W.M.D. And 300 tons of lost explosives going BOOM! everywhere. Rummy tried...

If I hear "Frosty the Snowman" one more time, I'll rip his frozen face off. It's a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of "Ring, Christmas Bells" drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates. I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas. Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom...

WASHINGTON — I've been surprised, out on the road, how often I get asked about my family. They're beyond red - more like crimson. My sister flew to West Virginia in October to work a phone bank for W. People often wonder what our Thanksgiving is like.It's lovely - if you enjoy hearing about how brilliant Ann Coulter is, how misguided The New York Times's editorial page is, and how valiant the president is as he tries to stop America's slide into paganism. This year, my brothers were on the warpath about news reports that Maryland public schools did not...

November 14, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST Slapping the Other Cheek By MAUREEN DOWD You'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged." Yet somehow I'm not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office. I'm getting more the feel of a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude -...

August 22, 2004OP-ED COLUMNISTKerry: Slo-Mo on SwiftiesBy MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON — It's easy for the Bushes to stay gallant. They delegate the gutter.There are always third-party political assassins, ostensibly independent, to do the dynasty wet work.W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival.The New Yorker editor David Remnick, writing in Esquire in 1986, limned the 1980 Congressional race in South Carolina's Second District "between Atwater's man, Republican Floyd Spence, and a Faulknerian figure named Tom Turnipseed At one press...

First lady Laura Bush is wildly popular with the American people, but not with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who called her a GOP "attack dog" this week for speaking out on stem cell research. "She's been dragged out to be a Republican attack dog on the most contentious issue, stem cell research, defending her husband's, you know, refusal to use more [stem cell] lines," Dowd told CBS "Early Show" host Hannah Storm while promoting her new book "Bushworld." "I think it's a huge mistake," warned the top Timeswoman. "Laura is this fantastic, nice, Marian-the-librarian-type who was curled up...

WASHINGTON One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even...

WASHINGTON Good golly, you knew Rummy wasn't going to pretend to stay contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the Pearl Harbor of PR, as Republican Tom Cole called it.The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain pounced and Hillary prodded. But soon he was once more giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off himself.By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see Donald-Duck steam coming...

WASHINGTON I wasn't sure how to ask John Kerry, so I just blurted it out: "Is there anything we need to know about your relationship with your father?"I didn't think the country could take another vertiginous ride on the Oedipal tilt-a-whirl. It's hard not to see the Bush unilateral foreign policy — blowing off allies and the U.N. to rewrite the ending of a gulf war his father felt had ended appropriately — as the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion."I know what you're saying," Mr. Kerry murmured.The globe got whipsawed by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents...

Laura Bush does not want that Chanel-wearing, shawl-draping, senator-marrying Teresa Heinz Kerry to get her house. It's a swell house, with doting servants, fresh flowers and grand paintings. And she does not want her Bushie to be tarred for lacking character, after he ascended by promising to restore character to an Oval Office still redolent of thongs and pizza. So the reserved librarian who married the rollicking oilman on the condition that she would never have to make a political speech has suddenly transformed herself into a sharp-edged, tart-tongued, defensive protectrix of her husband's record. Many White House reporters, including...

WASHINGTON First came the pre-emptive military policy. Now comes the pre-emptive campaign strategy. Before the president even knows his opponent, his first political ad is blanketing Iowa today. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," Mr. Bush says, in a State of the Union clip. Well, that's a comforting message from our commander in chief. Do we really need his cold, clammy hand on our spine at a time when we're already rattled by fresh terror threats at home and abroad? When...

WASHINGTON — It must be the voice. It is the basso pretendo profundo voice of the dean of boys in a strict private school. At the tables of power, he speaks so sparsely and softly in that low hypnotic monotone, with that lower jaw tilting to the side in a self-assured "I only talk out of one side of my mouth" kind of way, that others at the table have no choice but to listen up. He is the one who must be obeyed.Dick Cheney's dry Wyoming voice has the same effect on some male Republicans, starting at the very...

WASHINGTON In the movie "The Untouchables," Sean Connery, a cop named Malone, instructs a naïve Eliot Ness on going up against gangsters."If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way, because they're not gonna give up the fight until one of you is dead," he says. "You wanna know how you do it? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to...