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How to apologize to a feminist He wasn't very clever. He wasn't very nice. And he's been trying to make it up to a certain red-haired columnist ever since. MAUREEN DOWD doesn't like me. This is not unusual. But unlike a lot of people, the New York Times columnist has a good reason. Despite her new book, "Are Men Necessary?" it's not just because I'm male. And I have no argument with her book, either. The way I see it, perhaps men aren't necessary, but we are very entertaining.

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 In his "60 Minutes" interview, Bill Clinton calls his intern idyll "a terrible moral error," illuminating "the darkest part of his inner life." Not to mention the hardest part on his back since, astonishingly, he says he spent months sleeping on the couch. (Was the Lincoln bedroom always occupied by donors?)"I did something for the worst possible reason," he told Dan Rather about his march of folly with Monica. "Just because I could. I think that's just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything."Just because he could. What a world of meaning is packed...

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 — In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism. "He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . . This is for sure." Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob....

WASHINGTON Let's get it straight. The president and the pope aren't riding the new gay wave."I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman," said President Bush last week. "And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that." Trying to add a tolerant note to an intolerant policy, he allowed that he was "mindful that we're all sinners."Last time I checked, we had separation of church and state, so I don't know why the president is talking about sin, or why he...

The New York Times columnist is often at odds with the administration, the facts, and herself. DOES MAUREEN DOWD know what she's talking about? Her New York Times column specializes in highly personal attacks on George W. Bush and his aides. Clearly she knows how to be snide. But Dowd also has written in recent months about the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's strategy, the aftermath of the war, the mood of American troops, and the alleged lack of an occupation plan for Iraq. On these subjects, she hasn't got a clue. Back on March 12, she wrote that the...

They were wrong, of course. Soldiers should not go public in the middle of a conflict and trash-talk their superiors or ask for the resignation of the secretary of defense. But it was inevitable that their gripes would bubble to the surface. Many American troops in Iraq are exhausted, and perplexed about the scary new guerrilla war they're caught up in. And they have every right to be scared, because the coolly efficient Bush commanders have now been exposed as short-term tacticians who had no strategy for dealing with a war of liberation that morphed into a war of attrition....

It appears that Miss Dowd’s last column offended far more people than I. Your humble narrator received countless emails and it seems that she managed to garner reactions from most of the blogosphere. One of our readers (and part-time commando), Jerry Boggs, sent me a couple of Miss Dowd’s email addresses that are not listed on the NYT website. I decided that the time had come to pull some chain and amuse myself. I thought the old “welcome neighbor” approach would work best so I sent her a warm letter of thanks: Dear Maureen, I wanted to say thank you...

JUN. 15, 2003: FABULISTS Maureen Blair Maureen Dowd seems to have learned nothing from the Jayson Blair fiasco. No, that’s not quite right. She does seem to have learned one thing from the paper of record’s plagiarist of record. Fresh from the scandal of being caught abusing ellipses to twist President Bush’s words, she is now using other people’s work to pad out a column when the deadline clock is tolling. Yesterday, Dowd wrote one of her trademark gaseous columns about popular culture turning its back on the accomplishments of feminism, etc., etc. As the column trudged wearily to its...

The leafy Connecticut towns of New Canaan and Norwalk are getting ready for the invasion of the body-snatched. The Stepford wives, those frilly minded, man-pleasing zombies who glided through suburban colonials and supermarkets three decades ago, are back — clutching casseroles with blue potholders and garden tools with white gloves. Usually, I avoid remakes. But I'm intrigued to see what the director Frank Oz and the screenwriter Paul Rudnick do with their new version of the 1975 cult thriller and ingenious spoof on male fear of female assertion, "The Stepford Wives," a William Goldman screenplay from an Ira Levin novel....

WASHINGTON — You might sum up the president's call to war Thursday night as "Message: I scare." As he rolls up to America's first pre-emptive invasion, bouncing from motive to motive, Mr. Bush is trying to sound rational, not rash. Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.But the Xanax cowboy made it clear that Saddam is going to pay for 9/11. Even if the fiendish Iraqi dictator was not involved with Al Qaeda, he has supported "Al Qaeda-type organizations," as the president fudged, or "Al Qaeda types" or "a terrorist network like Al Qaeda."We are scared of the world...

WASHINGTON — George W. Bush has often talked wickedly about his days as the black sheep of a blue-blooded, mahogany-paneled family. But the younger rebellion pales before the adult revolt, now sparking epochal changes. The president is about to upend the internationalist order nurtured by his father and grandfather, replacing the Bush code of noblesse oblige with one of force majeure.Bush 41, a doting dad, would never disagree with his son in public, but in a speech at Tufts last week, he defended his decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after Desert Storm."If we had tried to go in...

WASHINGTON — Nobody in America makes me feel more insecure than Tom Ridge. The man who is supposed to restore my confidence in the prospect of my safety gives me the uneasy sense that the door's unlocked, the alarm's off and there's a ladder leaning up against the house.He seems like a pleasant, well-meaning guy and admits, "It's not always easy to know the right thing to say or the right thing to do."But in George Bush's pulp Western, Mr. Ridge should be a square-jawed extra with no lines.Last week, the head of Homeland Insecurity unveiled the big strategy he's...