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Aging Maureen Dowd cannot seem to help herself when it comes to Governor Palin. It was first thought of as irrational envy. You have a strong, intelligent, attractive, self-made, non-Ivy League educated, happily married, mother of five verse a wrinkled old shrew. Her continued attacks are more then comical and it seems she is now fixated on Governor Palin. Mark Finkelstein, of NewsBusters, describes Maureen Dowd quite accurately: Nothing like a presidential assassination metaphor to spice up an otherwise insipid Sunday column . . . Churning out yet another anti-Sarah screed, Dowd descended to this today [emphasis added]: "At the...

"Gryphen" a/k/a Alaska blogger Jesse Griffin, decides apparently at random to unload on Trig Palin again: Sarah Palin has used this heartrending diminutive prop with such careless abandon, that even people who once supported her are embarrassed at her apparent disregard for the well being of this baby. Leaving behind all of the questions about Trig's parentage, the question we must now ask ourselves is how well is he currently being cared for? I believe that many people have very powerful concerns for this child. We see him trotted out when Sarah wants to make a political point, or create...

"Gryphen" gets an extension on his 15 minutes of fame courtesy of the New York Times columnist: Palin is still obsessed with the blogosphere, which recently lit up with a rumor -- started by a fellow mavericky Alaskan, who also no longer has his job -- that she and Todd were Splitsville. Excuse me, Ms. Dowd, but is Palin "obsessed with the blogosphere" or is it the other way around? And don't you share that obsession? Furthermore, ma'am -- speaking of "Gryphen" a/k/a former Anchorage kindergarten teaching assistant Jesse Ray Griffin -- is it the usual practice of the New...

Here is video of New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd talking this morning with MSNBC's Willie Geist about her column today in which she compared Gov. Sarah Palin with Richard Nixon, calling her a "bizarre babe-at-large." Dowd, in her usual snarky way, said she "loves Sarah Palin," because she's the best story ever for a jounalist. Dowd said she believes Palin could win the GOP Nomination in 2012 because "she plays to people's darker impulses." Maureen Dowd is the classic Eastern Liberal, who has no idea what average Americans are like, or how they think. She spends her life belittling...

The one-two punch thrown by Democrats and their counterparts in mainstream media have probably cost Alaska the governorship of Sarah Palin. Sarah has provided two reason for stepping down as Alaska's governor: 1) The money she and the state have had to spend defending against 15 ethics complaints, all dismissed, and 2) The endless attacks against her spouse and children by Democrats, the media and those in pop culture. Politics is officially a rich person's sport -- so long as you are rich enough to defend yourself against a string of baseless complaints you can stay. Also, the children of...

Much has been said about Maureen “I wanted to weave the idea into my column” Dowd’s latest take-down of Sarah Palin (“Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.”) Her hit-piece is a self-parody. Instead, of seriously critiquing the wisdom or folly of Palin’s controversial decision to step down from the governorship, we get child-like sentences on spec like this: "On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an...

If, somehow, by the grace of God...or in this case...by the grace of NOW...these two were...just...maybe...able to combine their DNA (again to the well of mad science, he goes!), the results would be astounding.

No one understands me. It’s like I’m speaking some Eskimo dialect or something. Andrea Mitchell follows me all the way to Kanakanak Beach and I get a French manicure and set up this huge photo op for her, even though she spooked the salmon. Todd and me are in our cool fishing bibs. Piper’s helping out on the boat. It’s an amazing day that shows how our Creator favored my beloved Alaska, gatekeeper of the continent, and makes a great shot for all the network reporters up here to milk. This progresses me away from my image as some kind...

When a politician drops a bombshell, it is natural that there be all sorts of puzzled queries as to the meaning of that surprise announcement. Sarah Palin, in her first gubernatorial term, announced her resignation as Alaska's governor on Friday. Immediately the speculation started as to what could be behind such a sudden decision. All this is understandable and very much expected. What isn't expected, what isn't natural, what is downright despicable, however, is how some liberals like The New York Times' Maureen Dowd reacted. Understandably all sorts of ideas, however far fetched, were floated as to the possible motive....

Now, Sarah’s Folly By MAUREEN DOWD Published: July 4, 2009 WASHINGTON Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president. Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy. Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney). When Lyndon Johnson was president, some of his staff began to think of him as “a sick man,” as Bill Moyers told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Moyers and his fellow Johnson aide Dick Goodwin even...

(LOTS OF GREAT PHOTOS) Catherine provided the entertainment - the Chicago actress performed dressed as a 1920s flapper as she showed off her dancing skills onstage. The 39-year-old, who has two children with Douglas, had earlier arrived hand-in-hand with her husband. On the red carpet she wore a flowing scarlet bustier dress, with a thigh-high split.

The fun police are patrolling Pennsylvania Avenue. Given the serious times, the chatter goes, should Barack Obama be allowed to enjoy date night with Michelle in New York, sightseeing in Paris, golf outings in D.C., not to mention doing a promotion for Conan O’Brien and a video cameo for Stephen Colbert’s first comedy show from Iraq? Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play on Broadway was too showy. I loved the “Pretty Woman” romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived...

The fun police are patrolling Pennsylvania Avenue. Given the serious times, the chatter goes, should Barack Obama be allowed to enjoy date night with Michelle in New York, sightseeing in Paris, golf outings in D.C., not to mention doing a promotion for Conan O’Brien and a video cameo for Stephen Colbert’s first comedy show from Iraq? With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread? “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the...

IT has been a busy week or two for the ethics police — those within The Times trying to protect the paper’s integrity, and those outside, ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists. Thomas Friedman, the star columnist, returned a $75,000 speaking fee after accepting it from a California government agency in violation of a Times guideline. Maureen Dowd, another star columnist, was roughed up on the Internet for using a paragraph from a blogger without attribution. And Edmund Andrews, an economics writer, began promoting a memoir describing how he took out subprime mortgages he couldn’t possibly repay even...

It isn’t so much that Dick and Rummy are back. It’s that they never left. They had no intention of turning America’s national security over to the Boy Wonder. The two best infighters in Washington history weren’t yielding turf to a bunch of peach-fuzz pinkos who side with terrorists. Let W. work out at the S.M.U. gym in Dallas, waiting for history to redeem him; Dick and Rummy are leaning forward into history, as they always do. Cheney is tawny with TV makeup; there’s no point taking it off. The gigs are nonstop, and he has a big Obama-bashing speech...

In many ways, Maureen Dowd and Joshua Micah Marshall personify new and old media. One is former political reporter and venerable columnist who dispenses bon mots from the New York Times editorial page once a week. The other is a blogging wunderkind who has blazed a trail with the liberal TalkingPointsMemo site. So when thejoshuablog (who's not Marshall) blogged over the weekend that Dowd had lifted, almost word for word, a slab of text from a blog by Marshall last week it was inevitable it would become a big deal. Unfortunately for Dowd, the furore shows little sign of abating...

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment from The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday. The error appeared in Dowd's Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration's use...

The strangest thing about Josh Marshall’s observation on the suspicious timing of enhanced interrogations is not that Maureen Dowd’s friend passed it off as her own before Maureen Dowd did the same; it’s that anyone would want to take credit for this bit of illogical paranoia. Here’s the twice-published line:

NEW YORK — New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president [Lula of Brazil]. As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich. “I do not know any black or indigenous bankers,” said Lula. He also told CNN he would press this theme at the G-20 meeting in London this week....