The lesser of two Dowds

It's time for Maureen Dowd to lose her job. Today she delivers yet another nonsensical column, ostensibly retelling the story of the Iraq war using Halloween terminology. As is her wont, she spends most of her time trying to make people look silly or childish (naw, she isn't either of those things). She finishes off this pointless exercise, as usual, by making up a funny name for an elected official.

Dowd makes my blood boil. I'm embarrassed to agree with her, when I do. There are usually about two sentences of worthwhile prose in any of her columns. This time they come from a must-read Boston Globe column rather than from her own sad, twisted mind. It's getting hard to believe that Dowd's shinola runs in a major newspaper (the Grey Lady, no less!) and that people -- intellectuals! -- actually enjoy this stuff.

She actually reinforces the common but generally untrue criticisms that the American left is all negativity and all hot air rather than substance or solutions; that its brand of name-calling is no better than Rush Limbaugh's; that it's full of cocktail-party chatterers who are more interested in stunning metaphors than cogent arguments. To use hers from today's column, she's nothing short of a horror show these days.

So that's Maureen. Tom Dowd, on the other hand, is heroic.