I feel sorta bad even bringing her up. She gets beat up all over the blogosphere, so it makes me feel like a bully piling on, or worse, just some mindless dittoheaded clone marching in lockstep with the right wing.

But still I have to ask - how on earth does Maureen Dowd keep her job?

Read her latest. (Note: registration required at the NYT. Look upon that as a chance to toss some sand in the gears - I think I told them I was a 20 year old black girl making over $100,000 per year, but it was a while back, so I forget :-)

Ok, come back after you're done.

You back? Now go read something else on the Web. Cruise over to one of the blogs listed on the right, if you're out of ideas. One Hand Clapping has some good thoughtful essays to read. See you back here in about fifteen minutes, but take your time.

Now, my question for you...

What was Dowd's editorial today about? Can you tell me in one sentence what her thesis was today? What were we to take away from her consumption of dead trees and bandwith and the time it took to read her?

That column was just mental junk food, except that junk food at least has some caloric value. This goes beyond that to some sort of magic diet junk food from which all nutrition whatsover has been removed - all that's left is the taste, and the illusion that you've eaten something. You could read Dowd's stuff for a week straight, and emerge from this without one fact, one clue, not one more jot of insight than you had when you started. I read better stuff on the web, written by folks that do it for free, and do that better job every day, not just the one or two or however many columns she pens per week.

Of course, sometimes a good taste can make even the content-challenged essay palatable. Lileks could pick up a bottle of ketchup, read the ingredients, and blog 1,200 words on that, and I'd enjoy it. (James, if you're reading this, and I know you're not, consider that your next challenge on a slow news day.)

But the only taste Dowd cooks up is a flippant condescending sneer. The impending war is "scratching the Saddam itch." Rumsfeld is "Rummy," and he's not travelling to Europe to try to strengthen our alliance to oust Saddam, which most of the Left thinks of as a Good Thing - gotta have a multilateral strategery and all, but "jetting around the world," simply so he can insult Europe at a closer range.

More Dowdisms: The orange alert made me wonder again why the Bush administration has spent the last year and a half hyping the Iraqi menace instead of singlemindedly hunting Al Qaeda.

Note, first, the underlying assumption - that the Bush administration is "hyping" the Iraqi menace, as if all of the sudden they were spinning Captain Kangaroo into Hannibal Lecter. If we were, a thoughtful op-ed writer opposed to the war might actually argue how exactly we were doing that, how Saddam isn't as bad as we've made him out to be, etc. But then you'd actually have to think of a reasonable argument. Doesn't seem as if Dowd has that sort of intellectual horsepower. If she does, she certainly isn't inclined to use it.

Next, one must wonder if she read her own paper enough to have heard of operations in Afghanistan? We took a bunch of prisoners that are still sitting in their detention cells leaking information that leads to arrests and foiled attacks to this day. Dowd may not think that we're effectively pursuing the war against Al-Qaeda, but I'd wager a lot of the Al-Qaeda leaders disagree.

Finally, perhaps she does not realize that the US government is huge, chock-full of assets of varying types, some of which are best used for ousting Saddam (say a carrier battle group, or a young Marine infantryman) and others, (for instance, a FBI investigator), that are better used to track down terrorists? And that the use of one does not hinder the use of the other? And that a prudent president will use all of his tools to protect the American people? That these two tasks are compleatly independent of one another, and the level of effort put toward one does not effect the level of effort toward the other?

She writes that "hawks" say: "And we can set an example to other countries: `If you cooperate with terrorists or menace us in any way or even look cross-eyed at us, this could happen to you.' " She never spcifies exactly which "hawks" she's referring to, because then, you know, you might actually have to prove that statement. Pentagon warmongers? Warbloggers? Who knows? These are the hawks that soar the skies of DowdWorld, evidently much more easily offended than the kinds that fly around here. They start wars for giving them a hard look.

A more fair statement of a real world hawk's position (say, mine) would be "If you defy UN resolutions for twelve years, commit genocide on you own people, invade other countries, commit acts of eco-terror, torture and kill your opponents, encourage suicide bombers by giving them rewards, and blow your seven or eight Last Chances, then we're taking you down. Oh, unless you decide that rather than getting killed, you'd rather just live out your life comfortably in exile."

It's really easy to win arguments with your enemies, or make them look stupid, if you get to put words in their mouth. Except all that Dowd's doing is making herself look stupid.

She can't even win an argument with herself.

UPDATE: Cripes. It was bad enough to read her in the NYT, but now, I gotta see it again, a few days later, in my own hometown rag, the Houston Comical. Sigh. We can't even get our tripe fresh.