Newsflash: Maureen Dowd Writes Awful Column

It begins like this:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

It ends like this:

Hillary has her work cut out for her. Rudy will not be so easy to spank.

...and it has lots of substanceless bullshit in between.

UPDATE: For a little perspective, I recommend that everybody read this 1999 piece from the New York Press about Maureen Dowd's "serious" journalism.

In 2002, the Weekly Standard accused her of reducing "political phenomena ... to caricatures of the personalities involved." That seems like a dead-on description, which still holds true today.

She has also relied on unscientific online polls to maker her points, and misleadingly used ellipses to change the entire meaning of peoples' statements.

UPDATE II: Glenn Greenwald addresses this awful column at Salon:

GREENWALD (11/18/07): Maureen Dowd’s column today, on the same page, is the perfect companion piece to Friedman's. It was hard to pick which one to write about, but I ultimately avoided Dowd's because–even for her–it's just, in equal measures, too trite and too twisted.

As always in Beltway pundit world, liberal men are emasculated losers (Coulteresque "faggots"); Democratic women are frigid, emasculating freaks; and war-loving Republican male leaders are our only Real Men. Hence, Dowd's whole column today depicts Hillary Clinton as an "icy," vicious, "dominatrix" and Barack Obama–"Obambi"–as her emasculated, intimidated, submissive slave. And she contrasted "Obambi" with Rudy Giuliani, who is far too masculine to be "kept in line" by Hillary's whip. One feels lowered even writing about Dowd...

(highlighting via Daily Howler)

UPDATE III: Maybe this column by Dowd in 2005 can shed some light on where she is coming from: "When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it." Seriously.