Metafisking Modo
(Via Andrew Sullivan) Catherine Seipp in the Washingtonian Online says Maureen Dowd is Too Cute for Words:

I wasn’t the only one who noticed Dowd’s precious column that day. "Little Miss Dowd says ‘Ick,’ " Lucianne Goldberg noted on her Web site, summing up not only Dowd’s inane tone of that moment but pretty much everything the New York Times’s star columnist has written after September 11. That things are changing at a dizzying pace seems to have thrown her for a loop. You could stuff all Dowd’s anti-whack-Iraq columns into a hat and pull one out at random; odds are "Little Miss Dowd Says ‘Ick’ " would be the theme in a nutshell.
...
But I’d say that it’s her condescension, even more than her superficiality and silliness, that so rankles readers. I don’t know Dowd, and I live in Los Angeles, not Washington, so I only see her when the Times flies her out to the summer TV press tour every July.

She cuts a memorable figure because she attends press conferences in a bizarrely casual getup: tank top over sports bra over sweatpants over running shoes, with hair up in a clip and - this part never varies - sunglasses worn indoors.

The mind reels at the vision.