You wonder if Maureen Dowd reads her own paper when she writes things like this: “Mr. Obama called W. on Friday to give him a heads-up about the repudiation on Iraq. Robert Gibbs said the call was not at all contentious.” Should someone tell her it wasn’t contentious because it marked  the fulfillment not the repudiation of Bush’s Iraq policy? (Hence, the decision to leave the most troops possible in place through the next election and leave 50,000 there for a while thereafter.)

–Jennifer Rubin. It’s long been a mystery to me as to why Dowd’s trite, lame, desperate attempts at humor, coupled with her complete ignorance of basic facts, haven’t gotten her fired from the New York Times. I suppose it says something about the newspaper that they keep her there; either the Times feels pity for a columnist who likely won’t be able to write anywhere else, or they are blissfully unaware of the damage they are doing to their reputation by keeping Dowd around.