Maureen Dowd Drags Down the Discourse

You know that moment, at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche goes completely off the rails and has to be dragged of to the loony bin? I have a feeling Maureen Dowd is about to learn how to depend on the kindness of strangers.

It's been a little disturbing, watching her bounce around these last few months, but today, she loses it completely, framing an imaginary debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in which each of them, well, talks to the other like they're MoDo.

It's disturbing and a little concerning to see Maureen's rich fantasy life so fully on display, with Hillary calling Obama "Twiggy," "rookie," "Skeletor," and "Bones," accusing him of fake eating, and promising to lock Bill in Dick Cheney's bunker if she's made VP.

Obama, for his part, calls her "Sweetie" and a stalker, accuses her of floating "White Fright," says the Clintons are "too much drama" and Bill is "off-the-charts crazy," and, most predictably of all, asks her, "Can you stop talking, Hillary? Is that even possible?" Wow, talk about pulling out your old chestnuts: HRC is now the Wife of Bath.

And it's not Maureen saying it: it's the candidates themselves! So you know this what they're really thinking!

My main beef with MoDo is and has always been a sort of terminal shallowness which unfortunately fails to find bottom. Just when you think she can't possibly sink lower, she finds some scrap of text scribbled on a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her Ferragamos and finds a way to work it in.

As the front page of Maureen's own paper shows, Obama's got it more or less locked at this point, but Clinton's strong showing cannot and should not be discounted. Dems have a couple weeks worth of work to do healing divisions, but in the end, it will be fine. I have never believed, and still don't, that Obama voters would refuse to vote for HRC or vice versa: people are not that stupid. We know what this is about, and here's a few hints for you, Maureen: