No one was more excited about the Controversial Major News Story earlier this week, involving Barack Obama and his sexist athletic proclivities, than Maureen Dowd, the popular newspaper sex columnist from 1998. The story provided her with at least three columns worth of unclear wordplay about gender and politics and homos. Check out this peculiar bit: “Besides, if Obama starts using a quota system for recreation, it will give fuel to the Republican campaign to paint him as a hand-wringing, Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy.” Note the way she fully outsources this superficial “campaign” to the Republicans, but doesn’t acknowledge the weekly leadership role a liberal female New York Times columnist has been playing in it for the last decade. [NYT via Gawker]

OMG David Denby murdered, literally murdered, blog-plagiarizing newspaper columnist Maureen Dowd, hid her body inside a wall, and wrote her column today! The Great Pundit Bitchfest About Civility 2009 continues: “It’s not. That country is gone. And in terms of biases that have faded, that’s a good thing. But partly due to the Internet, the standards of behavior in this new country are terrible. If Beaver and Wally were around today, they’d likely be writing snarky, revealing blogs about June and Ward.” Ha ha those blogs would be awesome. [NYT]

OH YEAH MAUREEN DOWD: So she had a sentence from a TPM post in her column. Her explanation: she didn’t mean to lift an unattributed quote from Josh Marshall; she meant to lift an unattributed quote from some random friend of hers, who happened to be quoting Josh Marshall, unattributedly. Whatever, this is how the Internet works, words want to be free, and everybody copies everybody else constantly. (There is no actual news anymore.) Josh Marshall seems not to be terribly offended anyhow. [thejoshuablog]

MAUREEN DOWD HAS A ZINGER, EVERYBODY: “The bank cloaks itself in a philanthropic glow while wasting our money, acting like the American Cancer Society when in fact it’s a cancer on American society.” See what she did there? And she’s referring to the bank Northern Trust, which she nicknames — wait for it — “Northern No Trust.” Since when can we not trust cancer? [NYT]

We were preparing to write something else fairly epic about the end of Bill Kristol’s tenure as the New York Times‘ “lightning rod conservative” columnist, a position he accepted one year ago for the sole purpose of annoying people during an election year, but… something’s happened! MORE »

We’ll put this nicely since we don’t wish to become victims of Gawker-style HuffPo blogroll revenge: GIVE THE POOR DUO A CHANCE, FAIREST ARIANNA! She writes in this column of hers, “It’s a Nora Ephron romantic comedy. When Hillary Met Barack. Sleepless in Chappaqua. You’ve Got Fundraising Email. Two intensely driven politicians cross paths, each seeking the highest office in the land — talk about a cute meet!” Just… gahh… hmm… we see the writerly device here and it’s trite vapid plagiarism of Maureen Dowd not very edifying. Look. This selection process has been the most drama-free thing a Clinton has ever done. Celebrate! [HuffPo]

• According to some preacher, the election will climax in a holy war between Allah, the God of Hawaii, and America. Obviously, this will all happen in Iowa. [Marc Ambinder]
• Bachelor of Mystery/Floridian Governor Charlie Crist is not going to even try to convince his state to vote for McCain anymore. [Andrew Sullivan]
• In 1996 John Hussein McCain attended a terrorist potluck sponsored by the violent Muslim communist organization known as “ACORN.” [Daily Kos]
• Maureen Dowd out-irrelevances herself. It’s not as sexy as it sounds. [AMERICAblog]
• What has John McCain done with the Earth’s supply of water? He’s moved it all to Arizona, for Jacuzzi Fun! [Ben Smith]

• When McCain said he was dropping out of the race to fix the economy, he was really having a filthy swingers orgy, in public, with Joe and Hadassah. [Ben Smith]
• Simulate the retarded, child-like speech patterns of national idiot Sarah Palin, with this fun word-generating internet machine! [Andrew Sullivan]
• Bill Kristol wants McCain to suspend his campaign once more, to go fix the economy all over again. [Weekly Standard]
• Pun abuser Maureen Dowd is BANNED from McCain’s Straight Talk Air. [Howard Kurtz]
• You know what’s also on the verge of collapse? Pakistan. Pakistan has become too big and too expensive for the taxpayers.  [Matthew Yglesias]
• Maybe instead of “bailout” this thing should have been called “Economic Stability Plan” or “Hey Let’s Nuke Iran” and then more Republicans would have gotten behind it. [Politico]

Usually it’s not worth it to post about Maureen Dowd’s column. She just does her thing. Nicknames, gender stereotypes, alliteration, hackneyed jokes, hackneyed narratives, whatever, let her quill gush forth, just leave us out of it. But things have changed, and she needs an intervention after this shit. Wasn’t this column the first scene from one of the Harry Potter books, with Voldemort talking about evil? Also: we are not notable practitioners of the so-called “Journalistic Ethics,” but is it really worth a New York Times columnist’s time and writerly capital to make things up? Like, entire narratives and motives? This column wouldn’t make the cut at most high school newspapers. Because. The badness. [New York Times]

JOHN EDWARDS WAS GROSS TO MAUREEN DOWD, TOO: “Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column. In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.” [New York Times]

Four-year-old lazy greaseball European gay Himmler-phile Barack Obama continues to be too effete for the United States. He just got back from his stupid trip to Nowheresville, Iraq and pinko Europe and he’s already planning another trip out of the country — this time to “Hawaii,” the main island of Indonesia, where he grew up as a Muslim with pineapples as his only loser friends. From the Washington Post: “Sen. Barack Obama, preparing for the Democratic National Convention and the long march to November, plans to spend about a week in Hawaii in mid-August, mostly on vacation.” We look forward to Maureen Dowd’s interpretation of this on… well whatever day her weird column comes out. [WP/The Trail]