The one thing I love about liberal columnists is how they complain about people spewing invective as they spew invective.

Such was deliciously the case in New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's offering Wednesday when she went after Rush Limbaugh:

Years ago, when I dubbed Dubya “The Boy Emperor,” Limbaugh spewed a stream of personal invective about me that embarrassed even my mother, a Limbaugh fan.

In a classic example of the liberal double standard, Dowd didn't have any problem whatsoever spewing invective of her own.

Better still, in a piece about America's leading conservative talk radio host, Dowd felt the need to also attack George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and Liz Cheney.

Let me count the ways:

Catholic News Agency reports The New York Times refused to publish an op-ed submitted by the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, that complained that Times news reports and opinion columns were anti-Catholic. Archbishop Dolan wrote the "most combustible example" was "an intemperate and scurrilous piece" on the opinion pages of the Times by Maureen Dowd.

"In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans."

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd spent some time in Catholic school as a youth, but judging from her latest rant/column, she didn't learn too much about actual Catholicism.

Dowd's anti-Catholic screed reveals that of someone who knows almost nothing about the Catholic faith. She also deceives her readers about a number of topics, including a 2004 letter issued by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Ever since long-time radio talker Don Imus inked a deal with the Fox Business Network to simulcast his morning radio program, he said he has been getting pushback from several acquaintances.

And as he explained and showed on his Oct. 28 program, he's not particularly pleased with the reaction about his deal with Fox News.

"I get this email and the e-mail says, ‘Sorry to see you've sold out to Fox Business, or whatever. But I am not surprised you sold out to Fox Business, disappointed.' Could you explain to me exactly what does that mean? When you walk in the door here, Roger Ailes or Neil Cavuto or what's the other fat guy's name? Kevin McGee? Not the other fat guy, that was unfortunate."

The White House has berated Fox News for days now for purportedly pushing an agenda and calling it news. So Americans may have been surprised when, as reported by Noel Sheppard, Obama invited two of MSNBC's most divisive liberal pundits--Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow--to the White House for an off-the-record briefing.

As it turns out, Maddow and Olbermann were only two of the left's heavyweights at the briefing. Yesterday, TVNewser received from the White House a complete list of names. Virtually all of them have their histories of shilling for the administration or Democrats generally, and of bashing conservatives.

Let us review the colorful histories of these pundits, and the reader can decide whether they "have a perspective," in the words of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (in the context of a Fox News attack).

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd must have woken up on the far-left side of the bed Tuesday given the number of prominent conservatives she chose to abuse in her article published Wednesday.

In "Daisy Chain of Cheneys", Dowd went after former Vice President Dick Cheney, his two daughters Liz and Mary, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, former Vice President Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, and OF COURSE George W. Bush.

This was really quite a venom-dripping hatefest even for Dowd (h/t Jennifer Rubin):

RNC Chairman Michael Steele shot back at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after the anchor tried to smear conservatives with racism on Wednesday’s Situation Room. The CNN anchor pointed out a racist sign at a Tea Party, and Steele replied, “Don’t hold up one person as an example of behavior by everyone.” The RNC chairman also rebuked Blitzer after the anchor pointed out the GOP’s dearth of minorities in Congress [audio clips from the segment are available here].

Before he introduced Steele, Blitzer played a clip from former President Jimmy Carter, who attributed “overwhelming portion of the intensely-demonstrated animosity towards President Barack Obama” to racism. He then asked the RNC chairman for his take on the Democrat’s remarks. Steele replied that Carter was “just dead wrong....I am, like a lot of Americans, concerned and disagree with the President’s policies and approaches from the stimulus spending to this health care strategy. Am I a racist because I disagree with that? I don’t think so.”

One of the biggest concerns most conservatives had about a Barack Obama presidency was that any criticism of him or his policies would be reported by liberal media members as an act of racism. 

Sadly, such fears ended up actually being understated, for since Inauguration Day, the left-wing punditry have routinely depicted anyone with the guts to question the new President -- from Tea Party goers to town hall meeting protesters -- as wearing white robes and burning crosses on folks' lawns.

The latest example is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd who in her most recent screed attributed Rep. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) "You lie" outburst during Wednesday's healthcare speech to the ignorant notion that "Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it":

Nothing like a presidential assassination metaphor to spice up an otherwise insipid Sunday column . . .

Churning out yet another anti-Sarah screed, Dowd descended to this today [emphasis added]:

"At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo."

So Sarah wants to shoot the brother of Pres. Obama's chief of staff, along with the president himself.  Per Dowd, they're nothing but "human prey" to Palin.

In Maureen Dowd's Sunday New York Times column on the shock resignation of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ("Now, Sarah's Folly"), the proudly shallow columnist piled on with her usual self-satisfied (and pseudo-sophisticated) mockery.

More seriously, she regurgitated an extremely dubious anecdote from the recent Vanity Fair hit piece on Sarah Palin by former Times journalist Todd Purdum. It's a good example of how liberal media elites pass along their own prejudices by their willingness to believe even the most far-out stories that reflect badly on their political enemies.

Purdum was a long-time Times reporter who covered the Clinton White House before leaving the paper in 2006 (he is married to former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers).

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol found the anecdote flatly unbelievable, and even leftwing media critic Eric Boehlert at Media Matters said that it "doesn't pass the smell test." Which didn't stop Dowd from passing it along unchallenged:

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Judge Clarence Thomas both had compelling life stories when they were nominated for the Supreme Court. But only Sotomayor's story has been celebrated that way by the New York Times.

Sotomayor's rise from a housing project in the East Bronx to Supreme Court nominee was "a compelling life story" in Thursday's lead article by Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney.

And Scott Shane and Manny Fernandez even celebrated the life history of Sotomayor's mother, in Thursday's "A Judge's Own Story Highlights Her Mother's -- A Tale of Rising Out of Hardship." The Times argued that Celina Sotomayor's story was "as compelling in its own right" as that of her daughter.

And Sheryl Gay Stolberg's gushing 5,000-word "Woman in the News" profile of Sotomayor Wednesday positioned the judge's rise as "Her up-by-the-bootstraps tale, an only-in-America story...."

By contrast, the lead July 2, 1991 story by Maureen Dowd, then a White House reporter, was rather curt when it came to extolling the conservative Thomas's riveting life history. Dowd dispensed with Thomas's inspiring rise from poverty in Pin Point, Ga., where he was raised by his grandparents, in two and a half paragraphs, and suggested a cynical political motivation on the part of President George H.W. Bush. Thomas's life wasn't necessarily inspiring but was merely "offered as inspiring" by the president:

UPDATE at end of post: Dowd's employing the famous "I heard it from a friend" defense.

On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was accused of plagiarizing a piece posted a few days prior by Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo.

Dowd has now admitted her mistake.

As Marshall wrote Thursday (h/t Hot Air):

Maureen Dowd's Sunday column for the New York Times, datelined "The Final Frontier," beat to death the already tiresome conceit of comparing Barack Obama to the coolly rational Spock from Star Trek. In Dowd's version, Obama is going to beam down and save newspapers or something. The column is titled "Put Aside Logic," and it does.

The text box is even lamer: "Can we Kling On to our newspapers in the galactic age?" Some headline writer must have thought the play on words was clever enough to be worth the corniness. It wasn't.

Dowd did provide a few decent Obama tidbits amidst the silly premise: Not only is the Times the president's favorite paper (he gets "cranky" without it), he sold subscriptions briefly while attending Columbia University.

I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism.

It's been a question discussed by liberal bloggers for years, and the creator of "Star Wars" has finally settled it once and for all:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is Emperor Palpatine, and former President George W. Bush is Darth Vader.

Phew...glad that's settled.

So reports New York Times columnist -- as well as Bush/Cheney hater extraordinaire -- Maureen Dowd (h/t Big Hollywood):

Maureen Dowd's New York Times opinion piece yesterday was "Cheney and the Goat Devil."  The mainstream media are reveling in the purported falling out between former President George Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney.  Supposedly the two disagreed over granting Cheney's previous chief of staff, Scooter Libby, a pardon.  Dowd joins in the fun:

There were clues in the last couple of years that W. and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by cutting loose Rummy.

As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The New York Daily News’s Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration: “It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard the president say, ‘Run that by the vice president’s office.’ You used to hear that all the time.”

The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as “Cheney’s Cheney,” despite Vice’s tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too late “You are not the boss of me” spurning of Dick Cheney.

It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all the other gigantic blots on the copybook.

Approximating the Marc Rich case to that of Scooter Libby is akin to comparing Barney Frank to John Wayne.  They have almost nothing in common, something even Dowd may have noticed.

When historians look back in wonder at how a long-established publication like the New York Times could have declined from its virtual king-of-the-world status in mid-2002 to its Bush-deranged, 85%-devalued shadow of its former self, they will surely make a few stops at Maureen Dowd's twice-weekly, lost-in-another-world columns (the Dowd picture is from the Times's web site).

Today's offering from Dowd (HT Hot Air Headlines) is intended to be a final figurative kick in the shins at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, something she admits to fantasizing about having done to the Vice President this week when she had opportunities.

But the Dowd diatribe really ends up as a self-portrayal of someone who deeply imbibed the kool-aid her paper dished out over the past seven years and is beyond ever letting go, and serves as a microcosm of what the Old Gray Lady has done to itself in that same timeframe:

Does Maureen Dowd moonlight at MSNBC as Andrea Mitchell's writer? Here's how for, purposes of defending Caroline Kennedy in her NYT column today, Dowd mocked former New York Republican Senator Al D'Amato [emphasis added]:

[B]elieve me, she talks a whole lot better than the former junior senator from New York, Al D’Amato, who once wailed that he was “up to my earballs” in some mess, and another time complained to me that those “little Jappies” bring over boats full of cars and then take the boats back empty.

Now check out Mitchell's comments made during her 1 PM time slot on MSNBC today:

How about Sean Hannity as editor of the New York Times op-ed page?  Maybe O'Reilly and Cavuto in place of Dowd and Krugman as Times columnists?  It might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.  At least, not if Michael Wolff is right.  The Vanity Fair media maven, appearing on CNBC this afternoon, not only said that Rupert Murdoch wants the Gray Lady, but predicted he would get her.  [H/t Gat.]

View video here [via CNBC].

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that everybody is looking at [the NYT] and waiting for it to kind of go over a brink, to run out of cash, which they're in the process of doing. Or to find itself in a situation where actually, and this is really the key thing, they go looking for a buyer.

A bit later, Wolff, author of a book on Murdoch, mentioned his name as a likely buyer . . .

Well, I guess the McCain campaign really did get tough on the New York Times. Yesterday, leftist columnist Maureen Dowd was told she was no longer welcome on McCain's campaign plane and had to go home with her tail between her legs. Tim McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Mo's parting shot was a charge that because of this incident McCain is somehow against the First Amendment like she imagines Dick Cheney is.

Rather amusingly, she was dumped in the middle of Pennsylvania, too. After an August 30 rally in Washington, PA, she was told she could not get back on the plane. The rest of the press corps loaded up and off they flew leaving poor Mo standing there in shock.

Barack Obama's desultory debate performance has left Maureen Dowd in the dumps.  Her weekend column is a laundry list of Sunday-morning quarterbacking.  Dowd's biggest beef is Obama's failure to have goaded McCain into a damaging display of ill-temper.  Just for fun, let's meander through Maureen's musings.

The president . . . is so insecure that he could only choose a vice president he knew would never hold his title.

The MSM portrayed Bush 41 as lacking in self-confidence by taking, in Dan Quayle, a VP who wouldn't overshadow him.  Now Dowd depicts Bush 43 as insecure for taking a strong Veep. Damned if you do, etc.