What should be my outrage about wrong-about-everything hack Bill Kristol getting a New York Times gig (because apparently the dozens of other media outlets he seems to have unlimited access to aren't enough) is attenuated by the fact that the Paper O' Record still employs Maureen Dowd. Melissa McEwan, Molly Ivors, and Echidne deal with her latest vacuous atrocity. As usual, it involves Dowd projecting various trivial personal obsessions onto the candidates and then using this as a reasons to attack their candidacies. Frankly, I would prefer straightforward Republican hackery to this. Strangely, Dowd largely spares Edwards this time, although if he wins in Iowa I'm sure we'll be back to MoDo's Deep Thoughts about his haircuts. Speaking of which, elsewhere among the inexplicably sinecured it is indeed funny that Richard Cohen literally can't get through one sentence of his column about the alleged mendacious lying of candidates without a mendacious lie about Edwards. As Atrios says, "it's so awesome when the Villagers can't even keep their fake "scandals" straight." But, really, this makes sense; once you've decided that the price of someone's haircuts or their spouse's sex life should be major factors in determining who should be President of the United States, whether the trivia you discuss is actually true or not is largely beside the point. Indifference to truth is just on symptom of the larger problem of hiring people who don't care about politics and know nothing about any substantive issue to write about politics on major op-ed pages. --Scott Lemieux
