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Maureen Dowd makes your blogstress a bit crazy. When she's good, she's very, very good, and when she's bad she's a very mean lady. Today we find her in good witch mode, promoting the candidacy of Caroline Kennedy for U.S. Senate from the Great State of New York: People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God. The press whines that she doesn’t have a pat answer about why she wants the job. I’ve interviewed a score of men running for president; not one had a good answer for why he wanted it. You go, girl!

Echidne of the Snakes, a goddess to whom your blogstress pays homage , has, on her most excellent blog, herself taken on yesterday's perplexing column by the New York Times 's Maureen Dowd: Dowd In A Feminist Coma Don't you think that Maureen Dowd has been hit by that large truck which says "feminist anger" on the side and that as a consequence she realized that a different way of mocking Hillary Clinton was called for if the important job of grinding Hillary into little bits under that red Prada heel was to be completed? CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF ECHIDNE'S POST Has Maureen Dowd stolen the pope's shoes ?

From the redoubtable Linda Hirshman , who usually blogs at TPM Cafe , which is today plagued with some technical ailment, comes this response to today's Maureen Dowd column, "An Imperfect Feminist Test," and your blogstress's assertion that, in it, Dowd makes a valid point or two: Whaddaya know? This morning, as a thought experiment, Maureen Dowd contemplated a woman making a successful run for President. She’d like that, she says. She even hopes the "male reporters" in the media would behave if it ever happened. Presumably she includes herself in that group. Dowd’s candidate would have an easier time than the real female candidate running, because Dowd’s candidate is not a real person, but one of those women on the internet pornography sites. Maureen’s candidate has no brain, no record, no history, no family, no past statements, no existence except in her overheated imagination. The internet porn candidate would be perfect, because, having no brain she co...

If there is another American writer as maddening as Maureen Dowd , your blogstress has yet to find her. While your cybertrix is hip to her own inner sexist, she winces when Dowd reveals her own, as she so often does when writing of Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton . Your Webwench has, by turns, both defended and derided Dowd, who holds court twice a week on the op-ed page of the New York Times . Today Dowd offers quite a good essay on her piece of NYT real estate about why Hillary Clinton's candidacy offers a less-than-perfect feminist test case for a female presidential contender (because of Bill , of course). But Dowd being Dowd, she can't help lay a few mines in her narrative landscape, as she does when she repeats, acknowledging its offensiveness, a heinous joke from a Penn Jillette routine: In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows tha...