Just Don't: Dowd and Brooks

After years (years!) of knowing that I cannot read the New York Times' Maureen Dowd -- or David Brooks, for that matter -- without feeling a surge of rage and a desire to send them obscene emails, I went and read them just now. Why? I'm not going to bother to link to them. People who want to stay on an even keel should not read them either. Suffice it to say that Dowd, queen of superficiality, said Clinton pulled the "poor woman card" the other day and alluded to various spurious scandals -- God, does this kind of hack deserve a Pulitzer? -- while Brooks wrote an equally facile column that pretended Clinton no longer existed based on the Iowa results (he probably doesn't even feel embarassed with Clinton's New Hampshire victory now on the books).

Here's the problem: These people forget that writing an opinion column gives you license to opine, which is not the same as writing factually unsupported innuendo. In other words, have an opinion, but then have the decency to construct a scaffolding of analysis underneath it, so that readers can evaluate your position. Both of them disturb me with their veneer of intelligence, which covers nothing but celebrity tabloid journalism disguised as Washington insight.

I'll take Bob Herbert or Molly Ivins (RIP) or Carl Hiaasen or Chauncey Bailey (RIP) any day. Legwork? It may not be in style, but it's what the best columnists do.