Maureen Dowd: How Can Anyone Defend this Woman?

I can't believe I'm getting comments defending M. Dowd on this thread. I just re-read the column in the NYT. It is really slimy; I was too far easy on her in my original post.

She basically insinuates, without coming right out and saying so, that Pope Benedict XVI is a Nazi sympathizer. What a pathetic, evil, little gossip and character assassin she is.

Look: there are only two possibilities. She either (1) knows better, because the true facts about Benedict's anti-Nazi family and how he was forced to "join" the Hitler Youth in order to stay in school but never actually attended a meeting etc. etc. are well known, in which case she is a mendacious and perfidious twerp, or (2) she does not know the facts, in which case she is far too ignorant to be writing for an actual newspaper. I think she knows exactly what she is doing and it stinks.

People on the left get all upset when right-wing kooks say that Obama is a Muslim and rightly so. That is nonsense. But to let Dowd get away with this and still get upset about birthers and so on just undermines your credibility. You appeal to fairness but you really practice cheap partisanship.

Paul's instruction to women to keep silent in the church makes no sense - until you read what a woman like Maureen Dowd has to say. If you assume he was talking about people like her, it begins to appear much more understandable.