SHORTER MAUREEN DOWD

Phew -- Giuliani is toast, so I can finally make fun of him without the slightest risk of helping Obambi or Hitlery!

Seriously, when was the last time Maureen Dowd wrote anything truly nasty about a Republican with a real chance of being the presidential nominee? Wait, I'll answer that: It was seven weeks ago. And the previous one was eleven weeks before that. (The love tap aimed at Rudy on October 17 doesn't count.) In that time, she's published sixteen attacks on Democrats (Hillary, mostly, but watch that change if the Obama campaign now regains momentum). If she's not slamming the Democrats, she's either mocking Bush and Cheney or ignoring American politics altogether.

She probably won't want to give the game away by writing a truly nice column about Romney or McCain or whoever emerges from the Republican scrum, so in all likelihood she'll just maintain this pattern all through '08. By November, my guess is that she'll have written more negative sentences about Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni during the year than about the GOP nominee.