Maureen Dowd Is All in Your Head

Here's the most boring question I've been asked in the last 24 hours: What do you think of Maureen Dowd's plagiarism? Here's the most boring question I'm regularly asked: What do you think of Maureen Dowd?
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Here's the most boring question I've been asked in the last 24 hours: What do you think of Maureen Dowd's plagiarism? Here's the most boring question I'm regularly asked: What do you think of Maureen Dowd?

Here's my question: Why are boring people so interested in her? Ever since she began her column in the mid-nineties it has been de rigueur among people who, relatively speaking, have no opinions about anything to have very firm opinions about Dowd. Among a great swatch of uninteresting people she is the officially sanctioned, government-approved lightening rod.

She's titillating to the I-made-the-effort-to-read-the-New-York-Times-and-so-have-got-to-take-it-seriously crowd. She's catnip to the I-can-be-a-media-insider-too wannabes. She infuriates the I-have-opinions-too-so-why-does-she-get-a-column bunch.

This pretty much defines the great bulge of obsessive news bloggers and therefore answers the question of why an uninteresting sentence, which turns out not to be Dowd's, in an uninteresting Dowd column, is all the talk.

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