Just a couple additional thoughts to what Jamison Foser already noted about Maureen Dowd's most recent effort, in which she mocked Obama's social secretary Desiree Rogers, who became a bit player in the WH party crasher story. Dowd ridiculed Rogers for acting all “entitled” and “sashaying around.”

Dowd's piece was just the latest in a line of get-Rogers pieces that the Beltway press produced last week, because now, at least according to The Village and the GOP, the president's social secretary is responsible for all security within the White House complex.

Who knew? (The Secret Service has taken complete responsibility for the party crasher gaffe, but the press prefers the angle that Rogers was a central player in the security breach.)

But note this Dowd passage, in light of the fact that the WH announced that Rogers would not testify before Congress, because WH aides to the president almost never do, thanks to the separation of powers [emphasis added]:

Desiree, queen of social networking, didn't properly R.S.V.P. to the House Homeland Security Committee investigating the gate-crasher incident.

Even if Desiree thought Congress was grandstanding, it was goofy of her to use the Constitution to get out of a Congressional summons. The Obama White House is morphing into the Bush White House with frightening speed. Its transparency is already fogged up....Instead, she let the Secret Service director, Mark Sullivan, go up alone and take the rap.

See, according to Dowd, it was Rogers' who decided she wouldn't testify before Congress. The WH has no legal staff apparently, and it was the social secretary who made the call inside the West Wing that she wouldn't honor Congress' request to testify.

Whatever you say Maureen.

In terms of the bigger picture, it certainly is interesting to watch (mostly female) journalists twist the knife into the back of Rogers. Her Beltway sin? It has nothing to do with the party crasher story, of course. It's the fact that Rogers is too full of herself. Too high-profile. And she's too interested in self-promotion. At least those are the charge leveled against her.

Right. But if Rogers were a man in Washington, D.C., and exhibited the same personality traits, would the same press corps even notice, let alone condemn, Rogers' behavior? Isn't self-promotion and vanity pretty much required for admittance into the Beltway's (mostly male) elite circles?

UPDATED: From the Daily Hower:

Dowd's style has always been drawn from the “women's pages” of the 1950s—from the days when women hadn't yet been allowed to discuss substantial fare. Here we see her green-eyed style again, as we've seen it so many times in the past. Angered by Rogers' designer clothes, Dowd responds in the broken-souled way which has increasingly come to define our journalism during the years of this columnist's influence on our D-minus elite.