Over the years, there have been occasional controversies over how much of Maureen Dowd's work she actually writes. I'm beginning to wonder how much of it she even reads.

Here's Dowd yesterday, describing “Republican Mean Girls” (warning: spit-take-inducing hypocrisy ahead):

These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they're mistreating the help or belittling the president's manhood, making snide comments about a rival's hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men's fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.

Maureen Dowd criticizing other people for “snide comments” about hair and “belittling the president's manhood” is like Sarah Palin criticizing someone for substituting practiced folksiness for factual analysis. Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby offered an overview of the hypocrisy:

In the past decade, Dowd has relentlessly “belittled the manhood” of a long string of Democratic pols. (Needless to say, this includes “Obambi,” the “diffident debutante” who reminded Dowd of Scarlett O'Hara. Al Gore was “so feminized he was practically lactating.”) She has made endless snide remarks about various major pols' hair. (Endlessly, John Edwards was ridiculed as “the Breck Girl.” She wrote at least seven columns which revolved around Gore's bald spot.) And no fashion show ever got more play than Gore's alleged switch to earth tones, an invented theme Dowd was happy to pimp, often in the columns where she imagined Gore fussing about The Spot as he looked into a mirror.

But that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. In 2007, I argued that Dowd's gender-based attacks on Democratic politicians aren't all that different from Ann Coulter's habit of calling them “faggots.”

And Dowd's obsession with clothes and hair and feminizing male Democrats isn't a thing of the distant past. She's still at it. Here's the lede of her August 31 column:

If we had wanted earth tones in the Oval Office, we would have elected Al Gore.

So: Has the Maureen Dowd who denounced “Republican Mean Girls” for “belittling the president's manhood” and “making snide comments about a rival's hair” and “ripping an opponent for spending money on a men's fashion show” ever read any columns by the Maureen Dowd who has spent decades trying to perfect exactly that kind of behavior? And do either of them understand the role Dowd has played in legitimizing the behavior she denounced yesterday?