Molly Ivors on Maureen Dowd. Just read the whole thing

Maureen Dowd starts today's outing with the least convincing line ever: "I'm not bitter."

Wow. Is she kidding? Dowd is so bitter she uses alum in place of talcum powder. She's so bitter you could put her into a champagne cocktail. (Which she would probably like just fine, come to think of it.) She's put more bunnies into more pots of boiling water than Jacques Pepin on a hasenpfeffer bender. She's so bitter...

Okay, I could go on like that for days, but you get the point. At least she finally admits what we have known for years: despite her almost accidental distaste for the president, she's a Republican at heart.

Shorter Dowd: "I became a Republican because those mean Democrats made me feel bad for being a rich racist."

But of course, she doesn't say that. Instead, it's "My family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values." And she makes sure to squeeze church, bowling, and immigration in there, just to be sure. (Not quite sure how the fuck-me pumps, married men, and feng shui fit into this universe, however.)

Look, people who left the Dems between Kennedy and Reagan did so for one reason: civil fucking rights. Blather on all you want about traditional values and welfare queens and entitlement programs, but it boils down, like a bunny, to one thing: black people should have remembered their place. The Southern Strategy worked, and not just in the South. Northern racists bought it too. I challenge Louisiana to produce as thoroughgoing a bigot as Thers's late Uncle Dave, a man who hoarded rusty canned goods and moldering reel-to-reel tapes from the John Birch Society in his basement in Queens, guarding against the day when hordes of black people were going to come marching up Northern Boulevard in Flushing and target electrician's shops full of broken equipment. And don't get me started on cops like Father Dowd, who mistake their contact with criminals for some bizarre kind of anthropological evidence. It's a load of crap.