Vampire in the Moonlight

Just when Maureen Dowd’s wrath-fueled Dick-Cheney-obsessed heart seemed to have quit its verbal throbbing at last, up she rises again to snap and snarl at him like a vampire in the moonlight.

The vice president’s effect on her has always fascinated—and repelled. Whatever’s at the root of it—did he callously refuse her an interview?—she’s come unglued over it, and her prose, which once upon a time (in the far distant past) had a kind of poison-toothed sharpness to it, is here nothing more than cartoonish aphorizing and spluttering incoherence, along the lines of what one might find splashed across the pages of an angry adolescent’s diary:

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues. . . .

[He] may no longer have a pulse, but his blood quickens at the thought of other countries he could have attacked. He salivates in his book about how Syria and Iran could have been punished. . . .

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America—like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions. . . .

A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force.

The op-ed page of the New York Times would be an embarrassment to real editors; luckily for Miss Dowd, there don’t appear to be any. She’s a little long in the fang to be thus tantruming in print, in any event. As nobody who pays her salary seems inclined to do so, putting a stop to it may necessitate the use of a cross, a wooden stake, and a tumblerful of holy water.