Maureen Dowd, Shrewd Judge of Human Character
By 
As Atrios always says, leaving aside the merits of the theater critic approach to political punditry (which have always struck me as scant), most of its practitioners are really terrible even on their own terms. Maureen Dowd, of course, has a ratio of theater criticism:actual politics that approaches 100:0, and yet is notably inept the former. for example:
Having seen Donald Trump as a braggadocious but benign celebrity in New York for decades, I did not regard him as the apotheosis of evil.
In fact, throughout this period Trump was systematically bilking people out of their money with an endless parade of scams. Why, it’s almost as if forming a vague first impression based on some superficial characteristic and never thinking to revise it doesn’t really work.
As for the rest of the column, I think I’ll just outsource:
This whole column is sort of like a long Kinsley gaffe about why its author should be fired https://t.co/uaMIGAI7S7
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) June 20, 2016