"Cobra" Seeks SWM, DWM, Any M At All
The NYT's Maureen Dowd, the 54-year-old author of Are Men Necessary? reportedly known as "the Cobra" around the White House, who could hardly stand to wait two months after 9/11 to condemn invading Afghanistan, really, really, really needs a man. Tim Blair has helpfully followed the saga from day one:

In April 2005, she was complaining about how her baby-boomer colleagues were obsessed with youth, which by May had devolved into debating who had attractive mothers. Somebody was developing a complex, and it clearly manifested, since the gal who previously called Australia "an apocalyptic BushWorld" was, January of this year flying to said warmongering wasteland on the hunt for an Aussie fellow she had a crush on 34 years ago, a guy named Rowan, who, it turns out, may have actually been an Irishman pretending to be an Australian to woo the young Dowd, now married with two children in England. So sad, and imagine the look on his face when he learned she was looking for him. Apparently, her desperation has now reached red alert status:

The really bad thing the feminists have done is to make it hard for Dowd to get a date. In her talk, Dowd said she hadn't had a date for yonks and that men were scared of smart women. She then gave the audience her hotel room number.

I've seen just enough of Dowd's book (it being one of those things you see on the bookstore shelf, skim out of morbid curiosity, and put back) to reasonably assert that little of what she thinks about relationships applies outside Manhattan, and most of it probably not even there. Parts of it reminded me of those hilarious ninteenth century studies of exotic tribes that we now know were totally and incredibly wrong.

Poor MoDo. The notion that men are "threatened" by smart women is, broadly speaking, crap, she can be attractive when she wants to be, and some of us even like 'em crazy. Dowd's problem finding men is, as Time's James Poniewozik once put it, that she's "an asshole".