Maureen Dowd finally seems to get it. She's been hedging around the truth for months. She's been expressing qualms about Dubya in her cute style since before the election. But, for the first time, she seems to finally be taken the horror that is Dubya seriously.

WASHINGTON — You might sum up the president's call to war Thursday night as "Message: I scare." As he rolls up to America's first pre-emptive invasion, bouncing from motive to motive, Mr. Bush is trying to sound rational, not rash. Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized. But the Xanax cowboy made it clear that Saddam is going to pay for 9/11. Even if the fiendish Iraqi dictator was not involved with Al Qaeda, he has supported "Al Qaeda-type organizations," as the president fudged, or "Al Qaeda types" or "a terrorist network like Al Qaeda." We are scared of the world now, and the world is scared of us. (It's really scary to think we are even scaring Russia and China.) Bush officials believe that making the world more scared of us is the best way to make us safer and less scared. So they want a spectacular show of American invincibility to make the wicked and the wayward think twice before crossing us. Of course, our plan to sack Saddam has not cowed the North Koreans and Iranians, who are scrambling to get nukes to cow us.

Of course, it might have been nice if Ms. Dowd had realized back in the 90s when she was constantly harping on Clinton and during the 2000 campaign when she made her fair share of wooden-Gore comments, that there was a serious side to this business and that maybe, just maybe, we need serious analysis of politicians in order to decide who should make those decisions. But that would have spoiled the fun and she probably wouldn't have made as much money in the process. Karl Northman, a poster on Table Talk, posted the perfect eviceration of Ms. Dowd (profanity alert):

Nice line, Bitch. And how hard did you work to put that fuckhead in office? How much did it seem like just a fucking game to you, politics, schmolitics, it's all a game, let's make fun of the dweeb? That was a pretty good column. Sounds like you might have suddenly realized that there is Real Shit in the Real World. Three years late. Tell you what. Write a fucking column, the column that is your plea as you throw yourself on the mercy of the court, that says: "Man, did I fuck up when I thought there was no difference between Gore and Bush, when I thought Bush was a nice guy, and I made fun of wooden-dork Gore. I was just having fun. That's what we all did. It was just fun. We didn't really think about the consequences, we were just out at the newspaper with a bunch of our friends, and we all got to talking and laughing and thinking it would be fun to make fun of the dweeb - I mean, everyone knows it doesn't make any difference who the president is. So we all thought ha ha, and did our best to make fun of the dweeb, and we pretended that we like the drunken jock. "Anyway, your Honor, we're real sorry about how the whole country got trashed, it was just kind of a practical joke that got out of hand, you know how it is, when you're hanging out with your friends, they seem more important at the moment than little things like burning down the school.