Maureen Dowd, as not enough people remember, spent the 2000 campaign 1)writing columns that were frequently dishonest and all so dumb they should have been published in the original crayon that 2)aggressively advanced the Gush-Bore narrative of the race. The idea that George W. Bush was a harmless moderate was…profoundly and obviously wrong and the results were awful. Admittedly, she wasn’t the only one on this point — her colleague Frank Rich was just as bad. But he learned. Maureen Dowd, as always, learns nothing. And hence her latest column:

The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

Anybody who thinks Hillary Clinton is fundamentally a Republican has absolutely no business getting paid to write about politics by anybody, let alone the most prestigious op-ed page in the country.

They can’t go with Donald Trump. He’s too volatile and unhinged.

The obvious problem with this is that the vast majority of Republicans who matter are, in fact, going with Trump.

The erstwhile Goldwater Girl

Here we have an ironclad indication that a column is not worth reading. For the record, for most of the 1964 campaign Hillary Clinton was 16. Reagan voted for FDR multiple times as an adult, but suggesting that as a presidential candidate he was a standard-issue New Deal Democrat would have been a firable offense. This is even dumber.

Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all? Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and got rid of those pesky welfare queens.

All of these things are certainly worthy of substantial criticism. But leaving aside the fact that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are, as best as this blog can determine, different people, there’s the much bigger problem that it ain’t 1996 anymore. The parties, entirely without Dowd noticing, have diverged massively. And norms that even in periods of divided government Congress and the president need to cut deals to get things done have been clubbed to death and thrown into the Potomac. The DOMA reference, in particular, gives away the show. What disabilities, precisely, can Clinton be expected to impose on LBGT people? Aren’t the facts that we have a national right to same-sex marriage because Democratic presidents nominated 4 Supreme Court justices and a Democratic Senate stopped a Republican president from getting his first choice, and Clinton’s justices will affirm this decision and Republican nominees in 2017 almost certainly would not, vastly more relevant than legislation that passed 20 years ago with massive bipartisan majorities?

Unlike Trump, she hasn’t been trashing leading Republicans. You know that her pals John McCain and Lindsey Graham are secretly rooting for her.

LOL at the idea that John McCain and especially Lindsey Graham are “leading Republicans” in 2016. And perhaps we should be asking why this rooting has to be secret. Trump is, in fact, the leading Republican.

The Democratic nominee put out an ad featuring Trump-bashing Michael Hayden, an N.S.A. and C.I.A. chief under W. who was deemed “incongruent” by the Senate when he testified about torture methods. And she earned an endorsement from John Negroponte, a Reagan hand linked to American-trained death squads in Latin America.

It is true that a bunch of neocons have endorsed Clinton. And the reasons for it is obvious: Clinton is not a nut, and people primarily concerned with foreign policy don’t necessarily have the strong commitment to upper-class tax cuts and forcing women to carry pregnancies to term that compels most Republicans to go along with Trump.

There are, of course, entirely legitimate reasons to be concerned about Clinton’s foreign policy, which will almost certainly be worse than Obama’s (although much better than Bush’s.) Politically, she should respond to the endorsement of people like Negroponte with “they endorse me; I don’t endorse them.” But the endorsements themselves don’t really tell you much of anything other than that Trump is unacceptable to many Republicans who don’t care about domestic policy.

Hillary is a safer bet in many ways for conservatives. Trump likes to say he is flexible. What if he returns to his liberal New York positions on gun control and abortion rights?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh my. Dowd is literally as clueless about how politics works as an otherwise unpublishable random Salon dudebro. Even assuming that Trump wanted to be liberal on these issues, how exactly would he do it? Sign the gun control legislation that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t pass? The Federalist Society hacks he nominates would vote to affirm Roe because he appointed them? Help me out here — I’m sure there’s an Aaron Sorkin script that explains how it all works.

Trump is far too incendiary in his manner of speaking, throwing around dangerous and self-destructive taunts about “Second Amendment people” taking out Hillary, or President Obama and Hillary being the founders of ISIS. And he still blindly follows his ego, failing to understand the fundamentals of a campaign. “I don’t know that we need to get out the vote,” he told Fox News Thursday. “I think people that really wanna vote are gonna get out and they’re gonna vote for Trump.”

Despite which, most Republican voters and most Republican politicians of actual influence support Trump. So how is this behavior un-Republican, exactly?

And now, the punchline:

And that’s how Republicans prefer their crazy — not like Trump, but like Cheney.

Clinton and Cheney — not a dime’s worth of difference!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the fact that these witless and comprehensively ill-informed columns are not only published in the New York Times but used to be showered with awards is about as damning an indictment of America’s overpaid and underachieving elites as you could ask.

UPDATE: LOL: