Maureen Dowd lowered the bar for intellectual seriousness again yesterday with her rant on Vice President Cheney:

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam's being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

Is it coincidence that Dowd's name hasn't appeared among the top ten searches on Technorati either yesterday or today - something that has become a standard occurrence when one of the fire-walled columnists at the Times writes a fresh piece?