"I Did It" -- As told to Maureen Dowd

Once again, Maureen Dowd phones in a column that is the envy of every ink-stained slacker who would love her gig. Who wouldn't like to get paid the big bucks for twice-weekly columns of stupifying mediocrity?

Today's offering is just so darned clever, you'll want to slap yourself upside the head. Dowd channels Clarence Thomas for an O.J.-inspired "I Did It" confessional. Is that hilarious or what?

As MoDo tells it, Thomas is an embittered guy who's "done it" to every one from Anita Hill to Al Gore as payback for his own sense of inferiority. As far as dime-store psychology goes, that ain't bad.

Dowd, though, is projecting as usual and reveals more about herself than her narrator-target:

I used to have grave reservations about working at white institutions, subject to the whims of white superiors. But when Poppy’s whim was to crown his son — one of those privileged Yale legacy types I always resented — I had to repay The Man for putting me on the court even though I was neither qualified nor honest.

So I voted to shut down the vote-counting in Florida by A. — oh, I’ll just say it: Al — because if he’d kept going he might have won. I helped swing the court in case No. 00-949, Bush v. Gore, to narrowly achieve the Bush restoration.

I know it wasn’t what my hero Atticus Finch would have done. But having the power to carjack the presidency and control the fate of the country did give me that old X-rated tingle.

Al Gore’s true claims didn’t matter in that standoff any more than Anita Hill’s true claims did during my confirmation. That’s the beautiful thing about being a conservative. We don’t push for the truth. We push to win, praise the Lord.

It’s a relief to finally admit it: I’m proud to have hastened Al’s premature political death, hanging by hanging chads. It was, you might say, a low-tech lynching.

Wasn't it actually the cynical Dowd that helped pave the road to Al Gore's political ruin? Wasn't it Dowd's columns about earth tones and Gore "practically lactating" that ignored the truth? Talk about a "low-tech lynching." And I'll bet MoDo enjoyed "that old X-rated tingle" when Gore, with her help, was hung by those chads.