This blog took a fair amount of heat for suggesting during the primary that Maureen Dowd's nonstop catty columns about Hillary had an obsessive, even unhinged quality to them. So it was pretty gratifying to see that Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in yesterday with a piece aggressively attacking Dowd's coverage of the Dem primary.

The crux of Hoyt's case is that her columns on Hillary were "loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband." But take a look at Dowd's defense of herself...

"I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years," Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as "Obambi" and has said he has a "feminine" management style...

"From the time I began writing about politics," Dowd said, "I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes." Now, she said, "you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I've treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves."

This is false, and Dowd almost certainly knows it. As Media Matters notes today, many critics loudly objected to her ritual feminizing of male candidates -- her devotion of an entire column to John Edwards' $400 haircut, or her characterization of Obama as a "starlet" who "can make a three-course meal out of a Nicorette," to name only two examples.

More broadly, by pretending that people are asking her to treat Hillary differently than male candidates, Dowd is ducking the real case against her.

Dowd has a deeply depraved tendency to indulge in "twisting gender stereotypes around" far more often when writing about Dems than Republicans. And she often does so in a way that dovetails very neatly with GOP efforts to sow doubts about Dems' manhood. Remember John " Breck Girl" Edwards? This isn't about Hillary. It's about her treatment of all Dems.

Hoyt writes that Times edit page editor Andy Rosenthal defended her coverage by pointing out that she's supposed to have opinions. That's fine. It's the quality of these opinions that's at issue. No matter what Rosenthal says, it's very obvious that the utter predictability of Dowd's writing has become a liability that the august Times Op ed page is now forced to carry on a twice-weekly basis. Indeed, her predictability has turned that page into a point of mockery for well-placed Beltway insiders.

Dowd's constant treatment of politics as little more than Royal Court Entertainment really belongs to another time -- the Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton presidencies. It's thoroughly out of touch with what people want from their political commentary today. Can anyone remember the last time anyone praised a Dowd column for offering anything even remotely interesting in the way of reporting, context, knowledge, or genuine insight? We sure can't.

Late Update: A terrific take on this from Digby.