Oh boy, Maureen Dowd pissed off Marty Peretz! How can I not click on a blog post from The New Republic's prickly, racist sometimes-owner headlined "Maureen Dowd And The Saudi Royals"?

MoDo wrote a paint-by-numbers MoDo column—childish nicknames, armchair psychoanalysis, teleprompter "joke" in the very first sentence, St. Patrick's Day-related "donnybrook" reference—except it was about Israel and not about, like, an imagined conversation between Rumsfeld and Cheney about how Hillary Clinton is a bitch, or something.

Maureen's been in Saudi Arabia, talking to Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. So her column, among all that nonsense with the jokes and nicknames, had a quote from Prince Saud al-Faisal. It also had a lot more quotes from pro-Israel journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, from The Atlantic. But it looks like Marty just sorta stopped reading it after he saw the bit where a Muslim said something critical of some Israeli Jews?

Because in his critique of the op-ed, he doesn't actually mention that the Saudi Prince's one quoted criticism is echoed and expanded on by the other guy, Goldberg.

You see, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, has actually instructed her on Israeli politics. "[Faisal] warned me," she tells us, "that Israel's ultra-conservative religious groups were ‘killing every option that comes out that has peace in its objective'." Of course, it is true that the prince—don't be too impressed by the title: there are more princes in Saudi Arabia than taxi drivers—knows a whole lot about "ultra-conservative religious groups." For instance, and just as an instance, 15 out of the 19 pious 9/11 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia.

I wonder, in fact, how many of Faisal's royal cousins, if not actually his brothers (and perhaps he himself), have contributed to the ultramontane in Muslim politics and theology.

It's like Marty sees the words "Saudi Arabia" and "prince" and just compulsively types "taxi drivers" and "9/11." (He probably compulsively types a lot of other things, too, that he's smart enough to edit out before hitting "publish.")

Please, Marty, leave criticisms of Maureen Dowd columns to people who are actually less crazy than her.