How did she manage to ignore “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”?

Good lord. Thanks (er, I think) to Kevin Drum for pointing me to today’s Maureen Dowd column. It is, as they say, a doozy.

Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter. She’s more appealing when she’s beaten down; he’s less imposing… Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama. As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly [Obama], it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

If someone were to produce a mash-up of Dowd and Polly Toynbee, leavened with a dollop of George Monbiot we might have the world’s most compellingly-appalling columnist.