Sullivan, Dowd, Time, Etc.: Minor flapdoodle in Time about the president "reinstating" the practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate memorial at Arlington. (Read the correction here.) Both Andrew Sullivan (you know the drill, scroll down) and Maureen Dowd make a point of loudly tsk-tsking this; then Sullivan gets holier than Dowd because her "retraction" involved too little self-flagellation. (Glad you're hammering her, Andy, but you need to listen up here too.) In addition to simply correcting herself, Dowd has to sneer as she corrects:

In my last column, I cited a Time article reporting that the president had "quietly reinstated" a custom of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial. Time has since corrected the story, saying he didn't revive the custom, but simply continued it. I would still ask: Why keep a tradition of honoring the Confederacy while you're going to court to stop a tradition of helping black students at the University of Michigan?

Obviously that bit about the Michigan case is meant only to excuse Bill Clinton. One could say to Dowd, "You can't hammer Bush for something Clinton did too." But Dowd, so smart, is ahead of you: "But Clinton," her implied argument runs, "wasn't practicing the politics of economic genocide [would this hyperbole be a reach for her? Nah...] against African Americans!"

Memo to Dowd: According to Lincoln, the defeated Confederates were American soldiers, no more or less so than the Union soldiers. Their memorial is fitting and just. It does not imply any support for the Confederacy's cause to honor dead Americans, soldiers who, in the great American tradition, fought bravely and died for their side. What's next, Maureen? Tear down the Vietnam Memorial because that was another unjust cause? Maybe you can serve us by letting us know just what is and is not worthy of our honor and remembrance. Oh, and break the list down by president and party, too, so that we can keep up with what acts of public policy disqualify other acts of public remembrance.

Maureen, you're such an idiot, I can't believe you live and breathe. I'm sorry that the world is changing in a way that interferes with your attempts to salve your own festering, unconscious guilt with finger-wagging self-justification. That's life. Grow up, see a therapist for the penis envy, and get job where you contribute something to the world, rather than just sucking, maggot-like, on the carcass of the silly, narcissistic "liberalism" of your generation and excreting its tired trope on the pages of the Times.