"Please fire Maureen Dowd"

"...or at least get her a fact-checker," requests middle-brow Salon, according to which, there has been "another screw-up that would get a less famous reporter axed." This latest brouhaha is over a misquote which Dowd attributes to conducting an interview in a noisy restaurant.

The New York mayoral race this week detoured into one of the occasional rounds of umbrage-taking that are a regular feature of American campaigns, as City Council Speaker Christine Quinn claimed that the wife of Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unfairly criticized Quinn for being childless. This wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal, even in terms of our little municipal election, except that the quote was actually a misquote. Making matters worse: The misquoter was New York Times political columnist Maureen Dowd. And Maureen Dowd has something of a history of screw-ups like this.

In chopping and screwing that response, Dowd turned what is basically a policy criticism, and one clearly based on de Blasio’s well-known campaign message, into a much juicier personal slam. The Times corrected the column and Dowd apologized, blaming the error on the noisiness of the diner where the interview was conducted — a diner whose name she also got wrong in her column, necessitating another correction. But the thing was already out there, a little outrage balloon launched into the frenzied last weeks of a primary campaign.

Is Dowd just another boomer resting on the laurels of past glories, ready to be comfortably stabled with a feedbag of organic oats? Has the time come to replace her with a newer princess of snark to serve up misquotes that sway public elections? I seriously doubt it.