Gee, Karl Rove seems to have taken umbrage at Maureen Dowd's latest column. Especially this part:

So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world. ...

What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.

Responded Rove, yesterday on Fox:

Rove: I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for the New York Times, who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for anybody on the conservative side of the aisle.

I actually went to an editorial board meeting at the New York Times and wasted a couple of bucks on some flowers to give Maureen Dowd at the meeting, so that it would give her a smile on her face, and that didn't even work. This is a dour, downbeat liberal. And, uh, it was an entertaining piece, I frankly agree with her that President Obama's entitled to go to New York and entertain his wife. I suspect I would have done it maybe just a little bit later in the year than now. But he's entitled. You do not want a president who feels confined in the bubble.

But why she felt so compelled to go out and trash somebody who did our country a great service for eight years and handled himself in an admirable fashion is just typical of Maureen Dowd's twisted, bitter little heart.

Well, I customarily don't find myself in the position of defending Maureen Dowd, but she was of course quite right. She's not merely trashing George W. Bush -- she's demonstrating the laughable falsity of Rove's claim that Bush was "someone who did our country a great service" (yeah, if by "service" you mean the agricultural kind) and "handled himself in an admirable fashion" (other than that whole running-the-country-off-a-cliff thing).

Being asleep at the wheel at 9/11, talking the country into invading another under false pretenses, sleepwalking through Katrina, inducing the greatest economic crisis since the Depression: Not exactly what I'd call "great service" or "admirable," would you?

Rove goes on to talk about how leaderless the Republicans are these days. Somehow, what goes unmentioned is the great damage his administration did to his party. Of course.