This is infantile. Maureen Dowd has imagined an exchange between Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and Robert Gates in the Oval Office. Obama and Gates are played completely straight. Cheney is a four year-old’s scribbling of a smelly monster who eats unicorns. These are actual statements she ascribes to the Cheney of her paranoid liberal imaginationland:

CHENEY: What are you going to do about it, Hussein? Mirandize me?

…

CHENEY: You’re such a Nervous Nellie you can’t even use the words “war,” “win,” “terrorism,” “enemy combatant,” “Bomb Iran,” “Fire Eric Holder” or “Fire John Brennan.”

…

CHENEY: Scott’s an All-American winner — Sarah Palin with better legs and less sarcasm. And the hair extensions make her seem even more phony.

…

CHENEY (stomping out): Is that your Indonesian birth certificate in the Oval vault?

The New York Times demands high enough standards of evidence when the target of a defamatory remark is a liberal. But Joe Wilson is fair game – not because he behaved so badly, but because the financially troubled “old gray lady” and her employees are still in the grip of Messianic delusions.