Look, it's easy to make fun of Maureen Dowd. We do it all the time! Talk about nothing of substance, psychoanalyze pols, imply that male Democrats are effete and female politicians of all stripes are raging harridans, bash the Clintons, toss in some increasingly out of date pop cultural references, and stir with occasional tired Bush-mocking. What you shouldn't do is pretend Maureen wrote a column exposing the secret fact that all of Obama's donors are Muslims and Communists, or something. Which is what one enterprising Obama critic has done!

One of the newest and surely among the most creative of the thousands of insane anti-Obama smear emails making the rounds purports to be a June 29 column by Maureen Dowd. Apparently all of those small donations to Obama's campaign, according to pretend-Dowd, came from "Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries."

"What I learned from this insider was shocking but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that when it comes to fund raising there simply are no rules that can't be broken and no ethics that prevail. [...]

"I guess we should have been somewhat suspicious when the numbers started to come out. We were told (no proof offered) that the Obama internet contributions were from $10.00 to $25.00 or so.

"If the $200,000,000 is right, and the average contribution was $15.00, that would mean over 13 million individuals made contributions? That would also be 13 million contributions would need to be processed. How did all that happen?"

Well, we gotta admit, the pretend rhetorical question is a kinda nice touch, there. But she's not calling him "O-Bambi" so it's obviously a phony. Also Maureen Dowd does not deal with money, numbers, or objective "facts."

The best part of the whole thing is the real Dowd, on when she stumbled upon the email: "I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me." The second line! She couldn't remember the lede from a column from last week?

(The real column, for the record, was about how Hillary and her supporters are crazy ladies.)