Barack Obama has some distant relative from a place called "Moneygall," in Ireland. Maureen Dowd joked about that in an interview that ran on Monday. Days later, she couldn't come up with a better line.

She was intrigued that Obama's Irish ancestors hail from a town called Moneygall in Co. Offaly. Immediately she began, as she always does, playing around with the word.

"That's what this crisis is all about," she said. "Money and the gall of people and how they treated it."

Ok, we made fun of that line, earlier this week, but, you know, that's an off-the cuff bit of meaningless "wordplay" there. Surely more time was spent crafting lines for her famously witty and daring column, right?

On St. Patrick's Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

Sigh. There is also a bit about an "Irish temper" and some cutesy Irish immigrant expression she claims her dad used to say involving a "boiled carrot" (Irish food is terrible), but otherwise the rest of her day-after-St. Patrick's Day column is about AIG.