New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, with her trademark snark, deftly hit back against John McCain’s campaign for barring her from its campaign plane.
“I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn’t like,” Dowd wrote in an e-mail to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for ‘the foreseeable future.’ Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicole Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane.”
She added: “It was disappointing because I didn’t think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney.”
The break-up began in August, when the McCain plane left Pittsburgh without her. Dowd had written a column while there about McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska), that was called “Vice in Go-Go Boots?”