MoDo, Kicked off McCain’s Plane, Declares End of ‘Great Relationship’

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?”