NYT columnist wants you to know that Sarah Palin is no Marilyn Monroe

It's come to this: Marilyn Monroe as some sort of intellectual giant compared to, you know, those conservative chicks.

Marilyn was not completely in on the joke. Scarred by her schizophrenic mother and dislocated upbringing, she was happy to have the classics put in her hand. What’s more, she read some of them, from Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400 books.

Miller once called Marilyn “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

As conservatives we're not really sure what that means (Miller lost us a "poet") but we're confident that both Bobby and JFK can totally relate to that last clause in Miller's quote.

And how smart was Marilyn? Let's let Maureen describe her writing style.

“Fragments,” a new book of her poems, letters and musings, some written in her childlike hand with misspellings in leather books and others on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria and the Beverly Hills Hotel, is affecting.

We can assume that Faulkner's,Whitman's, Twain's, Wolfe's (both of them) place atop the American literary food chain are secure.

But, hey, we're not here to pick on Monroe. He're the piece d'resistance from Mo:

On Saturday, at a G.O.P. rally in Anaheim, Calif., Palin mockingly noted that you won’t find her invoking Mao or Saul Alinsky. She says she believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be — as Palin, O’Donnell and Angle keep saying — just like you.

If liberals like Maureen Dowd and President Obama want to argue the merits of American exceptionalism and who possesses it and who doesn't, does it not make sense that they should at least have an inkling as to what it means?

That paragraph is stunning in that Dowd thinks of American exceptionalism as either a measure of qualification (for running the country) or as the opposite of commonness... we're not sure such is the degree of incoherency. Or maybe she does know and completely abused the meaning in order to make a cheap and lame point at the end of her column.

Either way, another sloppy, sloppy effort from the nation's paper of record.