Wednesday Maureen Dowd— in the midst of the media's current sex-blitz exploding on the White House lawn— has added a new ploy in her anti-Hillary arsenal, an unfounded homophobic suggestion made by "sex casualty" Dick Morris that Hillary Clinton may not really like men. Dowd's quoting, used at the moment of the Clinton family's greatest public crisis, reflects, perhaps, her own greatest fears about herself, some suggest. If she truly suspects lesbianism in Hillary, they say, the Times columnist may be projecting on the First Lady what she herself secretly denies within.

Certainly its become clear that Maureen Dowd is a prominent literary champion for the kind of disgruntled cynicism that irks readers loaded with less of her superabundant personal animosity. "I think Ms. Dowd ought to add a 'y' to her name," said one such critic.

The Morris quote used with homophobic intent by Dowd referred first to the embattled President. "But lets assume," she quotes Morris as saying, "that his sexual relationship with Hillary is not all it's supposed to be, let's assume that some of the allegations that Hillary—sometimes not being into regular sex with men—might be true…."

In 1988, according to Michael Moore, Ms. Dowd had allegedly plagiarized a story from the Congressional Quarterly, "publishing it under her byline in The New York Times, an offense the Times kept silent about." The irony, says Moore, is that at the time Dowd did this, she was reporting on another's reputed plagiarism, that of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. "Perhaps," reflected an angry gay activist, "there's a similar ironic vein running through Dowd's hint that Hillary may eschew men. Maybe Ms. Dowdy herself does too! Maybe she's just a frustrated and mean closet case!"

But if Maureen Dowd has adopted a sex-o-phobic posture, her co-columnist in the Times, Thomas L. Friedman, who reports on "Foreign Affairs," has done so too. In his Tuesday Op-Ed, Friedman wrongly predicted—as did the Times editorial that day—that the President's State of the Union Speech would go unheeded while cameras would likely focus—because of the White House "scandal"-- upon Mrs. Clinton's face. Wednesday, contradicting the Times pious "prophecies", newspapers' nationwide headlines said that President Clinton's speech had been delivered in a "upbeat" style and that the points he'd wanted to emphasize had been heard with much enthusiasm from coast to coast.

Friedman's anti-Clinton column, titled Character Suicide, unintentionally revealed its author's sexual-shyness, a full-blown admission that such revelations as he'd heard about Clinton would make any personal communications with the President utterly impossible. Insisting Clinton's State of the Union ideas would get short shrift on the spot, The New York Times columnist wrote: "It is hard to really hear what a president has to say when you are too embarrassed to look at him in the eye."

Friedman, posing as a supporter of Clinton's agenda, nevertheless rushed quickly to judgment, saying the President "was involved with someone in a way he never should have been and by doing so has let us all down who believed, if not in him personally, in the policies he has elected to implement."

"He broke the bargain," said Friedman's column. " I knew he was a charming rogue… but I didn't think he was a reckless idiot."

A reader who had previously admired Friedman's commentaries on world affairs said of the columnist, "I knew he was a powerful communicator, but I didn't think he was a puritanical nerd."