Dowd Takes Down Bin Laden & Desmond

I always enjoy Maureen Dowd's over-the-top breathless but chatty opinion pieces in the NY Times. Here's a bit from her latest effort. In this she compares Osama Bin Laden to Norma Desmond:

Maybe it’s because I watched the videos of Osama bin Laden released by the Obama administration while staying at the Sunset Tower Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. But seeing him holed up in his room, looking pathetic with white beard and blankie, gazing at himself on screen in his heyday, Osama was oh so Norma Desmond (with a dash of Woody Allen in “Bananas”).“I am big,” he might have sneered. “It’s the thumb drives that got small.”

The C.I.A. is playing mind games — both with Al Qaeda, trying to show its slain leader as a pitiable figure, and with Pakistan, sending a message that we may have even more information than we do, and that double-dealing Pakistanis had best cooperate because they could be embarrassed, too.

She also writes about the director and screenwriter of "The Hurt Locker" making a movie of the hunt for Bin Laden that for release in 2012.