As a small child, I read a magazine many American children loved. It featured a Do-Bee and a Don’t-Bee: the Do-Bee flew around doing nice, positive deeds; grinning ear to ear, the Don’t-Bee stung the hell out of you every time.

It may have been the same children’s magazine with vignette’s about GOOFUS and GALLANT, another quaint delineation between JERK and NICE GUY.

Kids were supposed to take our pick. Which kinds of people did we want to be? The lucky ones had good parents, churches, teachers, scout masters, coaches to help them buttress the right choice. The Eddy Haskells of the world were on their own.

It’s no surprise that politics brings back my childhood memories, especially of the playground. But word of Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column about Congressman Joe Wilson really hit me. Suddenly I realized that Dowd’s a Don’t-Bee, by any other name a glowering GOOFUS who gets paid to sting.

A recent barb slammed the South Carolina Rep. for being a white southern slug, threatened by lectures from a “brainy” black president.

Besides comprehending the inverse relationship between high IQ‘s and high CSQ’s (Common Sense Quotient), regular, rational Americans know the difference between Ensigns and Admirals, between larvae and mature insects. They understand the total divorce from reality achieved by Dowd, Obama, Pelosi, Frank and other Don’t-Bees who never make it out of cocoons.

When in doubt, which has to be daily, swarms of Don’t-Bees like Dowd pollinate the race weed and hope it swells. Incapable of understanding how Do-Bees think, analyze and act, the Don’t-Bees get it wrong everytime. Unable to make honey, they produce a kind of venom, proverbially known as vinegar.

If world issues weren’t so serious, Dowd’s toxic remarks about Joe Wilson would be hilarious.

Once, when a ton of us were small children, people who acted like Dowd represented exactly how not to be. What’s changed?

Are Americans supposed to believe that the majority of us now read, if not revere, people who are jerks? That hordes of Don’t-Bees now “worship” people who get paid to flaunt their GOOFUSness…to spread their venom across America, dumbing, downing, and dividing our beloved country at every turn?

Maureen Dowd writes and says what nice, decent people from most spiritual traditions were taught not to. What happened to make this little Catholic girl so mean, hateful and wrong? What made her choose to be a female version of Eddy, instead of Wally and Beave? What magazines and books did she read as a child? What did her grandparents teach her? Her church? Her college? Should we blame it on Manhattan? How about the nuns again, the priests, the playground, or her parents?

What kinds of people do most Americans admire and respect these days: the Don’t-Bees or the Do-Bees? GOOFUS or GALLANT? Eddy Haskell or Beaver Cleaver? Which ones do they teach their children to try to emulate? Do they want Don’t-Bees to teach their children how to do everything wrong? Where have all the Do-Bees gone and their many-colored flowers too?  

It’s one thing to believe the conclusions of a person you feel is steady, loving, honest, and more-or-less “issue-free.” But even a child can see that Don’t-Bees Dowd, Maddow, Olberman, Jackson, et al have serious happiness-and-hate issues. At least take that into account before you swallow their poisons.

Unless you really do believe that the Don’t-Bees are the be alls to end all.