Queen of quips.

Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk by Maureen Dowd, Putnam. 523 pages. $25.95.

I missed Maureen Dowd's take on the Bush daughters' appearance at the Republican Convention. Too many speakers to skewer and too few column inches, I guess. So the twins' bratty debut went unmentioned by the person best qualified to dissect it.

How did it get past Karl Rove, I wondered, when Jenna and Barbara so rudely tweaked their "unhip" grandparents? Grandmother Barbara Bush "thinks Sex in the City is something married people do, but never talk about," they told the nation. Richer still, they treated the convention like a roast of their father, saying now was their chance to embarrass him. And they proceeded to do so, making unflattering comparisons to John Kerry, revealing, with plenty of eye-rolling, that George and their mother actually call each other "Bushie," and reminding the audience of their own "young and irresponsible" behavior with alcohol--and their dad's.

The girls looked like two chips off the old block--self-involved, smirking, entitled. Maybe the family-values crowd is willing to overlook their display of adolescent cheek in an effort to appeal to young, female voters.

But someone forgot the part of the script where the jokes are supposed to hit the sweet spot, revealing a soft, personable, likable side of their target.

What the Bush family showed instead was an attitude of spoiled rebelliousness.

This, of course, is what Maureen Dowd's book is all about. In Bushworld, a collection of her op-ed columns for The New York Times, she declares that the Bush Administration justifies her patented, personal style of journalism. Foibles and family drama drive the Bush White House and all its policies, including the Iraq War, she suggests.

Again and again, she returns to the point that George W. Bush is working from a reverse playbook of his father's Administration. His father didn't "finish the job" in Iraq, so Bush will. His father was hurt by breaking his "no new taxes" pledge, hence Jr.'s relentless tax cutting. An Oedipal struggle in the Bush family, with Dick Cheney as a dark father figure pulling Bush Jr. away from his real father, is a continuing theme. Bush is trying to avenge his father, restore his legacy, and, at the same time, move out of his shadow by being more macho, Dowd declares. The whole world is unwillingly drawn into the family drama.

It's a self-serving thesis and ultimately impossible to prove or disprove. But at the very least, the personal details of politicians' lives are revealing.

Following the dreadful Bush girls' roast, Dick Cheney paraded his own daughter, baby in arms, with three more young children in tow, across the convention center stage, while not letting his lesbian daughter--who works full time on his campaign--appear at all. Maybe she was afraid of being lynched by the Republican mob. Maybe her father told her to take a seat. Either way, her conspicuous absence sure says something about what kind of people these are.

"I always enjoy hearing about how a teenage Dick Cheney stood off to the side with buckets of water to put out Lynne's flaming batons," Dowd wrote snidely in the Times right after the Cheneys' big night. "But there was an even better moment during Claire Shipman's two-part Good Morning America interview at the Wyoming ranch this week. Trying to humanize Dr. No ... Ms. Shipman asked the Vice President 'his greatest guilty pleasure.' While Mr. Cheney was pondering, his wife quickly interjected that it was fly-fishing, stopping what we all know would have been his answer. His greatest guilty pleasure, of course, is global domination."

Speaking of guilty pleasures, I read Dowd's book during the convention, when, like Jon Stewart's sharp parody on The Daily Show, it was good for a much-needed laugh. Most of the book you've seen before, on the Times op-ed page. But it's worth going back to the descriptions of Cheney and Rumsfeld, lounging around in the White House, babysitting the Kid.

Here's a good one from May 2, 2001:

"Dick and Rummy are in the lemon-and-raspberry-striped wing chairs in the Oval Office. They like to kick back at the end of the day, down a Johnnie Walker Red, and kick around how they will organize the country and the world to their liking. Junior is out on the South Lawn, practicing placing the ball on the batting tee for the opening day of White House T-ball on Sunday. The President is very, very excited because the San Diego Chicken is coming. He is also all puffed up because he has learned a new word: 'counter-pro-lif-er-A-tion.' At one point, W. runs up to the French doors to pester the two older men. 'Is it up yet? Can I see it?'

"'No, son,' Dick says in that slow, deliberate voice. 'We're still working on it.'

"W. grins and races back to the diamond.

"'He thinks the missile shield really exists?' Rummy smirks, sipping his Scotch."

At her best, Dowd is like Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, or Kurt Vonnegut, lampooning the men who run the world's greatest military and political power.

Then, sometimes, she lapses into the jaded sassiness Lawrence Wechsler once described in The New Yorker as "chick lit"--spawning a band of shallow imitators who have abandoned solid political reporting for personality gossip.

On occasion, she even seems a little sorry for her savage cattiness. "Forgive me, Al Gore," she wrote after the 2000 election debacle. Watching the Bush Administration do its worst to the environment made her swipes at Gore's green technogeekiness seem petty in the extreme, even to Dowd.

There's no question that Dowd is a major talent: brilliant, hilarious, and mean. And she knows how to hit her target. As in "The Asbestos President" from April 1, 2001:

"Being witty about poisoned drinking water isn't easy. It requires a certain obtuse savoir-faire. Our President gave it a go Thursday night at a press dinner here. 'As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water,' he told the crowd of radio and TV correspondents at the Washington Hilton. 'To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating.' I guess a guy who can yuk it up about a woman he has executed in Texas can yuk it up about anything. But it was a creepy moment. It worked for Erin Brockovich to joke about carcinogens in the water enviro-villains were sipping because she wanted to get the poison out. W. wants to keep the poison in--to help the enviro-villains who contributed to his campaign."

In truth, the book could have used more editing. The whole first section--columns from before the 2000 election--could have been cut. Even just changing the tense would have helped where some of the old columns seem stale.

Repetitiveness hurts the jokes. She says several times that the elder Bush couldn't get used to her as the White House reporter for the Times and thought a Times man should be an Ivy Leaguer named "Chatworth Farnsworth III."

Still, by jabbing at the Bush family pedigree, and by highlighting the issue of class, she shows how the Bushes have put one over on the American people: "They make themselves happily oblivious to the difference between thinking you are self-made and being self-made," Dowd writes, "between liking to clear brush and having to clear brush.... The Bushes seem to believe that the divisive thing in American society is dwelling on social and economic inequities, rather than the inequities themselves."

Cut to this year's campaign, and the revolting use of blue-collar props: cops, firemen, teachers. The repeated assertion that "anyone can make it" in America by silver-spoon scions and overcompensated, disgraced corporate executives, the chickenhawks with their multiple draft deferments intoning soberly about supporting the "brave men and women in uniform."

How do they get away with it?

With so much fawning press coverage ignoring the lies and failures of this Administration, a jaundiced eye like Dowd's is just what the country needs. Sure, she's equally hard on the Democrats. And sometimes she seems more interested in her own cleverness than any sense of justice. But no one deflates hypocrisy like Dowd.

Anthologizing a few years worth of columns is a good way to sort the brilliant from the merely flashy. Too bad no one at Putnam took the time to do a quick edit or pushed Dowd to write a retrospective summary--if only in a few more paragraphs.

While the Bush parodies are priceless, the references to passing fads and forgettable movies like Ocean's Eleven could have been tossed in the bin. Dowd mocked Clinton for being a fan of Hollywood stars, even as she jammed her own column with references to Hollywood hot-tub parties she attended and made mention of silly, ephemeral Hollywood flicks.

Future readers will see references to "Clooney and Pitt" and scratch their heads.

But sometimes Dowd's preening style functions like comedian Jon Stewart's self-deflating silliness: It allows her to get away with more. She brags that Bush has given her a nickname ("the cobra"--appropriately, in honor of her poison pen). She uses her good looks and girlish flirtiness with Bush I to achieve a kind of grudging favor in his eyes as his "favorite least favorite" journalist, as she lets us know.

It's cloying when she writes about herself. Yet you get the feeling she gets material by making herself part of the scene--a character who amuses her subjects even as she impales them. And the broad satire goes further than a more mature, modulated approach could.

A friend once demanded of me, when I expressed admiration for her writing, can you name one thing Maureen Dowd cares about? The answers are in her book: When she contrasts her own ethnic, working class family background with the Bushes, when she talks about the hateful oppression of women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, when she imagines Planet Enron run by corporate thieves and, in another column, when she worries about a sci-fi Planet Earth destroyed by too much oil drilling and coal burning.

Michael Moore has nothing on Dowd when it comes to the Saudi royal family's connection to the Bushes. In a column published a year before Fahrenheit 9/11 came out, she decried the spiriting of bin Laden family members out of the U.S. and detailed the wining and dining of Prince Bandar by the Bushes. Dowd summons genuine outrage at the coddling of "a kingdom that gives medieval a bad name," after the state's religious police let schoolgirls burn to death rather than let them escape a fire without their headscarves.

In a column that could have been published today instead of in January 2002, she writes: "The GOP is giddy at polls showing Americans once again see the party as the big, strong daddy, protecting the Ponderosa from wolves and poachers. I hesitate to interrupt the victory laps, the chesty posing, the passing out of medals. But something in me really wants to know: Is the war over? Did we win it or not?"

Toward the end of her book, she takes on the Iraq War. "This Administration is the opposite of The Sixth Sense. They don't see any dead people," Dowd quips. Why doesn't the President acknowledge fallen soldiers in Iraq or attend their funerals? she asks. "The White House is cleverly trying to distance Mr. Bush from the messy problem of flesh-and-blood soldiers with real names dying nearly every day, while linking him to the heroic task of fighting global terror."

But they're having a harder time doing it, thanks to Maureen Dowd.