New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is back to her old tricks again. In 2003, she took a quote from President Bush and twisted it so badly that it led to a change in the way the Times handles corrections on the op-ed pages.

Today, she does it again, only this time she’s twisting Don Rumsfeld’s remarks at a press briefing yesterday. Here’s Dowd’s column:

Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. U.S. troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, “The lethality, however, is up.” Afghanistan’s getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he’s raising troop levels in both places for coming elections.

This paragraph is so garbled it’s hard to know what Dowd was trying to say. Rumsfeld, however, was clear about what he meant. As a transcript of his remarks reveals, he was talking specifically about U.S. casualties related to IEDs:

Q: Mr. Secretary, the U.S. casualties from IEDs [improvised explosive device] over the last four months have been — have been at their highest levels that we’ve seen since the invasion. I’m wondering what you attribute that to. Do you think it’s going — we’re going to see it continuing? And I mean, do you attribute it to Iran, to this increasing sophistication of IEDs? What’s your –
SEC. RUMSFELD: You’re talking about Iraq.
Q: I’m sorry; yes.
SEC. RUMSFELD: The — I mean, the number of incidents, you know where that is, that level. And it’s been going up, as it has in every other instance prior to an event like the constitution or an election in Afghanistan and so forth. We’ve tended to expect that.
The number of provinces that it’s occurring in Iraq are relatively few, three or four or five, not 18; relatively modest numbers in the remainder. The — as you point out, the lethality, however, is up. Interestingly, however, of the number of incidents, the overwhelming majority are not effective at all; there are no casualties. I’m going to say like 80 percent of them.

As I said, the passage in question — indeed, Dowd’s entire column — is so incoherent that it’s hard to accuse of her of twisting Rumsfeld’s words: We don’t even know what she was trying to say. But in any case, she did quote him out of context, making a remark about something very specific seem like a more general description of the conflict.