MAILER BLASTS BACK AT COMIC DON’T invite Dennis Miller and Norman Mailer to the same party. Miller trashed Mailer in a May 5 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal for the novelist’s arguments against President Bush’s liberation of Iraq. And now Mailer has responded with a “Dear Dennis” letter, published in the Journal yesterday. “Just because the two big guys who flanked you on ‘Monday Night Football’ took away your [bleeps] and left you with a giggle in replacement doesn’t mean you have to suck up to the Wall Street Journal,” Mailer wrote. “You’re too good to become squalid and kiss-a- – for so little.” The fun started with Mailer’s recent op-ed piece in the London Times, “Why Are We in Iraq,” in which he asserted that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a way to massage the white male ego. Miller retorted in the Journal that Mailer, like designer Mary Quant, was “kinda hot for a few minutes in the ’60s . . . Mailer was the Father of the Non-Fiction Novel and now he can also claim lineage as the distant, addled third-cousin of the Rational Op-Ed. “With six marriages under his belt, one would assume Mr. Mailer has a stranglehold on warfare. One would be wrong. “[Mailer’s] basic contention is that we went to war with Iraq because with the dominance of white American men in the boxing ring, the office, and the home front eroded, George W. Bush thought they needed to know they were still good at something. “Mr. Mailer has a degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard so he had to know that argument wouldn’t fly . . . “I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he’s clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully . . . to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he’s effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.” Mailer may have drawn some comfort yesterday from two fellow World War II veterans – Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal. The three gathered in the East Second Street photo studio of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders to pose for an upcoming Vanity Fair piece about war protesters. Miller wasn’t invited.