Doctor Doctor

In an extremely disobliging piece on Condoleeza Rice (mind you, there is a reputation that has been accelerating downhill faster than George Bush's) Andrew Stephen refers to her as "Dr" Condoleezza Rice, going on to say

Her family had moved to Colorado when she was 12 because her father was appointed assistant dean at the University of Denver; predictably, she duly pressure-cooked herself through that university, emerging with a doctorate in politics at 26. Earlier, I used inverted commas to highlight her use of "Dr" to describe herself because it is telling; even erstwhile colleagues like Paul Wolfowitz, who earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago before teaching at Yale, would not dream of calling himself "Dr" in the same way.

Apart from noting in passing that acquiring a doctorate at 26 is not exactly evidence of pressure-cooking, this strikes me as renmarkably mean-spirited. PhD's are not just meaningless window-dressing, people who are awarded them do have the right to use the title Dr. Just ask John Reid. And, irrelevant twitch though it is, why is it even Paul Wolfowitz? Is he particularly known for this sort of thing?