America Has a Choice of Victims

Maureen Dowd has a good op-ed in the NY Times in which she looks at the Obamas since of "underappreciation" by the American public. Then she widens it to include Newt Gingerich who feels he is similarly underappreciated and misprepresented by the press:

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.

The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.

Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?

This is ridiculous. A leader needs to be psychological secure and have a joy in backslapping and glad-handing with people. But the dsyfunctional US political system is giving the American people a choice between flub and flop in the November poll.

Voting in introverts, narcissists, or those who see themselves as victims is asking for perverted politics and a poisoned civil society.

A Summary of America's "Effort" In Iraq

Here is a bit from an opinion piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd that nails down the idiocy of US policy in Iraq:

You’d never know it, given Republicans’ churlish silence and unseemly sniping, but the president and the vice president have stumbled and bumbled their way to an acceptable ending to the war that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney so recklessly started. It was a magnificent miscalculation that Obama warned in 2002 was “a dumb war.”

Funnily enough, Obama has found it easier to wrap up Bush’s foreign policy blunders than his domestic ones.

Vice President Joseph Biden spent so many hundreds of hours hashing things out with Iraqi officials that he knew the names of their grandchildren — just as Bill Clinton could reel off street names during the peace effort in Northern Ireland.

In the painful calculation of what’s “good enough,” as we end our two attenuated wars, the White House sees it this way on Iraq: The baby is born. The gestation period couldn’t be 18 years; eight years was bad enough. The midwife had to leave.

The spectacular error that Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made was feeling we needed a post-9/11 demonstration of war to prove our toughness. If they had merely pushed along the Arab Spring, they could have saved a trillion dollars and the lives of 4,500 American troops.

It would have been more of a boon to our national security to finish off the Afghanistan mission and kill Osama bin Laden sooner. Instead, the Bush team let itself get distracted with nation-building in Iraq when our own nation was falling apart, and President Obama ended up surging and withdrawing in Afghanistan at the same time, which made no sense.

Before W. tried to outdo his daddy, we were a country that usually had to take a punch before we went to war. We didn’t unilaterally start wars.

In her new memoir, Condoleezza Rice has a sentence so stunningly lame it makes you want to scream — or cry. “The fact is,” she writes, “we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”

I’m not a National Security Council adviser, but I can think of about a hundred other options we had with Saddam.

At least Condi admits that one of the inflated and improvised rationales for war wasn’t true: “We did not go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to democratize Germany, though that became American policy once the Nazis were defeated.”

The real tragedy is that in 2008 Americans voted to change policies but got a Bush "lite" in Obama. Obama promised to get out of the war, stop torture, and get out of Guantanamo. Once in office he "surged" in Afghanistan and dragged his feet on all these commitments. He may have stopped torturing prisoners, but he has upped the ante with a lot more drone-based killings. Rather than arrest Osama Bin Laden he sent in a killer elite to "terminate" rather than capture. There is something indescribably sinister in a policy of death rather than justice.

Dowd on Newt Gingrich

Here is a bit from an opinion piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd:

Gingrich agreed in 1995 that we might have to “rethink our Constitution” — something that wouldn’t go over well with originalists.

The man who wishes to be our leader implementing Lean Six Sigma might shy away from Toffler’s main thesis, that we were moving toward a basically leaderless society where information was available to everyone, so everyone could make their own decisions. “Someday,” Toffler wrote, “future historians may look back on voting and the search for majorities as an archaic ritual engaged in by communicational primitives.”

And what about Toffler’s prediction that those (like Gingrich) who resist the end of the nuclear family and the spread of gay parenting, gay rights, women’s rights and abortion access as variegated families set up shop in “electronic cottages” would just add to the pain of inevitable transition to a “de-massified society”?

Torn between the virtual and the virtue-crats, Gingrich this week endorsed the “marriage pledge” of an evangelical group in Iowa opposing same-sex marriage and abortion and vowed fidelity to Callista. Hasn’t he taken that vow and broken it twice before?

Sometimes you go with “Future Shock.” Sometimes you go with present schlock.

It is absolutely pathetic that this wretch from the past is considered by 40% of the Republicans to be the "leader" of the future. I think back to America of the 1960s and wonder how that country has gone so badly off track. In the 1960s the US was rising to challenges with hopeful policies like breaking Jim Crow racism and setting a mission to the moon. Sure, there had been bumpy stretches like McCarthyism in the 1950s and the idiocy of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, but generally the US was a positive force for good in the world. Now it is the last remaining of the two evil empires of the Cold War and it is in fast decline. It is like a muttering senile relative puttering around making of mess of everything. Tragic.

Dowd on Obama vs. Gingrich

Here is Maureen Dowd in a NY Times op-ed giving her usual lyrical treatment of the two main contenders to run America:

A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation’s patriarch.

The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.

One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who’s always veering out of control, one who’s too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.

One pretending to be a populist when he can’t drag himself out of Tiffany’s; the other pretending to be a populist when he’d like to be at Davos with Jamie Dimon.

Obama is a foul-weather populist and Gingrich is a fair-weather normal guy. Neither is a convincing populist for the 99 percent who crave one, but it would be fun to watch the Hand Grenade take on Cool Hand Luke.

Whereas Obama usually faded away on stage during his primary debates in 2008, Gingrich revived a fading campaign this fall with his confident debate performances against pitiful foes.

Where Gingrich is vesuvian, Obama is spartan. Gingrich spewed a lot of ideas but often lacked the discipline to see them through. Obama has plenty of discipline, but some plans come a cropper because he gives away too much too early to the other side and delegates too much to Congress.

Like Obama, Gingrich loves to give seminars. But Gingrich, unlike Obama, has a talent for the visceral. Often, however, his rhetoric goes off a cliff.

It is tragic that America will be given a choice between two incompetents. There is need for real leadership with a grand vision to pull America out of the muck of the Great Recession. But these two clowns aren't even worthy to kiss the feet of the leader that America needs. Tragic!

Dowd Nails Newt Gingrich

Here is a bit from a NY Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd:

Newt Gingrich’s mind is in love with itself.

It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.

His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.

He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.

...

He warned against political pressures encouraging “Black xenophobia.” What’s xenophobic about Africans wanting their oppressors to go away? It’s like saying abused wives who want their husbands to leave are anti-men.

...

Newt is like the Great White Hunter out on campaign safari, trying to bag a Mitt, an animal with ever-changing stripes. Certainly, the 68-year-old’s haughty suggestions on child labor last week in Iowa smacked of harsh paternalism and exploitation.

He expanded on Dickensian remarks he’d made recently at Harvard, where he said “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” adding that 9-year-olds could work as school janitors.

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he asserted in an ignorant barrage of stereotypes in Des Moines. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”

Has he not heard of the working poor? The problem isn’t that these kids aren’t working; it’s that they don’t have time with their parents, who often toil day and night, at more than one job, and earn next to nothing.

Newt’s the kind of person whom child labor laws were created to curb. He sounds like a benign despot with a colonial subtext: Until I bring you the benefits of civilization, we will regard you as savages.

He’s Belgium. The poor are Congo.

The joke is that Newt passes for an "intellectual" in the Republican party. Tragic.

On the Latest Great White Hope of the Republican Party

From an opinion piece by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times where she looks at New Jersey's governor Chris Christie announcing his non-candidacy for US president. First she side-swipes Obama then nails Christie:

People are longing for a president who can understand their pain, mix it up and get action — not one who averts his gaze, avoids conflict, delegates to Congress, wastes time hunting for common ground, cedes the moon to opponents and fails to get anywhere.

Our nuanced president sticks to gray, while the no-nonsense governor, as Joe Scarborough noted, “paints in primary colors.”

I love the way Maureen Dowd purple prose really spells it out. Obama, the master of nuance and shades of gray. Christie, the puffed up body that’s off-putting and who paints in primary colours. Funny.

Here's her bottom line:

The message from new books by Ron Suskind and Jeffrey Sachs, and from the proliferating Wall Street protesters, seems to be that President Obama is a captive of the banks who pursued policies that helped the very richest people in the country.

Americans who have been hurt want to identify the villains, and Obama is loath to target villains.

Christie can be a bully, but that may seem better than the alternative: a president who lets himself be bullied, and who lets the bullies run wild.

It is tragic that Americans voted in a man of "hope" and "change you can believe in" and instead got a schmuck lost in nuance, sold out to the ultra-rich, and unable to seize the historic moment to save his country.

Maureen Dowd Skewers Obama

Dowd compares Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and poor Obama just doesn't measure up. Read her opinion piece in the NY Times. It is enlightening and funny.

Here's the bottom line:

Obama concedes that he has lost the narrative that brought him to the White House against all odds: his vision for making America great. Suskind’s book suggests he went astray in the sway of Wall Street pal Tim Geithner, going too easy on the gluttonous bankers, demanding no important concessions from them and throwing the equitable balance of society out of whack.

Now the president is trapped in two damaging story lines. Is he too weak and immature to do the job? Or is he too cool and distant to do the job?

I would say that Obama is a snake oil salesman. He learned to say what people wanted to hear, but he never developed a soul. There is no centre. Deep inside he doesn't really care for anything other than climbing to the top of the heap. He has happily manipulated people all his life telling them what ever story line he sensed that they wanted to hear. That worked for him. But not that he is on top of the mountain, he finally realized the buck stops with him and he is coming up $1.10 short.

Dowd on Democracy

Here is a bit by Maureen Dowd in an opinion piece in the NY Times. She is horrified by the political right's turn to anti-intellectualism. She agrees that Obama is too academically disengaged, too aloof and cool, for most people, but the folksy "down home" style of Rick Perry terrifies her because he sends an anti-education message to the population at large:

Traveling to Lynchburg, Va., to speak to students at Liberty University (as in Falwell, not Valance), Perry made light of his bad grades at Texas A&M.

Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,” said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force.

“His other D’s,” Richard Oppel wrote in The Times, “included courses in the principles of economics, Shakespeare, ‘Feeds & Feeding,’ veterinary anatomy and what appears to be a course called ‘Meats.’ ”

He even got a C in gym.

Perry conceded that he “struggled” with college, and told the 13,000 young people in Lynchburg that in high school, he had graduated “in the top 10 of my graduating class — of 13.”

It’s enough to make you long for W.’s Gentleman’s C’s. At least he was a mediocre student at Yale. Even Newt Gingrich’s pseudo-intellectualism is a relief at this point.

Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

Here's her general distaste for the Republican party:

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?

The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

I Can't Believe It... Maureen Dowd is Accusing Politicians of "Faking It"

Here's a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Maureen Dowd:

WOW, what a relief.

The president was strong and House Republicans were conciliatory.

There was only one teensy-weensy problem: The president is weak and House Republicans are obstructionist.

Congressional Republicans, heeding polls indicating that their all-out assault on President Obama was risky, finally tempered their public comments after the jobs speech on Thursday and stopped acting like big jerks.

Obama, heeding plummeting polls and beseeching voices from his despairing base, finally deigned to get tough.

In the capital of political tactics, it was just another fine day of faking it.

Oh my gosh... Maureen Dowd thinks the politicians may be faking it.

I feel Obama really does have fire in his belly. He really feels the need to get jobs for the unemployed. Why else would have have waited for over two years to finally get up and give "the big speech"? Why would he have waited for the summer recess before getting around to giving his impassioned cry? Why would he have decided that he could cool his heels for 24 hours while Republican presidential candidates had a love fest in California? He knows this is an urgent issue with 25 million unemployed and underemployed waiting for action. So he's planned his moment.

Oh... and he's decided to respond with big numbers and big action. There's a $10 trillion hole. So Obama has given it his all and decided to call on Congress to belly up with $450 billion. Yep... that's 4.5% of the missing spending in the economy. That should fill that hole nicely. Oh... and rather than just go out and hire people. Obama has decided those darn Republicans did such a bang-up good job of managing the economy over the last 30 years and left the bottom 90% with so much loose cash and happy times, that he has decided to continue with the "most of this stimulus will be tax reductions for business" because we all know that "trickle down" economics is really, really effective.

Since Obama has now officially "caught fire" in a jobs, jobs, jobs push. He has decided he can best show off his leadership style with his renowned "lead from behind" so he put this challenge to the populace:

A re-energized Obama urged students at the University of Richmond to lobby lawmakers: “I want you to call, I want you to e-mail, I want you to tweet, I want you to fax, I want you to visit, I want you to Facebook, send a carrier pigeon.”

Right. Why send a man to do a man's job when you can send some fresh-faced youth out to fight your fight? That's shows the leadership savvy of Obama. He knows that a general always leads from behind.

Yep... this is the bold brassy Obama, the promised one:

As always, the same questions persist in our long, fruitless effort to pierce the Obama opacity. How long can the president sustain the sizzle before the fizzle? Does he get it together when the country’s in trouble or when he’s in trouble?

Certainly, Obama cares that Americans are in pain. Yet he has been unable to move away from his academic disdain for hardball and his alpha addiction to buzzer-beating wins.

So while the country has grown ever more scared, miserable, broke and broken, the president has too often been absent, quiet, ambivalent, impenetrable and inscrutable.

The master of his own narrative in print let the Republicans define the narrative in politics. And Obama likes to come in late, after the other players have staked out positions. It’s a strangely risk-averse tact, given the fact that he took two of the boldest risks in history — jumping into the presidential race in the first place and giving the kill order on Bin Laden on sketchy intelligence.

But when his polls plummeted, the Sleeping Beauty President roused himself to transform back into a semblance of the 2008 electrifying phenomenon.

He always must be chided and cajoled before he gets re-engaged.

...

Each time Obama goes through a period of lying doggo, his opponents — from Hillary in the primaries to the Tea Party in the summer of 2009 to the House Republicans during the debt-ceiling debacle — get an infusion of oxygen.

The reawakened Republicans are no longer the loyal opposition. They’re revolutionary Bolsheviks who want to eat Obama alive.

When the president stays insulated with his little circle that doesn’t know how to push his messages, and he lets the nihilist Republicans go unchallenged in their crazy claims to be saving the country they’re hurting, he sets the stage for Rick Perry.

It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job.

Yeah... there's nothing quite as inspiring as a "leader" who only shows up with his fight face on when his job is at stake. It shows his deep "commitment" to the American people.

How is Obama Failing... Let Me Count the Ways

Here are some bits from a Maureen Dowd opinion piece in the NY Times:

Polls show that most Americans still like and trust the president; but they may no longer have faith that he’s a smarty-pants who can fix the economy.

Just as Obama miscalculated in 2009 when Democrats had total control of Congress, holding out hope that G.O.P. lawmakers would come around on health care after all but three senators had refused to vote for the stimulus bill; just as he misread John Boehner this summer, clinging like a scorned lover to a dream that the speaker would drop his demanding new inamorata, the Tea Party, to strike a “grand” budget bargain, so the president once more set a trap for himself and gave Boehner the opportunity to dis him on the timing of his jobs speech this week.

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No. 2 on David Letterman’s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: “Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.”

On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight. But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.

MSNBC’s Matt Miller offered “a public service” to journalists talking about Obama — a list of synonyms for cave: “Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate.”

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You know you’re in trouble when Harry Reid says you should be more aggressive.

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Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

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The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.

After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.

“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”

Obama should announce that he will not seek re-election. He needs to let the Democratic party start the search for a successor.

Maureen Dowd's Primal Scream

Here's a bit from a NY Times op-ed piece by Maureen Dowd where she moans that Obama just isn't "alpha male" enough to lead America:

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.

LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so hopeful with him, but Washington grabbed him and here we are. I just want him to stay strong and don’t take the guff. We want a president who is a leader, and I want him to be a little bit stronger.”

Hers was a gentler message than the sign stuck on a post outside Alpha: “One Term President.”

But her three words summed it up: Washington grabbed him. Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?

The “supercommittee” that’s supposed to save us just sounds like more government bloat — supersizing something just as unhealthy as McDonald’s.

Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?

He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself.

Obama shows himself to be clueless as a leader. He doesn't get it: a leader has to "lead". The job of the leader isn't to wait for the people to call for action or to wait for Congress to come up with a plan:

At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town.

Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything.

...

If Clinton wanted to be president 25 hours a day and W. wanted to be president four hours a day, Obama wants to be president for about 14 hours a day. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t look like you’re phoning it in when the country is dialing 911.

What a disaster.

So the 2012 "choice" for Americans will be between right wing loonies and a do-nothing president. What a choice!

Dowd Spots the Obama's Weakness

From a NY Tiems op-ed by Maureen Dowd, here is the key bit:

The president was in “Afternoon of a Faun” mode, a rural deity playing on his panpipes in the woods. Then, suddenly, he stood very still as he sensed electoral danger.

After assuring Obama that she was a supporter, an Iowa mother named Emily asked the president at a town hall at the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah what had gone wrong.

Standing in a setting that was Martha Stewart-perfect — a red barn with an American flag, surrounded by white pines, red cedars and pink zinnias — the president looked breezy in khakis and white shirt. But he seemed to tense up as Emily spoke.

“So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn’t move the bar on us,” she said. “And it seems, especially in the last year, as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust by compromising some key principles that we believed in, like repealing the tax cut, not fighting harder for single-payer. Even Social Security and Medicare seemed on the line when we were dealing with the debt ceiling. So I’m just curious, moving forward, what prevents you from taking a harder negotiating stance, being that it seems that the Republicans are taking a really hard stance?”

The president defended himself with a tinge of resignation: If the crazed bullies put a gun to your head, you must surrender.

“Now, I know that people would like to say ‘Well, just do something to get these guys under control,’ ” he told Emily, adding: “You don’t want to reward unreasonableness. Look, I get that. But sometimes you’ve got to make choices in order to do what’s best for the country at that particular moment.”

The answer must have seemed lame even to Obama because, on the spur of the moment, he felt backed into doing what many in his White House and party wish he had done long ago. He told Emily he would put forward “a very specific plan to boost the economy, to create jobs and to control our deficit.” (But not until September.)

Driving through Midwest cornfields in his opaque, black, custom-made, $1.1 million “Matrix” bus, our opaque president found himself in The Field of Dashed Dreams. If you don’t build it, they may not come.

Obama has no intention of coming up with a "very specific plan". He may say that he "feels your pain" but only when he grouses that the electorate is a pain in the butt. He's got his. He dances around the White House every night saying "it's mine, it's mine, it is all mine" like Scrooge McDuck did with his piles of gold coin. The only thing that drives Obama is how to win the 2012 election. He has already told the electorate that they are going to have to dig themselves out of the the 2008 Little Depression.

Here's the most telling bit in Maureen Dowd's article:

In Decorah, he said: “Everybody cannot get 100 percent of what they want. Now, for those of you who are married, there is an analogy here. I basically let Michelle have 90 percent of what she wants. But, at a certain point, I have to draw the line and say, ‘Give me my little 10 percent.’ ”

Maybe Michelle should be the one negotiating with the Republicans.

I for one don't want a Mrs. Obama running in 2016 like the politico-aristocrat Clintons ran husband and wife presidential campaigns and I don't want to see father-son-son-grandson politico-aristocrat families like the Bushes or the Kennedys. America deserves better than that. The country isn't a "family business" to be handed down within the family. It needs real political giants willing to take on the powerful money lobbies and all the vested interests.

Dowd Savages Obama's Failings

Here are some bits from an excellent NY Times op-ed by Maureen Dowd where she sizes up Obama's "leadership" and sees him as falling far, far short of what America needs:

Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world.

“We are choosing hope over fear,” Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses.

But fear has garroted hope, as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself.

Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

...

“We just wish he’d be more of a fighter,” said one influential Democrat with a grimace. Another agreed: “You can’t blame him for everything. I just wish he would come across more forceful at times, but that is not the dude’s style. Detached hurts you when things are sour. You need some of Clinton’s ‘I feel your pain’ compassion.”

The president has been so spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington that the high-spirited Michele Bachmann feels free to purloin Obama’s old mantra.

“The power behind our campaign is hope and a future,” she chirped to a sparse crowd Monday in Atlantic, Iowa. “That’s all I believe in.” That and making America safe for old-fashioned light bulbs and not those weird curly ones.

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Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona — superior, wise, above all parties and interests, all-seeing, calm, unflappable.

But as Drew Westen, a liberal psychology professor at Emory University wrote in The Times on Sunday, puzzling about what has happened to his former hero’s passion, the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems.

It’s unclear, Westen wrote, whether that reflects his aversion to conflict or a fear of offending donors, or both.

Obama’s assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nation’s capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.

He is completely totally ineffective. The Democrats need to replace him in 2012 or else they are giving the Republicans the US presidency on a silver platter.

Obama campaigned on ending the pointless wars of Bush. But this week 30 US soldiers died in one attack in Afghanistan. Supposedly the US went in to punish al Qaeda in that land for the 3000 Americans killed on 9/11. But here they lose 1% of that total in one muddled mess of a "fight" with the Taliban. A total of 1,650 have died over the last 10 years. That's 50% of the lost lives in 9/11. What kind of "retaliation" is that? The US did a fine job in October 2001 thru Jan 2002. At that point they should have declared victory and gone home with the message of "you mess with us again and we will be back with twice the firepower and will come down twice as hard on you". That's what was needed. Not a 10 year "nation building" exercise for a hopelessly corrupt regime. But Obama came to office and doubled down on Bush's mistakes! Pathetic.

Dowd Defines the Real Obama

I love Maureen Dowd. She uses words like howitzers or a flame thrower to mow down the object of her ire. Here's her take on Barack Obama in her latest NY Times opinion piece:

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn’t use it. He wanted to be a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan’s strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

And now, just when the high school principal in the Oval has been browbeating Congress to help create jobs, he is once more distracted from that task as he tries to save his own.

He goes to fund-raisers to tell people to stick with him, but he seems to be trying to reassure himself.

...

He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly.

The one clear-cut, chesty victory that Obama has had may have come too late for beleaguered Americans to much care.

When the president is asked what it felt like to kill Osama, he’s low-key and modest, even though he personally refocused the mission to capture the 9/11 architect after W. dropped the ball.

What I don't like about Obama, one of many things, is that he is too calculated. Here's what Dowd says about his plans to boost his 2012 election:

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

This is the guy who has come down harder on whistle-blowers and leakers than Bush ever did. But when it comes to polishing his image for the 2012 election, throw the rules out the window. Cynical. Wrong. Manipulative.

I just wish he had one-tenth the enthusiasm for getting America out of the rut that he has in sucking up dollars for his re-election and for polishing his image. He needs to focus on the job and stop politicking for 4 more years of mediocrity.

Dowd on Debt and Doom

The "debt ceiling" crisis is a self-inflicted wound for the US. Here's a bit from a Maureen Dowd NY Times op-ed showing how crazy it is:

The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.

Amid the chilling anarchy, there’s not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn’t want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved.

The citizens of this country tremble at the thought that these are the people governing them. Should we stick our money under our mattresses? It’s not only the economy that gets nourished by confidence; it’s also politics.

The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it.

Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes. (Many are worried about primary races with even more dogmatic challengers, which is a truly scary thought.) If they can drag President Obama off his pedestal, even better. They think he looks down on them and sneers at their values.

Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

If you want to measure how crazy US politics have become, this pretty well summarizes it:

The Gingrich revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Reagan revolution and the Tea Party revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Gingrich revolution. The difference, though, is existentially striking: The Reagan and Gingrich forces wanted a leaner government, but they still believed in government.

...

The laconic president emerges from the sidelines periodically to warn about economic default, but we’re already in political default.

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the “hobbits,” as The Wall Street Journal and John McCain called them.

What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?

I blame Obama. He was elected to lead but he has failed and this isn't his first failure. His biggest failure was the big lie he told the electorate in 2008: "change you can believe in". He's delivered 4 more years of Bush "Republicanism". Meanwhile, the crazy Republican party has gotten even more insane. This is a race to the bottom and Obama is only slightly being outdone by the crazy Tea Party as they plunge downward.

Maureen Dowd Brings Some Reality to Washington Political Fantasy

Here is the key bit from a NY Times op-ed by Maureen Dowd as she analyzes the dysfunction in Washington:

So if President Obama is fantasizing about climbing Marty McFly-style into a juiced-up DeLorean and going back to a more civilized, productive era when America wasn’t an over-the-hill deadbeat and when Washington wasn’t a shrieking, destructive, primal, feudal, apocalyptic wasteland of partisan banshees, he’s out of luck. Or science.

For half a century, our trust in government has been falling off a cliff. Some presidential elections have been more about voting against somebody rather than for somebody. There were upticks in faith when Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton delivered prosperity.

But now trust levels are drooping even lower. The public has less faith in Congress than Wall Street, and that’s saying something. Most Americans either feel that government is broken or that the fix is in, so that special interests and a handful of people at the top are the only ones benefiting.

The last century was the American century. But this one will not be, thanks to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who used their boots and spurs to ride roughshod over the globe and American economy. They spent eight years and trillions of dollars either barging into stuff they should have left alone or leaving alone stuff they should have intervened on.

W. accomplished the impossible: He made the Daddy Party less quick-draw. Republicans’ isolationist wing is stronger now because some conservatives and libertarians don’t want to pay to stumble into endless, pointless wars.

Still, if the epic budget battle being waged on the Potomac is our own version of the Harrison Ford-Daniel Craig movie “Cowboys & Aliens” — where our favorite American myths collide — the Republicans will want to be the cowboys.

How else can they continue to paint the president as an aloof, intellectually arrogant, pointy-eared alien?

President Spock, who so sparingly makes emotional connections, felt he had a real one with John Boehner. Chomping Nicorette through the stressful negotiations, Obama actually grew fond of the old-school Republican speaker puffing on cigarettes.

An alien and a cowboy, trying to connect on a fairway rather than a frontier and save America from a credit rating that would be alarmingly comparable to mine.

The Republican “Taliban wing,” as some Democrats dub the rabid Tea Party militants, was determined to break up any budding Obama-Boehner bromance.

Shockingly, the president was left waiting by the phone one day last week while the speaker would not take or return his calls. At some point, Obama, the jilted lover, simply gave up and went to bed.

The White House feels that its foes not only want to stomp on any reasonable compromise; they want to make sure that Obama never has the presidency he dreamed of, one that isn’t about digging out from W.’s intractable messes; one that helps the parties reason together and move into the future.

I find it interesting that she vaguely sense what I see coming, a fundamental realignment in US politics where the current Democrats split into two parties (progressive and centrist/right following the Obama "line") and hopefully the Republican extremism dies an agonizing death as the fanatics bring out the factional knives and spill copious blood in their on Armageddon:

Obama, after all, is a new entity. He’s not really a Democratic president. Or a Republican one. He’s the first Independent president, creating his own party.

“Obama’s interests are not the same as the Democrats in Congress in terms of what he needs to do for his own agenda, election and legacy,” said one Democratic strategist, who notes that now the president can benefit from an obstructionist Republican House as a foil.

White House officials dryly joke that the president’s “sweet spot” is his ability to alienate his base and infuriate his foes while falling short of his goals.

Nobody knows the future, but it is clear to me that "more of the same" simply accelerates the decline of the US into "banana republic" status. So I expect change. The American people aren't stupid. They have been hoodwinked and lied to and they have an abysmal press that hides political reality, but given enough carnage in this political circus in Washington, the voters will rebel and fundamental change will come.

Dowd on Obama's "Leadership"

This is excellent. She has nailed Obama's problems as "leader". Here is a bit from Maureen Dowd's NY Times op-ed column:

Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cocktail parties, he wants to collect some of their fat for his campaign.

On politics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For others, bipartisanship means transcending their own prior political identities. For President Obama, it means that he participates in all political identities. He does not seem deeply affiliated with any side except his own.

He was elected on the idea of bold change, but now — except for the capture of Osama and his drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen — he plays it safe. He shirks politics as usual but gets all twisted up in politics.

The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.

Obama was elected under the banners of "hope" and "change you can believe in". But he is delivering the same old back room political dealing and the kind of cynical half measures which makes people want to puke when they think about politicians:

As a community organizer, Obama developed impressive empathetic gifts. But now he is misusing them. It’s not enough to understand how everybody in the room thinks. You have to decide which ones in the room are right, and stand with them. A leader is not a mediator or an umpire or a convener or a facilitator.

Sometimes, as Chris Christie put it, “the president has got to show up.”

With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is.

Obama lied his way to the top. He sold himself as one thing and delivered something substantially less. He is still far superior to the idiocy that the Republican party puts on offer, but his indecisiveness and vacillation leaves his administration in a muddle. Instead of leading America out of the Great Recession, his half measures leaves the country mired in a mess. It will take a new president either 2 years from now or 6 years from now to finally grab the country by the ears and yank it painfully out of the quagmire it is in. In the meantime tens of millions will live blighted lives because Obama can't be decisive.

The Beam in Your Own Eye

I love stories about religious figures, especially when they so obviously flaunt their ignorance of the essentials of their own religion.

Take Matthew 7:5

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

This admonition by Jesus isn't holding back a New York Catholic archbishop as Maureen Dowd points out in her NY Times op-ed column:

With his cigars, blogs, Jameson’s and Irish affability, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan prides himself on his gumption.

Certainly his effort to kill the gay marriage bill, just one vote away from passing in Albany, shows a lot of gall.

The archbishop has been ferocious in fighting against marriage between same-sex couples, painting it as a perversity against nature.

If only his church had been as ferocious in fighting against the true perversity against nature: the unending horror of pedophile priests and the children who trusted them.

In the second-generation round of the Church vs. Cuomo, Archbishop Dolan is pitted against Andrew Cuomo, the Catholic governor who is fiercely pushing for New York to become the sixth and most populous state to approve gay marriage.

I guess in the archbishop's ranking of sins 'buggering a child' is less harmful than a 'same-sex marriage'. Go figure! My problem is that in the first case, you are wrecking a kids life, a little kid who doesn't understand what is being done to him by a calculating "man of the cloth". In the latter, you have two consenting adults who want to have a public acknowledgement of their relationship.

I'm amazed that the Catholic church manages to keep its churches full while it persists in its bizarre medieval world view of male-only priests, woman-hating morally simplistic anti-abortion crusades, and their refusal to address the rampant criminal behaviour of its own priests. But what do I know? Obviously I'm not "talking to the big fella upstairs" who seems to approve of this kind of sleazy behaviour. Certainly Jimmy Swaggart was living proof that God loves a boozing, skirt-chasing, sinning hypocrite.

It is hard to believe that the Catholic church has much of a future when:

The church refuses to acknowledge the hypocrisy at its heart: that it became a haven for gay priests even though it declares homosexual sex a sin, and even though it lobbies to stop gays from marrying.

In yet another attempt at rationalization, the nation’s Catholic bishops — a group Dolan is now in charge of — put out a ridiculous five-year-study last month going with the “blame Woodstock” explanation for the sex-abuse scandal. The report suggested that the problem was caused by permissive secular society rather than cloistered church culture, because priests were trained in the turbulent free-love era. It concluded, absurdly, that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were causes.

In another resistance to reform, the bishops voted on Thursday to keep their policies on sexual abuse by the clergy largely the same, with only small revisions, ignoring victims’ advocates who were hoping for meaningful changes.

At their meeting in Bellevue, Wash., one retired archbishop from Anchorage actually proposed an amendment to get rid of the “zero tolerance” provision on abuse so some guilty priests could return to parishes. That failed, at least.

I have no problem with religious communities setting standards within their community for their own members. But I have a real problem when minorities living in a pluralistic society become politically active in order to impose their own twisted logic on the larger community. That's when I start quoting Matthew 7:5.

I love Dowd's humourous twist on things:

Worn out by the rampant sexting of Anthony Weiner and the relentless blogging of Archbishop Dolan, I’m wondering if our institutions need to rejigger: Maybe pols should be celibate and priests should be married.

Dowd on the Dirty Deed

I love it when Maureen Dowd gets hold of a good sex scandal and roughs the rogue up with her racy rants:

Your Tweetin’ Heart

Tweetin’ ain’t cheatin’.

In his sensationally surreal apologia, a weepy Anthony Weiner had only one thing to brag about: “I’ve never had sex outside my marriage.”

No congress for the congressman. In the new, mega-political Internet sex scandal, the 46-year-old New Yorker downplayed his phone sex and salacious sexting with female strangers as “you know, almost a frivolous exchange among friends.”

Scrabble is a frivolous exchange among friends. Taking a picture of your deal, as David Letterman dubbed it, and blasting it into hyperspace to women you’ve never met is, you know, something more creepy and compulsive.

Go read the rest of her NY Times op-ed on Weiner's wiener.

I find it funny when Dowd takes on the "world weary" viewpoint:

In five decades, we’ve moved from the pre-feminist mantra about the sexual peccadilloes of married men — Boys will be boys — to post-feminist resignation: Men are dogs. And there’s no point in feminists wasting their ire at women being objectified because many women these days seem all too ready to play along.

We’ve traded places with France. There, after D.S.K., a spirited feminism has blossomed, an urge to stop covering up seamy incidents of droit du seigneur. Now we’re the world-weary ones, with little energy to try to reform relations between the sexes: Is there any point, really, in trying to fix men?

She's so much better than this. I love her when she gets into a hissy fit and takes the boys down. This new Dowd filled with a jaded acceptance just isn't as fulfilling as the old outraged in-your-face Dowd.

In this article Dowd has let her rant run down into a meow...

In her book, Elizabeth Edwards wrote that she would have bet her big house that her husband would not fall for a cheesy line like the one Rielle Hunter tossed at him: “You are so hot.”

But clichés work. As Weiner wrote to Weiss: “What are you wearing?”

I want the fire back. I want Dowd to come out with all her lively lexicographic girlish rage and gut Weiner. Flay him for his failings. Sadly, in this article she waxed world weary. Oh well.

Dowd on the Catholic Scandals

I'm not a fan of organized religion. The various scandals -- preachers with prostitutes, paedophiles, drugs, and extorting money from believers -- make it pretty clear that it is ideal for giving predators easy pickings.

Here are some bits from a Maureen Dowd article on the sex scandals in the Catholic church:

Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church — a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials — the Irish are still angry and appalled.

The only church leader who escapes their disgust is the no-nonsense, multilingual Martin. He was sent home to Dublin in 2003 after 27 years in the Vatican bureaucracy and diplomatic corps and found the Irish church in crisis, reeling from a cover-up that spanned the tenures of four past Dublin archbishops.

I went to see him at his office in Drumcondra in north Dublin because he is that rarest of things in the church’s tragedy: a moral voice.

In February, Martin held an unprecedented “Liturgy of Lament and Repentance” at a Dublin cathedral, where he asked forgiveness from God and victims of abuse and praised the courage of those who had come forward.

Wearing a simple black cassock, he helped wash the feet of eight victims and conceded that the church “will always bear this wound within it.”

The frustrated Martin has criticized the Vatican’s glacial pace on reform and chided the church: “Denial will not generate confidence.”

...

In return for doing the right thing, he has been ostracized by fellow bishops in Ireland and snubbed by the Holy See.

Showing again that it prefers denial to remorse, the Vatican undermined Martin’s call for accountability. In 2009, after the Irish government’s 700-page Murphy report on sexual abuse came out, Pope Benedict XVI refused to accept the resignations of two Irish bishops who presided over dioceses where abuse cases were mishandled.

The following year, when Martin expected to be named cardinal, the pope passed him over.

“Martin is standing alone against the tide right now, but he’s on the right side of history,” said Jason Berry, who has written two books on the church scandal. “I think he is probably the single best hope for the church within the hierarchy.”

Yet Martin, famous protector of victims, is an outlier of the club, while Cardinal Bernard Law, notorious protector of pedophiles, has a cushy Vatican sanctuary. And Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who was in league with the notorious abuser of seminarians and inseminator of women, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, is the dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome.

Garry O’Sullivan, the managing editor of The Irish Catholic in Dublin, told me that Martin “has had a prophetic role in the church.”

“And all the prophets were stoned or murdered or ignored,” he said. “The big question is, why would the Vatican be indifferent to a guy who’s so brilliant at identifying with the victims? They should put him in charge of a protection office in the Vatican, a global watchdog against sexual abuse.”

It is pretty clear that the Catholic church won't reform. It needs to be disbanded. It is a cesspit of scandal with an ex-Nazi in charge of it. All the officials in Rome are corrupt. The Vatican should be torn down, the land plowed with salt, and all the hangers-on inside the church should be forced to get an honest job.