Egghead

Maureen Dowd:

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. 

And how about Obama's grades, eh?  Oh, wait...

Keep Maureen Dowd Away From the Nutmeg

I think Maureen Dowd has had enough nutmeg...

The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics. The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he’s trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being.

Palin’s father advises her to warm up her trigger finger. And trigger-happy Sarah represents the Republicans, who have spent two years taking shots at the president, including potshots, and tormenting him in an effort to bring him down. 

An intervention may be necessary.

Maureen Dowd's Irrational Rationality

Is Maureen Dowd attacking Christine O'Donnell in her latest column or Barack Obama?  It's hard to tell.  Both?  Probably.  She begins with one thesis and ends with another and I completely miss the rationale that ties them together.  Did she write two columns and a poltergeist in her computer blended them?  I don't know.  She tries to tie it together but it just doesn't work.

She begins clearly enough mocking Christine O'Donnell and her "Palin Mini-Me" look, (because that's what matters so much about politicians, right?  Their looks?) then picks up the witchcraft and Tolkein threads that have moved through the blogs this week. 

This is the line where Dowd attempts to ties her two threads together...

She’s also smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth — two elements Barack Obama was able to summon during his campaign that are sorely missing from his presidency.

 ...because now she's mentioned Barack Obama and now she can spend the rest of her column about him without another word on O'Donnell (which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

The last third of  Dowd's column deals with Obama's lack of passion and empathy.  She spends two thirds of her column mocking O'Donnell's passion yet then bemoans Obama's lack of it.  Which way do you want to go, Maureen?

This is actually the closing line which Dowd seems to believe ties it together:

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.

Is she calling O'Donnell "insane" or just people with passion?

If this is best high dollar talent the New York Times can offer, there's hope for us all when it comes to making the big bucks.

(H/T:  Memeorandum)

The Liberal Left Misses Dubya, Too

Oh this is just too gleefully rich for me:

There's a new argument emerging among supporters of the Ground Zero mosque. Distressed by President Obama's waffling on the issue, they're calling on former President George W. Bush to announce his support for the project, because in this case Bush understands better than Obama the connection between the war on terror and the larger question of America's relationship with Islam. It's an extraordinary change of position for commentators who long argued that Bush had done grievous harm to America's image in the Muslim world and that Obama represented a fresh start for the United States.

Oh you are just kidding me!  Seriously?  We've got the likes of Maureen Dowd pining for Dubya?

The war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam. In fact, you can’t have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam. George W. Bush understood this. And it is odd to see Barack Obama less clear about this matter than his predecessor. It’s time for W. to weigh in. 

Incredible.

Ed Morrissey has the rest:

That, of course, is one of the delicious ironies of this situation.  Obama has done nothing but attack and demonize Bush for the last nineteen months, mainly to distract attention from Obama’s own failures on the economy.  In fact, while Dowd et al demand a response from Bush, Obama is busy on the campaign trail (an activity that Obama chided the GOP for doing while Obama attended big fundraisers) attempting to continue blaming Bush for the economic slide Obama promised to prevent with his massive spending.

Heh!  And Doug Powers has a wonderful line here:

Are they asking the same George W. Bush who started an illegal and immoral war, lied about WMDs so his buddies could profit from the invasion and tortured exclusively Muslim detainees to come to the rescue of a president who was supposed to save America from all the horror Bush hath wrought? That’s fine, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

Yes, I appears most of us are on the same page.

And let me reiterate what most poeple already recognize; this isn't about building a mosque.  It's about building a mosque right there.  That point is even more evident when you know that Gov. David Paterson offered to meet with developers in order to help them find a new site and they refused.  In fact, developer Sharif El-Gamal said the planned mosque is "nowhere near the World Trade Center site."  Yeah, well, we know that's not true.  We know, too, that wreckage from the attack crashed through the Burlington Coat Factory building which is to be the site of this mosque.  Pretty near, if you ask me.

And now the liberal left who support the building of this mosque on the ashes of the World Trade Center want George W. Bush to weigh in.  They assume he will support the plan; he might and he might not.

Be careful what you wish for.

Joe Wilson Must Be a Racist

Sometime next week the Democrats in the House will censure Rep. Joe Wilson with a Resolution unless he publicly apologizes on the House floor for calling Obama a liar last week.

Wilson immediately apologized to Obama who has accepted the apology; the Speaker has even said that everyone needs to move back to the debate on health care. This is apparently not good enough for some, however, and Pelosi's spokesman Brendan Daly said, “He has until next week sometime to apologize and if he doesn’t do it, they’ll go ahead and do a resolution.”

The lesson in this story, it seems, is the continuing double standard between parties in politics. The videos of bad behavior from the Democrats during Bush's speeches have circulated widely this week. Nobody demanded an apology then. Harry Reid called Bush a liar in 2004. Nobody censured Reid or demanded an apology. Apparently the difference is that Reid didn't do it on the House floor.

I'm not defending Wilson's breach of decorum. There were better ways to prove Obama's lies than to shout out from the floor during his speech.

Wilson's frustration with Obama's persistent "misrepresentations" of what is in the bill is shared by many of us. I believe Obama would have a better chance passing this bureaucratic nightmare of a bill if he'd at least tell the truth about it. It's a bad bill, but that's another issue at the moment.

Maureen Dowd doesn't see any problem with the bill, it seems, or with the lies. She doesn't think Obama was lying. She thinks Wilson disagreed with Obama just because Obama is a black man. For a party that purports a desire to move beyond race, it seems the left is the party constantly bringing it up. She writes, "But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted 'liar' at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it."

It's the old "shoot the messenger" theory, I guess. Wilson pointed out that Obama was lying when he said illegals would not be covered, so he must be punished. He must be a racist because he disagrees with Obama.

Dowd even takes shots at the South in her column today, "For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both." Stereotype much, Maureen?

Of course, as we all know, Wilson was correct in his belief that illegals would be able to obtain coverage because as many of us have been pointing out for months, there is no mechanism in place to stop them.

At any rate, in the end, Wilson was wrong for shouting from the floor; he apologized to Obama; Obama accepted the apology. Committees began work this week to try to close the loophole in the bill regarding illegals. Move on.

(H/T: Memeorandum)