As far as I can tell, these are serious quotes from a very serious person.
The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership. [...]
How can the president star in a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner satirical film pretending to be Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Obama,” and not have absorbed the lessons of “Lincoln”? [...]
He might do better to remember what Jeremy Irons’s pope says on “The Borgias,” “Do you not see that even the impression of weakness begets weakness?” [...]
Closing Guantánamo doesn’t address the fundamental problem of rights. Obama’s solution, blocked by Congress, is to move the hornet’s nest to a Supermax prison in Illinois — dubbed “Gitmo North” — and keep holding men as POWs in a war that has no end. They’re not hunger-striking for a change in scenery. [...]
The senior senator from Kentucky has been a leader in Keep-Terrorists-Offshore. Maybe, if the president really wants to close Gitmo, he should have a drink with Mitch McConnell. Really. -Maureen Dowd
If only President Obama would show some leadership, he would have united Congress, learned the lessons of Lincoln, displayed the mighty (fictional) prowess of Jeremy Irons, convinced Mitch McConnell to close Guantanamo, walked on water, and parted the Red fucking Sea.
My reaction can only be described thusly:
It’s as if Dowd collected every beltway trope and meme there is, threw them at a dartboard while drunk, and took the ones that hit the target and put them into a column.
No amount of magical leadership can sway the votes of the Crackpot Caucus, assuage their xenophobic nightmares, or quench their thirst for conspiracy. No sprinkling of fairy dust will ease the fear of detainees being housed inside the states, which Dowd propagates here by referring to them as the “hornet’s nest” and “Gitmo North.”
A glass of Budweiser will not convince Mitch McConnell that he’s been wrong all along or that his campaign to make Barack Obama a one-term president which he initiated over four years ago was a mistake.
I don’t know what The New York Times is paying Maureen Dowd to write this ridiculous drivel, but I’m sure it’s too much.