Whoa! Maureen Dowd Channels Dan Cirucci Blog!

Last week, right here we wrote about how President Obama lost the vote on the gun bill.

here's part of what we said:

President Obama is really more interested in campaigning and demonizing Republicans than he is in reaching across the aisle to make a deal. Obama doesn't want a Democrat/Republican, bi-partisan unity vote.
If he did, he would have gone to the GOP with a solid 58 votes and that likely would have tipped the scales and brought two more Republicans in the fold and the scales would have been tipped.
But it wasn't worth it for him to keep his own party together and then just two more GOP votes. He was more interested in campaigning all over the country, using parents of the Sandy Hook massacre as props and denouncing gun owners and second amendment defenders. All that was more important to Obama and his team than quietly working out a deal.
He didn't want to do the hard work that needed to be done.
Instead -- as is often the case with Obama -- he wanted to grandstand; to campaign; to propagandize. He simply doesn't appear to be interested in leading and building consensus the way a president should.

Now, the undisputed Queen of Liberal Columnists writing at the Liberal Bible (The New York Times) agrees with us.  Yes, Maureen Dowd is beginning to figure it out (maybe). And FINALLY, she's saying what we said more than a week ago: Obama can campaign and win elections but he cannot, cannot, cannot govern. Here's what she says in yesterday's column:

"Unfortunately, he [Obama} still has not learned how to govern.
"How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.
It’s unbelievable that . . . he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.
"Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.
"President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things. He chooses not to get down in the weeds and pretend he values the stroking and other little things that matter to lawmakers."

Folks, you read it all here first.
And you saved yourselves the aggravation (and the cost) of having to read the New York Times.
Of course, there is one vital difference between Dowd's approach and ours: She still insists (no matter what the problem) in pinning the final blame on Republicans and conservatives. We don't.

Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes?!

From Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters:
On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.
On Sunday, Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo accused New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of plagiarizing a piece he posted a few days ago.
Dowd has now admitted her mistake.
As Marshall wrote Thursday:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Dowd wrote before she got caught:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

As such, Dowd merely substituted "the Bush crowd was" for "we were." The rest is exactly the same.
Dowd's piece now reflects her admission:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.” [...]

An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

So, we not only have so-called journalists channeling nonsense from the liberal blogosphere, but now they're just cutting-and-pasting from it.
And newspaper owners wonder why their subscription rates continue to plummet.

When Wizards Fizzle

From Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:
The Obama wizards’ tactical skills seemed to desert them. The White House often ends up making its inhabitants tone-deaf (or even nuts), but this was an unusually quick trip into the cognitive third dimension.
Asked what he had learned from the Daschle fiasco, one Obama official replied, “Not to rationalize.”
They knew that the choice of Tom Daschle conflicted with the Obama change message, but they preferred to focus on how much the president owed his friend and how good they thought he would be in the job.
They wanted him because he was the ultimate insider and they lost him because he was the ultimate insider. Now Daschle’s punishment for getting too rich with special interests will be to get richer with special interests.
Obama aides call the morass a good wake-up call, and the president seems more aware of how the White House weather can cloud your thinking. Maybe that’s why he keeps trying to pop out to get a breath of fresh air — at an elementary school, at the Kennedy Center, at Camp David.
On Friday, a reporter asked Robert Gibbs if the president was already feeling cooped up.
“He’s a bit of a restless soul,” Gibbs said, laughing. “His idea of a crazy day is to take a long walk.”
A long walk where? somebody asked.
“In solitude and isolation,” Gibbs replied.