MoDo Misses It By That Much

“Obama’s Flickering Greatness” is the latest rumination by Maureen Dowd:

ON Saturday mornings, I love to watch reruns of the TV Western “The Rifleman.” Each show is a little moral fable, with Chuck Connors’s widowed rancher and crack shot, Lucas McCain, teaching his son, Mark, about actions and consequences.

If you neglect to do this now, you will pay a penalty later. If a corner is cut here, you will regret it there.

The president might want to catch some shows, as the lame duck’s chickens come home to roost.

At this pivotal moment for his legacy at home and abroad, his future reputation is mortgaged to past neglect.

Like Prufrock, Obama must wonder if the moment of his greatness is flickering.

Yes, I get Obama the clunky teleprompter orator and T. S. Eliot, the landmark modernist poetry stylist confused all the time, as well. But the fictional J. Alfred Prufrock, a construct of Eliot’s rich imagination, was an elderly modernist facing the twilight of his years with the double-barreled dread of additional infirmities and the eternal void to come. The quasi-fictional B. Hussein Obama, whose myth is entirely the construct of DNC-MSM fabulists, is 53 years old — an awfully young age in today’s society — who had every opportunity to achieve greatness, but had nothing but malice in his heart, instead.

If only MoDo and other journalists had the courage to point that out from the start, instead of attacking everyone who didn’t drink the Obama Kool-Aid as racists. (QED: MoDo’s racist 2009 attack on Rep. Joe Wilson.) Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama was not only corrupted himself, he corrupted so many of his defenders as well. As Jonah Goldberg wrote last month, both men and their courtiers are “a perfect example of what Lord Acton really meant by power corrupting. He didn’t mean that rulers are corrupted by power, he meant that intellectuals become corrupted by their worship of the powerful.”

And in some cases by association with their peers as well; which is why I was so surprised to see MoDo admiring The Rifleman. Given what her fellow leftists think about the all-American traditional western, that passage has got to be considered a hate crime by her colleagues at the Times.

And note this:

President Obama has vowed to degrade, destroy and defeat ISIS, but it seems more like delay, so it won’t look as though he lost Iraq on his watch. He’s putting a bandage on the virulent gash, sending American advisers to work with Iraqi troops and tribesmen in “lily pad” bases near the front lines.

It appears to be a sad, symbolic move by a country and president fed up with endless war and at wit’s end about how to combat the most murderous terrorists on the face of the earth. If we drowned in quicksand going full-bore for a dozen years beside Iraqi soldiers who did not want to fight, what good will 450 more American trainers do?

A lame duck sending sitting ducks to lily pads is not a pretty sight.

And once again, MoDo misses the obvious — Obama’s simply trying to run out the clock, and hand the smoking wreckage of Iraq over to his successor, after declaring in 2011, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” As Paul Mirengoff wrote last month at Power Line, “Bin Laden’s overriding goal was to drive the U.S. out of the Muslim world so that al Qaeda and its affiliates could topple hostile governments in these regions. Once we understand this, we must see bin Laden as more of a success than a failure. And we must see President Obama as the vehicle through which bin Laden succeeded.”

But Dowd is right: A lame duck is not a pretty sight — and both sides of the aisle can smell the fear and the stench of failure that emanates from this White House.