Fox News sought a response from the White House for a story it was doing on the problem of President Biden's advanced age.

But — as HuffPo reports in "Fox News Refuses To Run Snarky White House Comment In Story Criticizing Biden’s Age"  — the White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates only responded with attacks relating to the advanced age of Rupert Murdoch.

First:

"We take inspiration from the 92 year-old owner of Fox News, and send our best regards on your accurate coverage of extreme MAGA Freedom Caucus complaining that President Biden outsmarted them on the budget as he continued the unprecedented bipartisan winning streak that is central to the best legislative record in modern American history."

Then: 

"I go back and forth on whether these stories are born out of Fox News executives trying to send a signal to y’all’s 92 year-old chairman, or that 92 year-old chairman’s frustrations with the political successes of a younger man running an exponentially more complex operation.” 

There's a big difference between owning a company and seeking election to high office. That Murdoch hangs onto his power says nothing positive about Biden's effort to cling to power in his old age. Biden must convince us, the people, that he's fit. He's younger than Murdoch and at least as power hungry. That's Bates's argument.

ADDED: At Meadhouse, we've been catching up on the HBO series "Succession," which has a character based to some extent on Rupert Murdoch. I bought the Season 2 "Complete Scripts," and I thought this was interesting, from the Introduction by Frank Rich:

"Under pressure over his possible impeachment, President Richard M. Nixon supposedly talked to the paintings in the White House. President Bill Clinton..."

"... absently toyed with his old campaign buttons. President Trump punches out Twitter messages in the lonely midnight hour. Long after his staff has gone home, long after the lights have gone out elsewhere around the capital, the besieged 45th president hunkers down in the upstairs residential portion of the Executive Mansion venting his frustration and cheering on his defenders through social media blasts."

Big news. The President tweets. A lot. When he's getting impeached and when he's not getting impeached.

But this is the NYT, assuring its readers that "For Trump, Impeachment May Be a Political Plus, but Also a Personal Humiliation." The anti-Trumpers know they're losing — he won't be removed and he's even benefiting politically — but damn it, at least they're humiliating him. The desire to humiliate — such a lowly emotion. And yet, the NYT is using it to pump up its despondent readers.

Subheadline: "As the House moves toward what even he says is an inevitable vote to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors, President Trump toggles between self-pity and combativeness." Toggles! How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?

The fact is he's not doing anything special to impeachment — nothing like talking to paintings or fingering old buttons. It sounds like Trump continues to Trump, same as ever. In which case, he's not losing it. He's carrying on — bold and tough, fighting and seeming to enjoy and get energy from the fight.

By the way, is it true that Nixon talked to the paintings? The NYT avoids responsibility for fact checking with the word "supposedly." It's a story. They say he got to talking to paintings.

I did my own brief research on the topic and stopped when I came to a Frank Rich column in the NYT, titled "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?" The date is December 3, 2006. 2006 — it is not about Trump. The question that the NYT would like to aim at Trump was aimed, back then, at George W. Bush:

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is....

So let's not forget: George Bush got the same treatment from the NYT.

Talking to paintings is a favorite way to say the President has gone mad. But Trump has tweeted all along. Nothing has changed. He hasn't gone anywhere. The tweeting is right there, a direct line from the President's brain to us, and we can see whether it's changed or not. Talking to paintings is something that a President does in isolation, withdrawing, and becoming abstracted — "untethered from reality." Tweeting is the opposite. It's totally connected and out in the open. It's something the President does with us — leaping over the press.

We don't have to wait for Bob Woodward to find out what happened behind the scenes. It's all already on the public stage. If the tweets are any crazier than before, we could see that — unless we've all gone crazy together and have grown accustomed to the weirdness — and we wouldn't need the NYT to tell us about it.

I just bought the Kindle version of "The Final Days" so I could see exactly what it said about Nixon talking to paintings. I think this is the only passage:

“The President . . . ” [Nixon's son-in-law Ed] Cox began. His voice rose momentarily. “The President was up walking the halls last night, talking to pictures of former Presidents—giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.”

ADDED: Proofreading this post, I saw the answer to my question "How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?" It's: They're reading the same tweets that we are. They don't have special access to sources. They're simply interpreting the same tweets we get.

As I said, Trump has leaped over the press. It must be so annoying for them. Maybe they're talking to paintings. Maybe to a painting of George W. Bush: Oh, George! How I miss you now! How good you were to let us trash you for 8 years and never to stoop to attacking us, like your miserable successor!

"So let’s give Schultz credit for bringing the country together, even if only in its bipartisan detestation of him."

Writes Frank Rich in "Howard Schultz May Be Even More Disingenuous Than Donald Trump" (NY Magazine).

Consider how similar that is to what Meade said to the Starbucks barista the other day: "I just want to say that I support your boss, Howard Schultz. Because I hate the Democrats, and I hate the Republicans, so go Howard."

Similar, but different, of course. Rich assumes everybody is a Democrat or a Republican and therefore wary of someone who threatens the 2-party game. Meade voiced opposition to both parties. There may be "bipartisan detestation" of Schultz, but "bipartisan" doesn't mean everyone, only everyone in one of the 2-parties, and a lot of us are on the outside and therefore not in a state of detestation but Schultz-curious.

Rich writes:

Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as “centrism” in our politics anymore beyond its use as a branding strategy for pundits and out-of-work politicians hustling to be hired as talking heads. ... Schultz’s potential third-party presidential candidacy is a ludicrous exercise in plutocratic ego that is of benefit to no one except Trump.

I did a little (obviously unscientific) poll yesterday on the blog. My question, "What is Schultz doing?"



I'm not saying these results are accurate, but look how strong the result is. 75% of you think Schultz is sincere and not ludicrous or egomaniacal.

"How protesters plan to get under Trump’s skin wherever he goes."

A headline at The Washington Post.

By the way, wasn't that Hillary Clinton's plan for the debates — "get under Trump's skin"? Wasn't there an old idea way back then that Trump was "thin-skinned"* and could be defeated by getting under his skin? He'd self-destruct? That's how I've packaged my memories of how everybody who tried failed to keep Trump from winning.

Back to the WaPo article, which is by Perry Stein and David A. Fahrenthold:

Having sought to create unprecedented disruption in Washington, his critics will now seek to bring unprecedented disruption to his life as president — including demonstrations that follow him when he travels, and protests that will dog his businesses even when he doesn’t.

Why aren't these people afraid that Trump draws energy from this negativity?

There have been small gestures of pique: lipstick graffiti on the sign at Trump’s golf course in Los Angeles, and a plan for a mass mooning of his hotel in Chicago. There have also been more organized efforts to take time and money away from family businesses — a boycott of stores selling Ivanka Trump’s clothes and a campaign to flood Trump businesses with calls demanding that the president divest from his holdings.

For Trump’s opponents, these demonstrations are a way to change his behavior by denting the president’s own self-image, as a popular man with a successful business.

Why would what hasn't worked yet suddenly start working?

About the anti-Trumpers insult of the moment: thin-skinned.

Hillary said it: Trump is "thin-skinned and quick to anger [and] lashes out at the smallest criticism."  And now Elizabeth Warren has said it: "Donald Trump is a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and serves nobody but himself,"

So let's think about this word. My first thought is, it's just an old trick to get your interlocutor to stop talking, like saying he's being "defensive." Who has not encountered an antagonist who criticizes you and then, when you respond, says something like: "Oh, I guess I hit a nerve" or "Don't be so defensive" or "You're awfully thin-skinned" or "You need to grow a thicker skin"? It's a call for unilateral disarmament! They want to keep attacking you, while you demonstrate how good you are at not fighting back. To be called "thin-skinned" heightens the aggravation yet if you react, they'll glory in your proving of their point. Aha! So you are thin-skinned! They knew it!

You've had that experience, haven't you? What did you do? 1. Accept the insight into your personality problems and try to model forbearance and a willingness to absorb blows without lashing back, 2. Withdraw from this fight and resolve to extract yourself from future discussions that might cause you to feel that you need to fight, 3. Confront your antagonist on his self-interested, phony psychoanalysis and insist on your right to respond to his attacks with commensurate forcefulness, 4. Ignore the distraction of the meta-conversation — the conversation about the conversation — and just keep fighting hard on the substantive issues that you were already talking about, 5. Take up the challenge of turning it into an argument about psychological shortcomings and hurl some equivalent insults at your opponent.

Now that you've thought about how you respond to this conversational gambit, think about what you want in a President. Maybe a good President needs all 5 options (and more), but it's obvious that all #1 all the time — or all #2 — would be absurd. I like ##3 and 4. Trump seems to like #5 —"If she wants to go the low road, I'm fine with that... I can handle the low road if I have to do it" — or at least he knows how to make his opponents feel they're not going to win that game.

But maybe Hillary and Elizabeth Warren think that "thin-skinned" is the one mean insult that can work, because it's the one where, when you try to return fire, you seem to be confirming their assessment. They also like it because it seems to fit a strategy of scaring people. The idea is that a thin-skinned President might lose his temper and take us into a war. Do people believe that? We've been in a lot of wars, but did they ever arise from a President getting mad? There have been bad decisions to go to war, but I think these had more to do with grim, sober analysis or with political calculation. Still, there's always the idea of the button. Hillary followed her "thin-skinned" remark with: "Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?"

Anyway, I got very interested in this word "thin-skinned" and did a search in the NYT archive. Here's a 1998 essay by Frank Rich recommending the "old-fashioned adjective thin-skinned" to describe the complaints of perpetually offended Americans:

Let any theater, museum or entertainment company float a project that might offend someone -- even sight unseen -- and that someone will scream, tempting the offending party to retreat or stick to the tried, the safe and the PG-rated in the future. No one can call this insidious syndrome censorship, because the protesters are always careful to say they are not demanding censorship and their targets are equally careful to say expressly that they do not back down in response to protests. But it's a disingenuous dance. Does anyone believe that NBC elected not to rerun the Puerto Rican Parade ''Seinfeld'' episode for any reason other than the public complaints? Or that the Library of Congress postponed an exhibit on Freud solely for budgetary reasons rather than because of a heated petition campaign by such prominent anti-Freudians as Gloria Steinem? This cautious cultural climate -- fueled by the right, the left and virtually every religious, ethnic and racial group -- can't be accurately described by that tortured term P.C., which is always in the eye of the beholder anyway. A better term would be that old-fashioned adjective thin-skinned. 

So Rich wanted to use the insult "thin-skinned" to push back political correctness. How interestingly Trump-related! Trump is notoriously thick-skinned when it comes to political correctness and his antagonists are betting on the thin skin of American voters, whom they nudge to feel outrage at anything Trump might say that could be interpreted as racist/sexist/xenophobic.

And here's something from April 5, 2008, when Hillary was fighting Barack Obama for the presidential nomination. Some young Obama supporter fretted about the hostility she'd been expressing toward Obama, and she said:

“For those of you who are new to politics,” she said, “it can be a little eye-opening especially when you choose sides and you’re for one or the other of us you can take personally anything one of us or the other says. Believe it or not, there have even been some things said about me. I don’t take it personally. I don’t take most of it seriously.”

Then, suggesting that perhaps Mr. Obama, or at least his supporters, were a bit thin-skinned, she added, “If you can’t take the heat, don’t run for president, because it’s a really hot kitchen in the White House. You’re supposed to present your case and critique the other case,” she added. “It is not a coronation. This nomination is worth fighting for and I’m going to fight for it.”

Isn't it funny? Obama is often praised for his cool temperament, but he's also been called "thin-skinned" quite a lot.

I think we should be thin-skinned about "thin-skinned." It's a tricky insinuation about a person, and I think we should be sensitive about it. I'll even be so sensitive as to suggest that it's an under-the-radar race word: Why are we talking about a person's skin?

The Kiss — a 10-item list.

1. After writing the last post — focusing on 2 magazine covers depicting a kiss — made me want to write a blog devoted to the kiss. It would be easy to keep a Google alert on the word "kiss" and blog every day on whatever miscellany relating to kissing happened to come up. I considered starting a new blog, but kiss.blogspot.com, kissblog.blogspot.com, and thekissblog.blogspot.com were all taken, so this post is a rough draft of what that blog would have been.

2. A Google news search on "kiss" brings up something I should already have blogged: Joe Biden, swearing in a Senator (Chris Coons) and wrangling various family members into good photo-op positions, got a little too cozy with a modest/nervous little girl and guessed wrong when he decided that a little cheek nuzzling would loosen her up. Reactions varied from "Holy Hell Would Be Unleashed On 'Handsy' Joe Biden If He Were Conservative" to "Awesome Little Girl Rejects Biden's Kiss At Senate Swearing-In." Hey, Joe, no means no... Mr. Violence Against Women Act.

3. Remember your first kiss? Kid Rock does — or is able to strain his voice Jack-and-Diane style in various assertions to that effect in this new video "First Kiss":



"And now these days when I drive through a small town/I turn my stereo up and roll my windows down/’Cause it reminds me of my first kiss/And those days that I always miss/Tom Petty on the radio." Tom Petty gets a big shout-out. Seems like John Cougar Mellencamp deserves a nod (or a peck on the cheek).

4. Kiss cam variations... including the deepest deep kiss:



5. "KISS frontman Gene Simmons... is as ubiquitous as ever with a reality-television show and a recent book on his business philosophy called 'Me Inc'" and a new restaurant in Oviedo called Rock and Brews. Quote: "You are alive, and you are supposed to keep moving... I'm 65, and, boy, do I look great."

6. "Tell me about the Root kiss. Was that a big gift for the fans?... Did you think it was a 'Goodbye forever' kiss, or a 'Shut up, I’ll be back' kiss?" Apparently, there's a TV show called "Person of Interest" and there was a kiss that made a big impression — "a much-anticipated kiss between the show’s electrifying women." What was so big about it? It can't just be that 2 women kissed on TV or even that 2 electrifying women kissed on TV. In the first nonplatonic 2-woman kiss the women were electrifying: Sharon Stone Mariel Hemingway and Rosanne Barr. "Television critic Frank Rich of The New York Times called 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 'a small step forward for the stirring of homosexuals into the American melting pot' and a 'sophisticated half-hour [that] turned homophobia on its ear.'" The year was 1994.

7. The previous post — the post that got me started on this list — discussed a Charlie Hebdo cover showing 2 men kissing which I assumed was an intentional allusion to the famous New Yorker cover showing a Jewish man and a black woman kissing, and Meade said: "You know what else you should have included?" I said: "Brancusi's 'The Kiss'?"



No, he was thinking of the famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse: "V-J Day in Times Square" by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Scanning my Google image search results, I saw Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" and said: "As ubiquitous as Gene Simmons." No, I said: "How many dorm rooms have you seen this in?" And "There's also that Rodin."

8. For a less famous, less over-liked artwork called the kiss, consider Tino Sehgal's "The Kiss": "On the [Guggenheim Museum's] ground floor, a man and woman entwine in a changing, slow-motion amorous embrace.... As choreography it will hold no surprises for anyone familiar with contemporary dance. Taken as living sculpture, it has amusing moments: every so often, the performers strike erotic poses derived from Courbet, Rodin, Brancusi and Jeff Koons." I'd already thought of Rodin and Brancusi, but let's check out the Courbet and the Koons.

9. Hey, Koons (#8) and Coons (#2). It's like the stars are in alignment. Is there a constellation called The Kiss? No, but The Arctic Monkeys sang: "And her lips are like the galaxy's edge/And her kiss the color of a constellation falling into place."

10. "Kiss" is a very old word in English. The OED — giving the first meaning as "A touch or pressure given with the lips... in token of affection, greeting, or reverence; a salute or caress given with the lips" — has the oldest appearance of the word circa 1000:

Ælfric Homilies II. 32   Ic hine to minum cosse arærde.

I don't read English well enough to understand that, but the language becomes more recognizable by the 1380s, when a translated Bible had: "Kisse he me with the cos of his mowth." And here's a great poet: "Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?"

"Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her."

"They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press — as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t 'a serious human being.' Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight."

That's Frank Rich, and look out: It's a trap. But do they know how not to fall into it?

"'Look at the steam in the man’s stride!' exclaimed Chris Matthews."

Frank Rich gushes by quoting Chris Matthews gushing about what amazing man Barack Obama is.

But "Look at the steam in the man’s stride!"? Now, we know all about Matthews and the "thrill going up my leg." And now here he is getting all excited about Obama's striding legs. But what's with "the steam." Do you really want people to perceive gusts blowing out as you walk? It's a rather... farty image, isn't it?

But the idea is how powerful and confident Obama seems these days. That's what Rich is talking about. And I'm thinking, is that the origin of the phrase "full of beans"?

***

This post would be so much better  if I could find a video clip of the great George Carlin demonstrating walking and farting.

"It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America."

In the first 2 sentences of his new column, Frank Rich stakes out the territory of his dreams. The first poll I think of is this new Gallup poll:

Now, I can see Rich's loophole: "one of the most popular politicians in America." All he needs for his statement to be true is for there to be a lot of other politicians who are more unpopular. And then, job approval isn't necessarily popularity. Presumably, Obama still has this personal popularity, which he could somehow begin to use to do things people would actually approve of.

Anyway, Rich goes on to say that Obama is in trouble and must act quickly. He'd like to see Obama "exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery" and holds up an example of JFK "threaten[ing] to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records" after the chairman of U.S. Steel tried to "break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages)." Rich doesn't identify anything precisely equivalent to the U.S. Steel situation that would make good theater for Obama.

Hmmm. I wrote that last sentence and carefully chose the expression "good theater" without it even crossing my mind that Rich began his career as a theater critic.

I've got to say, I really don't understand what Rich would like Obama to do and how it could help our terrible economy. Here is the text of Kennedy's press conference. Can you extrapolate from that and apply it to today? The most Rich has is:

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses....

So... jawboning... or is Obama supposed to threaten them somehow?

"The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York" — Frank Rich makes it all sound so scary.

Or at least the NYT headline makes it sound as though Frank Rich is about to scare us over the Stalinist invasion. But, reading the text, I see: "The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P." Are they killing the poor citizens of upstate New York or are they killing themselves? Get the image straight, Frank. Are liberals supposed to be aghast that conservatives were able to promote a conservative ahead of the Republican Party's liberal candidate? Or should liberals be delighted that the Republican Party is destroying itself from the inside?

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck... would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity....

Now, Rich himself sounds pretty wacky and paranoid to me. He tells us that it's "better for Democrats if Hoffman wins." He wants Hoffman to win. Really.

Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure....

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes....

Punch-drunk... pathology... hysteria... seething... fear... maniacal... Rich's perception of craziness seems... crazy. Hoffman and others are saying that conservatives should stand for traditional conservative values, and not, like Scozzafava, be more like the liberals. Give the electorate a choice between conservative and liberal and see who wins. That strikes me as quite sane. And I am speaking as someone who voted for Barack Obama in part because John McCain was not a solid, coherent conservative. Faced with the need to trust either a (seemingly) thoughtful, intelligent liberal and a confusing partly liberal candidate, I chose the former. I would do the same thing today. But I would like a real choice. Let the G.O.P. be conservative and defend and develop conservatism and see if people want it. I'm not surprised Rich is trying to portray that strategy as insane: He's a hardcore liberal.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals....

Oh, I've already said what I had to say. I just threw in one more line because "parrot a tic" amuses me.

Don't tick off a parrot. And as for what to do with a tick... we don't parrot it. We do this.

Now, I'm getting far afield, and I'm manufacturing what could be perceived as evidence that we wingers are crazy. So let me, at long last, bring this post in for a landing. With something positive. Because, you know, we right-wing ideologues are an optimistic bunch. I want to compliment Rich — and the NYT — for studding the column with hyperlinks, many of which send us away from the NYT website. For example, when Rich attributes "whiny cries of victimization" to Rush Limbaugh, there is a link to Limbaugh's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Maybe some NYT readers who would never listen to the radio show will pop over there to see how terrible Rush is and find to their amazement that it's completely cogent and impressive. It might even strike a sympathetic chord for some readers. ("My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race?")

"What made the lone, piercing cry of 'You lie!' shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier."

Frank Rich opines:

It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president.

Violent rage? Think what you will about the forceful expression of outrage — I've often read it in Frank Rich columns — it's different from physical violence. And no one thinks Joe Wilson was about to do something physically violent.

Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

No, shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater causes fearful running for the exits, and it's actually the right thing to do when there actually is a fire. That's why Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

I wonder why Frank Rich wanted to evoke Free Speech case law when his aim in this column is to bemoan vigorous speech. I suppose he just meant that neither "You lie" in the House chamber or "Fire" in a crowded theater is good.  Except that "fire" is good when there is a fire, which leaves Rich's analogy setting up the argument that shouting "You lie" during a presidential speech is desirable if the President really is lying. But that's absurd. We'd never get to the end of these already seemingly endless orations if that was the rule.

Back to Rich:

When [Wilson] later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

Not every impolite outburst equals uncontrolled anger, and I don't remember Rich caring about all the angry statements that were aimed at George Bush. I remember him making them. He and lots of other brave dissenters loved calling Bush a liar. I don't remember back then hearing anybody propounding the theory that free speech needed to be tempered lest it give "permission to crazy people."

Frank Rich "imagine[s] what it’s like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama."

Getting some perspective at long last?

Not really. His next words are:

Those who feel the whole world is against them.

What? Your feat of imagination has you immediately projecting your opinion of their insane paranoia?

Those who think the press corps is in the tank.

Could you pause for a moment and consider the extent to which the press is in the tank?

Those so sickened by the fawning that they’d throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.

But it is sickening, isn't it? You had to dash headlong into that fevered image of violent brick-throwing and Bush-bashing, so you wouldn't have to think about how awful the fawning really has been.

But only for a second. I confess to being among the 81 percent (per Wall Street Journal/NBC) who like the guy...

Rich contends that all the fawning is because "[t]he journalism industry is fighting for its life" and "Obama is the one reliable product" it can offer for sale. Forgive the bad journalism. We need to make it bad so you'll buy it. Not you brick-throwing deadenders. But somebody. Anybody.

Rich goes on to inform us that the GOP is pathetically diminished, and that "with so little opposition, in the political arena or most anyplace else, to challenge his high-flying course," Obama will need to keep himself "grounded."

That's way at the end of the column, long after the discussion of journalism, but maybe journalism is what he meant by "most anyplace else."

I wish he'd gone back to his Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders! Do you really still insist they are people who feel the whole world is against them? You've just mapped out why they — and all of us — really should be alarmed. You have a massively powerful, ambitious President, unchecked by an opposition party, boosted and promoted by journalists who've forgotten what their role is. Now, go back to your imagination exercise and do it again.

"Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts..."

"... his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed."

Frank Rich says Obama's "Katrina moment" is here.

A smiling John McCain crushed under Palin's high-heeled shoe.

Nice illustration by Barry Blitt (the artist who did the famous Michelle-and-Barack New Yorker cover).

The accompanying column, by Frank Rich, is not Palin-friendly:

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

The bitch! Hey, wait, does that mean she's cerebral now?

... She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party.

And a guy.

Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that [Barney] Frank nailed.

Frank's column is full of sexual imagery, but I think that one was unintentional. (And, by the way, the Blitt illustration is arguably sexual.)

You have to wonder how long it will be before [Republicans] plead with [McCain] to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

Frank Rich thinks you should be very afraid of Sarah Palin.

Look out. She's a real right-winger:

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above....

Don't you know that when Republicans praise the people of small towns, what they are doing is insulting urbanites? Right wingers are so sneaky.

Compare the forthright Barack Obama, who had the guts to come out and say that the people of small towns "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

If he'd been more underhanded and sneaky like Sarah Palin, he could have sent that message secretly coded in praise for big-city people.

Back to Frank Rich. I'm skipping a whole lot of stuff about Westbrook Pegler. If you want to know who Westbrook Pegler is and what he's got to do with the frightening threat that is Sarah Palin, you have to click over.

But suffice it to say, Pegler was a big right winger and -- to accept Rich's characterization -- an anti-Semite and a racist. If Pegler was a right winger and Palin is a right winger, then Palin must be a big racist. That's Rich logic.

The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites... who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago.

Fairy tale, eh? Here's a quiz: What big right winger famously mocked Obama by saying "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen"?

Obama "had yet to learn to be laught at" and sometimes "a deeper shade of hauteur... overspread his features."

Maureen Dowd thinks Jane Austen's description of Mr. Darcy apply well to Barack Obama:

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices....

In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial...

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?

If we're going to get all English proffy, heavy on the race-and-gender talk, shouldn't we critique Dowd for portraying the black man's pursuit of political office as a sexual exploit?

***

I like this little statement at the end of Dowd's column:

Frank Rich is off today.

Isn't Frank Rich always off?

"Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture... it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush."

On to the Maureen Dowd column. Yeah, I know I could be more creative about where to go for a Sunday morning's blogging, but the Frank Rich/Maureen Dowd pairing is telling today.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

Okay, so Dowd has some sardonic distance on the love fest — and yet I feel that she's teasing us here, showing off that she got close to the world's boyfriend — and can even kind of talk about sex with him. It's an interview. (Is Frank jealous?) She's on the plane, having a personal conversation! I'm jealous.

“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.

He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”

Aw. The man in the bubble. Let's write a different movie scenario — one where the fabulously successful candidate realizes he doesn't want to live like this. He only wants to be free. He just runs off one night. Have him climb out a window. He melts into the crowd. No one ever hears from him again. Maybe he grows a big beard and starts wearing glasses. Spends the rest of his life giving free legal services to the poor and teaching night classes as a third tier law school somewhere in America....

But he can't climb out the window now. He's on an airplane. With Maureen Dowd:

“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”

It's all about enjoying your work. Wouldn't it be amusing if some day, a President resigned because he just wasn't enjoying the work — not deeply, anyway?

But that comment makes me feel a little wistful and sad for the world's boyfriend. He admitted he feels trapped in his new role — he's given up his freedom. Yet, because he's a candidate, he had to immediately say that he really does enjoy it. Deeply.

Assertions of depth ≈ shallowness.

Life must be hollow now. Oh! I shed a tear for our boyfriend.

“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”

The sacrifices our boyfriend makes for us.

But he's going to be even better in the future. He's going to raise up some big important issues. He won't just raise issues. He will raise up issues. He will glorify issues. And not just issues. Big important issues.

I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.

“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg....

“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”

This is a good theme for him. Even, balanced, seeing the good and bad in everything....

Sigh.

"A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners."

Barack Obama's overseas trip seems like the scenario for some Borat-style movie to Frank Rich.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings.

Don't forget the power to turn back the rising oceans!

You know, I just passed up one breakfast spot — here in Beverly Hills — because they had Chris Matthews — Chris Matthews! — effusing off the flat-screen TV on the wall. Now, I'm in a café that is mercifully free of television, awash in mellow music. There's no thrill-up-the-leg Matthewzing to get on my nerves as I try to inject the appropriate amount of caffeine into my veins.

But there is still Frank Rich. Oh! The Power! The Raw Power! Ah! Stunning! Slick! And oh-so-manly POWER!

Sorry, Frank. He's married.

Rich pads out the middle part of his column with the usual material about how he disagrees with Bush about the war. He's got a point he's supposedly proving: Bush is so bad that Obama has somehow become "acting President" — especially in Euro-eyes.

And McCain is therefore royally screwed.

Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling.

Troubling... or modest and proper.

[McCain's] grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.

Who helped Rich with his semi-up-to-date Borat reference in paragraph 1? I don't know, but his back to showing his age with pop culture references from the distant past.

When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy.

Well, you are plainly in love with that guy.

So, anyway, McCain is such a screw-up. He can't catch a break. And the whole world has embraced Obama as the new President. This thing is all over. What a blow out! Obama is crushing McCain. He must be about 20 or 30 — even 40 — points ahead in the polls by now.

Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd get around to the subject of the Clinton-Obama debate.

It must be hard to think of new things to say, when everyone's been talking about the debate for days. You could talk about what people have been saying, but Dowd doesn't do that:

The thorny questions Obama got in the debate were absolutely predictable, yet he seemed utterly unprepared and annoyed by them. He did not do well for the same reason he failed to outmaneuver Hillary in a year’s worth of debates: he disdains the convention, the need for sound bites and witty flick-offs and game-changing jabs.

Does he "disdain" all that because he's lofty and idealistic, or because he's not very good at it? Remember the time he said "You're likeable enough, Hillary"? That seemed to lead directly to his loss in the New Hampshire primary and the agonizing prolongation of the primary season.

He needs to be less philosophical and abstract, and more visceral and personal....

He needs to not be the magical screen for projection that made us see what we wanted when we looked at him. He has one amazing thing that he can do better than anyone. How can he be expected to do anything else anywhere nearly as well?

[W]hen a voter from Latrobe asked in the debate why he doesn’t wear a flag pin, he high-hatted it as a “manufactured issue,” then, backing in tepidly, added, “I could not help but love this country for all that it’s given me.”

Asked about his friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers — an association that The Wall Street Journal suggests could turn into the Swift Boat of 2008 given Ayers’s statement that “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough” — Obama defended him with a line that only the eggheads orbiting his campaign could appreciate. Ayers, he said, is “a professor of English in Chicago.”

Obama has to prove to Americans that, despite his exotic background and multicultural looks, he shares or at least respects their values and understands why they would be upset about his associations with the Rev. Wright and an ex-Weatherman.

Dowd thinks Obama knows he needs to prove something like this and that he's trying, but what can he do? Dowd says that, since the debate, he's seemed "eager to show he was not highfalutin." Of course, he's eager. But what can he do? Saying he didn't grow up rich, hugging a vet, and ending a speech with “God Bless America” — the 3 things Dowd cites — do nothing to address questions about his patriotism.

Frank Rich begins with talk about the talk about the debate, specifically, the criticism of the ABC moderators, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson:

Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town voters....

Mr. Obama did sound condescending, an unappealing trait that was even more naked in his “You’re likable enough, Hillary” gibe many debates ago.

(I'm reading this after calling attention to the same Obama quote above.)

But the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media more than it damaged him. For all the racket about “Bittergate” — and breathless intimations of imminent poll swings and superdelegate stampedes — the earth did not move. The polls hardly budged, and superdelegates continued to migrate mainly in Mr. Obama’s direction.

Ahem. Check the trend in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch.

Eh. Who cares? Obama isn't running against the media. It doesn't matter whether we like the media — which Rich is part of — less than Obama but whether we like the other candidates less. We will always bitch about the media, especially when they wound our favorite candidate.

That's all I have to say about Rich. Unlike Dowd, who makes every sentence interesting, Rich rambles through the second half of his column. Some people have more money than others — did you know?

Frank Rich promotes Barack Obama.

Also in today's Times, Frank Rich promotes Obama:

By telling an Iowa audience on Tuesday night that he had opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” Bill Clinton committed a double pratfall. Not only did he refocus attention on his wife’s most hazardous issue, Iraq, just as it was receding as the nation’s Topic A, but he also revived unhappy memories of the truth-dodging nadirs of the Clinton White House.

Whatever his caveats, Mr. Clinton did not explicitly oppose the Iraq war from the beginning. But Al Gore did unequivocally and loudly in a public speech before the beginning, as did an obscure Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. What if Mrs. Clinton had led an insurrection against the war authorization in the Senate? Might she have helped impede America’s rush into one of the greatest fiascos in our history?

Rich thinks Obama would be a more formidable match for the Republican candidate:

[T]he Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama...

Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters....

An Obama candidacy would force them to engage. Or try to. A matchup between Mr. Obama and Mr. Giuliani, who was forged in the racial crucible of New York’s police brutality nightmares of the 1990s, or between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who was shaped by a religion that didn’t give blacks equal membership until 1978, would be less a clash of races than of centuries.

Oh, yeah, go after Romney because he professes a religion that had a defect that it eradicated 3 decades ago. That will be wonderfully effective and a stunning display of enlightenment. Don't we all want to see how much religious and racial discord the 2 parties can stir up and leverage in their lust for power?

Can someone please ask Obama how he likes Rich's vision?

***

Maureen Dowd's column is about Obama too. But she's not really promoting him. She's up to something else.