MoDo: Slouching Toward Washington

I hate Maureen Down and I love Maureen Dowd. But there's no getting around her gravity-defying brilliance. In her latest column, MoDo weighs in on the ongoing Christine O’Donnell kerfuffle and the quickening transformation of American politics into parody (See Mr. Colbert Goes to Washington):

On the hapless O’Donnell:

Holy Roddy McDowall. Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand why monkeys can’t turn into people right before her eyes.

[Bill Maher] has a soft spot for the sweet-faced Republican Senate candidate from Delaware, but as he told me on Friday, it’s “powerful stupid to think primate evolution could happen fast enough to observe it. That’s bacteria.”

She (rightly) slaps the GOP wingnuts with one hand:

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Jim DeMint and some Tea Party types don’t merely yearn for the country they idealize from the 1950s. They want to go back to the 1750s.

And then, unable to resist, she swiftly backhands Obama with the other:

President Obama was supposed to be a giant leap forward in modernity, the brainy, rational first black president leading us out of the scientific darkness of the W. years. But by letting nutters get a foothold, he may usher us into the past.

Look, needling Obama in front of a national audience is fine. Hell, it’s healthy. And I’d like to imagine this death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach is MoDo’s special way of holding “Barry” accountable, even when it is gratuitous. That said, methinks her expectations still derive more from a “West Wing” fantasy than realpolitik circa 2010 A.D.