Maureen Dowd offers balanced coverage of Obama’s Q and A with Repubs

Wow. It’s hard for me to admit this and even go so far as to link to her op-ed in today’s NY Times, but of all the coverage I’ve scanned of Obama’s much heralded Q and A with the Republicans the other day, Maureen Dowd has offered the most balanced account of the occasion. Hey, she even acknowledged that despite his emergence from his “Camus coma,” Obama got his comeuppance a few times from Utah’s freshman member of the House, Republican Jason Chaffetz.

Is it too much to hope that our punditry is finally emerging from its comatose state evident since Barack Obama first-stepped on the national stage?

Read Dowd’s entire column here:

U.S. ranks 70th in the world in political empowerment of women

After the treatment Hillary Clinton received during the 2008 Democratic primary, I was not surprised to learn today in Ruth Marcus’ column, submitted to the Washington Post from Davos, that the United States ranks 31st in the Global Gender Gap Index – and hey, look at this: we rank 70th in the category of political empowerment.

As I’ve suggested before, America should be embarrassed to lecture the rest of the world on human rights issues - what with its treatment of women, and it’s recent experiments in using torture to obtain intelligence information from “enemy combatants” picked up off the streets in various countries without benefit of formal charges.

But back to the gender gap. Marcus reports:

The focus is on the gap between men and women in each country rather than women’s overall levels of achievement there, so countries are ranked based on the gender differential rather than development level. At the top of this year’s heap, once again, were the Scandinavian countries: Iceland ranked first, followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden. But the rest of the top 10 was a global grab bag: New Zealand was number five, then South Africa, Denmark, Ireland, the Philippines and Lesotho. At the bottom was Yemen, with Chad, Pakistan, Benin, Saudi Arabia and, surprising to me, Turkey, which was a notch below Iran.

The United States ranked No. 31, about where it’s been for the last few years but worse than its No. 23 ranking from the first survey, in 2006. This relative backsliding is unusual: Of the 115 countries that have been covered in all four years, 97 improved their rankings.

Read more of the shameful details here.

Tavis Smiley, Michael Beschloss, and the continued PBS assault on Bill and Hillary Clinton

I used to get angry when the right criticized PBS for having a liberal bias in its political coverage. No more. That was before the 2008 Democratic primary when I saw Shields, Brooks, and Lehrer repeatedly treat Hillary and Bill Clinton with lip-curling contempt. PBS has been at it again this week, once again demonstrating their “do or say whatever it takes to support Barack Obama attitude,” even if it means trashing two fellow Democrats who have given him their complete support throughout his first year in office.

Just prior to Obama’s first State of the Union speech, the network aired Tavis Smiley’s interview with Hillary Clinton, which I watched with mixed feelings. On one level, Smiley was treating the secretary of state with apparent awe for her hard work and dedication, but on another level there was unmistakable condescension in his every comment about her.

And there was outright misrepresentation of the facts in his first mention of her trip to Africa where she exposed herself to dangerous conditions in the East Congo, the rape capital of the world, to make a stand for women’s rights.

From her entire trip to Africa, Smiley chose to highlight an incident when Clinton rightfully objected to a student’s question regarding what her husband thought about an issue.

In concert with his sexist colleagues in the media, Smiley failed to get the put down that any self-respecting contemporary woman in Clinton’s circumstances would have experienced in that situation. Instead, our smug, superior news correspondent referred to Clinton’s objection to the question as a “gaffe.”

I never learn. I made the mistake of tuning in the NewsHour the day after Obama’s State of the Union address to watch Judy Woodruff moderate a panel that included so-called historian Michael Beschloss. Historians put aside their biases and record history objectively, right? My jaw dropped in astonishment as I heard Beschloss attempt to prop up Obama by accusing Bill Clinton of having done whatever it took during his first term to get re-elected. It was about then that I hit the off button on my remote.

I don’t understand how American TV viewers continue to support PBS in response to its recurrent fundraising drives in which its spokespersons boast about the network’s objective and balanced news coverage. Personally, I will never send PBS a dime.

By the way, Beschloss didn’t succeed in his efforts to elevate Obama by smearing Bill Clinton. Not by a long shot. In this morning’s NY Times column, Paul Krugman puts Obama’s puny stabs at leadership in perspective:

Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it’s an indication of the extent to which we’re failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.

It’s time we all asked ourselves, what’s going here?

President Obama’s State of the Union: Hey, America, fixing our economy is just a big athletic contest!

Well, yes, I sat up and listened to President Obama’s first State of the Union address. Overall, I felt mildly dismayed, but not surprised, by how the president’s audience cheered on the several occasions when he mouthed the usual clichés to arouse America’s competitive spirit in relationship to the rest of the world, for example:

From -- from the first railroads to the Interstate Highway System, our nation has always been built to compete. There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains or the new factories that manufacture clean-energy products.

It was kind of like listening to a basketball coach rev up his team before the big game with all the loyal fans present. As was to be expected, the fans stood up and cheered on cue.

Sadly, I did not hear an alternative vision of how America could play a leadership role in promoting a level of global prosperity that would at least allow the people of every nation the opportunity to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families. But then that would require an emphasis on cooperation rather than heightened competition.

I had to shake my head when President Obama offered a disclaimer for Candidate Obama who was swept to victory on his repeated pledges to transform the world in six days and rest on the seventh. Instead of “Yes, we can,” the president spoke more humbly a year after he took office:

I campaigned on the promise of change, change we can believe in, the slogan went. And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren't sure if they still believe we can change, or that I can deliver it.

But remember this: I never suggested that change would be easy or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That's just how it is.

I beg to differ: Candidate Obama may never have suggested that change would be easy, but nowhere in his heated rhetoric did this superb motivational speaker warn his typically youthful, shouting, and foot-stomping followers of the hard road ahead.

And he’s still not being 100 percent honest and straightforward with the American people by implying that overcoming the financial meltdown and high levels of unemployment is comparable to a rigorous pick-up basketball game in which the USA team in its red, white, and blue uniforms can easily overcome its international competition.

Elizabeth Warren nails Wall Street CEOs on the Daily Show (video)

I’d like to nominate Elizabeth Warren for the presidency in 2012. Watch this video.

Secretary Clinton skips Obama’s first State of the Union speech

“Madam Secretary sends her regrets,” so writes Washington Post columnist Al Kamen:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got a pass last week from President Obama to skip Wednesday night's State of the Union speech. (We had heard she begged to be excused, but apparently it didn't come to that.)

Seems there's an important international meeting Wednesday in London on battling radicalization in Yemen, and then another, long-planned conference there Thursday on development and security in Afghanistan.

So while the president struggles to regain his footing after being rudely shoved aside by a pickup-driving Republican in Mass., Secretary Clinton will be joining world powers in seeking ways to support the Yemeni government’s efforts to combat its local branch of Al Quaeda, which has claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack in the U.S.

Clinton will also meet with representatives of 60 nations on stabilizing Afghanistan and transferring control from international forces to the Afghanis.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather be in Hillary's shoes today than Obama's.

The liberal media wants to know: who the heck is Barack Obama?

Without acknowledging that he and his sexist colleagues in the liberal media joined forces to take down Hillary Clinton and elevate the unvetted and inexperienced Barack Obama to the presidency, Bob Herbert demands to know this morning in the NY Times, “Who is Barack Obama?”

Herbert writes:

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

After detailing the ways in which Mr. Obama has betrayed his most ardent supporters in his campaign for office, Herbert concludes:

Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.

They want to know who their president really is.

In the meantime, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just keeps on being the Hillary we've always known her to be, working her heart out in support of the rights of all people wherever in the world she finds herself.

And guess what? She couldn't care less what the media thinks about her.