Buyer's Remorse? Maureen Dowd Slams Obama

Occasionally, using the Plain Dealer for what it is best used - lining a bird cage, puppy potty training or wrapping a fish - I unfortunately come across the "make my eyes bleed" columns of Maureen Dowd. Yesterday, as I was spreading a temporary 'loaf lounge' for Fido - Dowd's column caught my eye.

Frantically, as Fido was shimmying into position, I lifted him by the tail and switched Dowd's column and gave him a more deserving target -- Cleveland Mayor Jackson's State of The Shitty speech.

Anyway, as I read Dowd's scribbles I could not believe my eyes! Was this partisan propagandist slamming Barack? Could it be?!? Was she doing the unthinkable for liberals - championing John McCain and slamming Obama? Yes, it seems the more Obama removes his mask, the more some of the left leaning lug-nuts are also getting sick of his lies...

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Barack Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no- earmark pledge from the campaign. He's been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He gave a speech on "wasteful spending" on Wednesday.

"You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation," he said recently about the "hard choices" we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he'll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that AIG and GM and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever- more-alarmed Chinese. Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that "the status quo is not acceptable," even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

Obama spinners insist it was "a leftover budget." But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president's trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget "line by line" and cut pork. On "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as "last year's business," because most of it was written last year. But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year's business.

It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by Obama's labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.

(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)

And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.

Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in "Lear": "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeits of our own behavior - we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars."

Sounds like buyer's remorse to me!