Miss Scarlett, In The Conservatory, WIth The Box Of Wine

Because Jennifer Rubin hasn't been hacktastic enough on the debt ceiling fight for the Washington Post, because Peggy Noonan hasn't chugged all the booze for the Wall Street Journal yet, we complete the Obama Derangement Syndrome harridan trifecta with Maureen "Sweetie, darling!" Dowd in the NY Times this morning in full AbFab mode.

Ancient incantations and eye of newt — not that Newt — would be the only way to conjure up a less embarrassing group of leaders.

The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.

Amid the chilling anarchy, there’s not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn’t want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved. 

Yes, because the problem with the Tea Party is that President Obama isn't assertive enough.  Boy if he just gave those Tea Party maniacs a good talking to from the bully pulpit, they'd just wither like hothouse orchids and we'd never hear from them again.  But nobody loves Obama, especially not the people who voted for him.

Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

More and more, 2008 looks like the tulip mania.

When Obama came before the cameras Friday to say that “any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan,” many Democrats wish he had just gone all unilateral and taken Bill Clinton’s advice to invoke the 14th Amendment. They yearned to see the president beat the political suicide bombers over the head with the Constitution. Impeaching a constitutional lawyer for saving the economy would be an even more difficult sell than impeaching a rogue for fibbing about a dalliance.

Boy she doesn't miss a single emoprog trope there, does she?  Obama is a bloodless wimp who has been emasculated, he's leading from behind, Clinton would have done better, he's a terrible negotiator, he's Jimmy Carter, why hasn't he gone all unilateral yet, yadda yadda.

Look, I want POTUS to consider the 14th too, but in order to do that and win the war that will come after, he has to do it as an absolute last resort.  He must make an abosolute good faith effort to negotiate.  And to do so, he has to show that absolutely nothing can pass the House and Senate and that compromise is impossible.

Then, and only then, can he "be all unilateral" against these clowns.  This "Obama has to be our daddy" thing is not healthy.  We shouldn't be insisting the President act unilaterally on anything, and here we are moaning about Obama doing exactly what we hated Dubya for doing.

And even then, the 14th would go to the Supreme Court.  No guarantee it would ever be allowed to be used.

We'll see what the Reid deal entails.