Maureen Dowd nonsense

The world has many intelligent thinkers who have spent their entire adult lives seeking to understand the complexity of the social world.  Why is it that these individuals so rarely get space in the New York Times while the nonsense of Maureen Dowd comes to us twice weekly?

In today’s typically mindless column, she puts herself firmly behind the Robert Gibbs inspired movement to put ‘lefties’ (a term connoting juvenility and a bit of mental derangement) on a drug testing regiment.  The need for ‘lefty’ drug testing is apparently due to their clear craziness in supporting public health care, opposing war, and criticizing Obama even though he

“has shepherded the biggest expansion of social programs since the Great Society and spearheaded the biggest spending program with the stimulus. But for the left (and for some economists), it was not as big as it ought to have been.”

“Some liberals, like the president, think you can escalate our wars to end them, whereas lefties just want the wars ended.”

So real unemployment is above 20% and Obama has no meaningful plan to curtail it.  His chief advisors played critical roles in fostering the system that led us into the crisis.  He’s appointed deficit hawks to a commission which will recommend cutting social security.  He has escalated the war in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, and the US is annually spending over $1 trillion on the military industrial complex.  Despite vast public support for simply extending medicare to everyone,  Obama copied a republican plan that to a very large degree maintains the status quo and doesn’t even take effect until 2014.

But according to Dowd and the elite social group for which she speaks, those who make these types of points and criticize Obama’s ‘liberal’ policies are not just wrong, they need to be tested for drugs.

Dowd should be reassigned back to the sports page or metropolitan beat from whence she came.  She adds nothing to our national debate.