MoDo Wants A Daddy

by tristero

Maureen Dowd
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle.
"Mental and emotional control."

That sounds like an extraordinary set of virtues to have in a United States president. But they are nothing but problems for the emotionally-troubled NY Times op-ed columnist. Her very next sentence:
But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.
In fact, being "cool about national security" or other potential emergencies (say, huge, city-wrecking hurricanes) is exactly what I want my government to be. I want - expect - reasoned, intelligent responses from my government to the problems we face. That's what I voted for, not hysteria or phony displays of emotional connection.

The ghastly attack by that double agent in Afghanistan, let alone exploding underpants, really didn't scare me. Here's an example of what does:
He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.
I simply can't believe that anyone would need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that anyone would write that they need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that the New York Times would publish an op-ed columnist who would write that she needs the president of the United States to be her Daddy. I simply can't believe that our public discourse is so debased that someone as unstable as MoDo has regular access to a wide public - not to rise above her psychological problems and inform us, or provide us with sensible opinions, but merely to trot out her deeply weird neuroses because she apparently thinks everyone shares them.

And that - the abysmal level of our public discourse - scares the daylights out of me.