Dowd fiddles while the Banks Burn

Our banks are folding.  People are losing their homes.  Gas prices are soaring.  The Taliban is back in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda operates with impunity in Pakistan.

But what's really important according to the meme-builders at the New York Times?  That Barack Obama is hard to lampoon, either because of his race or because he doesn't play buffoon.

Enter Maureen Dowd, who writes today:

If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.
..
Because if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.

So let me get this straight, Obama is an elitist, non-regular guy because he focuses on the concerns of real people instead of providing tabloid material to the elite corporate media?

You see, to Maureen Dowd, the material needs of the rubes are secondary to the needs of elitists like her to get their jollies from the antics and missteps of their leaders.

Yeah, Bush wrecked the economy, trashed the constitution, destroyed our standing in the world...but at least he was a lovable, bumbling idiot when he did it!

Look, neither Obama nor his supporters are humorless.  Obama's riff about Dr Phil was funny.  His request to evaluate Bill Clinton's dancing abiities to determine if he was "the first black president" was funny.  He takes it in stride when Michelle says he doesn't pick up after himself or smells in the morning, or Malia says he leaves his bag in the doorway.

But since the elite media's attempts to satirize his race and religion have fallen flat with audiences, they are displacing blame on Obama instead of working to come up with better material themselves.  

Personal responsibility and accountability isn't just for black males, it should also be for wannabe pundits and comics.  

As Phil Gramm would say, we have a media of whiners.  They are in a mental cessation of comedy.

But seriously, there is an important point to be highlighted here.

The interests of the corporate media and the country are at cross purposes.

The corporate media needs material that generates ratings..scandals, wars, incompetent governance, etc.  Regular people need a government that works because they kind of have bigger problems than whether their president is enough of a laughingstock.

This means that the media are complete hypocrites when they call Obama an elitist or unpatriotic.

If the pundits were not so elitist, they'd be more concerned about real people suffering than political junkies not laughing.

If the media were patriotic, they would not equate competence in governance with ability to entertain when the former is so much more important than the latter.

And just because we will have a president who doesn't play the fool, that does not mean we will have nothing to laugh at.

There will always be Republicans and out-of-touch pundits.