Wankery Overload From "The Old Gray Lady"

(Haven’t used this in awhile – I was starting to miss it…).

It sounds like Bobo has been effectively called out for the latest neocon pundit blather today (h/t Atrios), but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the NYT’s other columnist today was Richard Cohen in blackface (easy...).

For you see, Bob Herbert (once again, a much better writer than this) concocted the latest screaming “OMG the Dems are sooo divided and have fractured the party so much that McCain is going to win!!” drivel, as follows…

Only now is the party starting to rally around Senator Barack Obama, who has been the likely nominee for the longest time. No one knows how long it will take to move beyond the fratricidal conflict that was made unnecessarily bitter by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Yes, I have hardly been a fan of the Clintons and their campaign, but this tells us that not only are the superdelegates coming home to Obama for good, but that governors who supported Hillary (including PA’s own Ed Rendell) are in the process of doing likewise. So I think the “fratricidal conflict” is on its way to a resolution that should definitely occur in time for the convention.

And oh yes, Herbert’s column is a recycling of The Rev. Jeremiah Wright stuff (and now this Rev. Michael Pfleger person – as I asked earlier, can actual or self-proclaimed “people of faith” in some position of authority please just STFU until this election is over?) and “chicken little” naysaying over everything the Democrats didn’t do, including “hammer(ing) the Republicans over the economy, the war, energy policy, health care, appointments to the Supreme Court, the failure to rebuild New Orleans, and so on” (kind of hard to do that in a hard-fought primary, wouldn’t you say, Bob; don’t worry – that will begin in earnest as soon as Senator Clinton’s candidacy ends, which will come shortly at long last).

And what of Obama, by the way? Well…

As for Senator Obama, he’s been mired in a series of problems of his own — problems that have done serious damage to the very idea that brought him to national prominence in the first place: that he was a new breed of political leader, a unifying candidate who could begin to narrow the partisan divides of race, class and even, to some extent, political persuasion.

Any specifics on this “series of problems,” Bob (OK, here we go again, boys and girls: "flag lapel, madrassa, ‘guns,’ ‘bitter,’ ‘cling,’ bowling, orange juice instead of coffee, middle name, pledge of allegiance, Muslim"; does that about cover it?).

And while I don’t know if Obama is a new breed of leader or whatever the current catchphrase is or not, I do know that he’s been a good sport towards the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, calling to congratulate her on her recent Puerto Rico primary win (here) and he has said personally that the party will be united, and I believe him (here - I know there are "hard-working white people" who will never support him, but the overwhelming majority of the rest of the Democratic Party and enough of everyone else will).

Finally, on the issue of where the “deeply divided” Democrats currently stand at this point, I think this analysis from kos is pretty spot-on (and as he says at the end, looks for this to improve as the Dems focus all attention and effort on defeating John W. McBush).

You could argue that Bob Herbert pulled this entire column out of a bodily orifice, and I’m not so sure you’d be wrong. It’s pretty shocking to see that he either doesn’t recognize the particular dynamics of this campaign so far on both sides, or perhaps he’s so preoccupied with perpetuating the horserace that he has chosen not to do any research in support of his argument (which, given Kristol Mess, BoBo and MoDo – and the obligatory dishonorable mention to Tom Friedman – puts him in some truly odious company under the same masthead).