Called On The Carpet

Maureen Dowd's latest takes on the Oval Office makeover. (People can relate to these homely things, even if they don't really matter much in the scheme of things.  Thus all the talk about Sarah Palin's clothes budget, or Bill Clinton's haircut, or Nancy Reagan's china.) Some have seen her piece as an attack on Obama, but there are plenty of potshots at his opponents, while Obama is depicted as being too nice.

Obama's new carpet has five of his favorite quotations, but Dowd thinks he should add "Post-partisanship doesn't work with Mitch McConnell." Of course, this is one paragraph after she's claimed that new ideas from Republicans are too silly to take seriously.  I suppose to Dowd, achieving consensus means the other side giving in.

If you haven't seen the quotes, here they are:

"The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself," President Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice," Martin Luther King Jr.

"Government of the People, By the People, For the People," President Abraham Lincoln

"No Problem of Human Destiny is Beyond Human Beings," President John F. Kennedy

"The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us," President Theodore Roosevelt

Not bad, except for maybe the stuff from the Roosevelt boys.  FDR's line may make sense during bad recessions, when fear freezes economic activity, but sometimes we do have other things to fear.  As for TR's kumbaya concept, as sweet as it sounds, it also can be an excuse to centralize money and power, taking away individual freedom in the name of general welfare.