MOTUS A.D.: Dear MoDo: Welcome To Your Nightmare.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Dear MoDo: Welcome To Your Nightmare.

As it turned out MoDo just dropped by the MOTUS Twilight Nocturne Lounge for a quick pre-pre-party cocktail. Here she is at her second stop at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Weekend Pre-Party at the swanky W hotel: MoDo with New Yorker editor David Remnick and Jane Mayer at the pre-party they hosted.

I don’t think I’m letting the cat out of the bag by saying that MoDo’s facial regrading turned out quite well; indeed, she certainly doesn’t look 62 now, like she did when she was 55!

Cheek lift, check, brow lift, check, eye lift, check, lips straightened around and plumped, check, neck lift, check

However it is slightly troubling that she’s beginning to look more like Arianna Huffington than herself, although, to be fair, Arianna doesn’t even look much like herself any more.

Listen to me – getting caught up in superficialities when what I really wanted to talk about was MoDo’s journalistic chops! Before getting on with that though I just wanted to let you know that I did get an opportunity to chat with MoDo briefly last night and guess what – she really is a big fan of The Red Shoes! I knew it! All those champagne cocktails she ordered were a dead give away.

Butt let’s discuss MoDo’s column from last Sunday. Once every decade or so MoDo emerges from her drug-of-choice (liberalism) haze to acknowledge the existence of objective reality. It happened once during the Clinton administration when she acknowledged that, yeah, Bubba was a creep, butt he’s our creep. And again, once early in the Bush administration when evil rained down on New York in such explicit terms that even most leftists recognized it for what it was. As soon as “W” made her feel safe again however, she returned to hammer him, “Big Time” Cheney and the “Bushies” for the next 8 years with her wit, cleverness and lost syntax.

Now it would seem it’s “Barry’s” turn in Mean Maureen’s fish barrel. She begins with this:

Stop whining, Mr. President.

And stop whiffing.

Don’t whinge off the record with columnists and definitely don’t do it at a press conference with another world leader. It is disorienting to everybody, here at home and around the world.

She likes to throw Briticisms like “whinge” in from time to time, as well as French phrases like this:

I empathize with you about being thin-skinned. When you hate being criticized, it’s hard to take a giant steaming plate of “you stink” every day, coming from all sides. But you convey the sense that any difference on substance is lèse-majesté.

They catch you off guard and tend to draw your attention away from the fact that her opinions are glib, seldom well thought out, and that she’s been phoning it in for years. She continues:

You simply proclaim what you believe as though you know it to be absolutely true, hoping we recognize the truth of it, and, if we don’t, then we’ve disappointed you again.

I don’t think BO should take this one personally. It’s essentially an allegation you could level against any progressive on any given day about any given subject. She then presented several things BO should not do:

But that being said, you are the American president. And the American president should not perpetually use the word “eventually.”

An American president should never say, as you did to the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, about presidents through history: “We’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” [ed. odd for someone who doesn’t worry about her own paragraphs that much]

An American president should never say, as you did Monday in Manila when you got frustrated in a press conference with the Philippine president: “You hit singles; you hit doubles. Every once in a while, we may be able to hit a home run.”

And chastises him for letting us down:

How can we accept these reduced expectations and truculent passivity from the man who offered himself up as the moral beacon of the world, even before he was elected?

And for letting our allies down:

As Leon Wieseltier wrote in the latest New Republic, oppressed and threatened swaths of the world are jittery and despairing “because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies, which it prefers to meet with meals ready to eat.”

Before concluding:

Once you liked to have the stage to yourself, Mr. President, to have the aura of the lone man in the arena, not sharing the spotlight with others.

But now when captured alone in a picture, you seem disconnected and adrift.

BO, seeking his own counsel from his staff of empty chairs

These excerpts actually make MoDo’s disjointed musings sound more focused than they are, she could really stand a good editor; too bad they don’t have any at the NYT. So after rambling down countless paths of dead-end sports analogies and disjointed thoughts thrown together after yet another late night, she finally settles on this:

What happened to crushing it and swinging for the fences? Where have you gone, Babe Ruth?

So bottom line: Mean Mo’s disappointed with her Prince Charming. So be it. At 62 it’s about time she grew up. Fairy tales don’t always come true.

After all she’s the one who wrote this about The Red Shoes:

“Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.”