New York Times BASHES Obama From All Sides

You know the Bloom is Coming off the liberal messiah when the bible of frothing at the mouth Liberalism, the NY Times attacks you. In today's Sunday Times, drew attacks from three of the paper's signature columnists (Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich) AND from the paper's editorial page. Jonathan Martin of Politico summarizes their arguments:

• Frank Rich, who made a cottage industry of Bush-bashing, writing that until Obama “addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.” Recalling the Daschle episode and the public’s response to the image of a wealthy former senator not paying taxes on a limousine, Rich said that judging from their response to the AIG case “the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”  Larry Summers, perhaps the president’s most high-profile economic adviser, came in for the worst of it. 

“Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy," Rich wrote.

• Thomas Friedman, the paper’s highly-read foreign affairs columnist, took a break from his usual Israel bashing role to say that the US lacked“inspirational leadership.” Friedman’s indictment was not limited to Obama, but he captured some of the concern about the president’s communications skills by writing that the president “missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G.”
  

Instead of letting Congress react in its usual knee-jerk fashion to overcompensate for what it believes the public wants—what Friedman called letting them “run riot”—the president should have stepped up.

“He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers — and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve — and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses ‘for the sake of the country.’”

• The paper’s liberal editorial page and a frequent voice of opposition to Bush’s national security policies complaining about “confused and mixed signals from the [Obama] White House” on some of the same issues.

“Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas,” penned the Times editorialists, carping about Guantanamo specifically, detainee policy more broadly and Obama’s reluctance to investigate Bush-era actions on “terrorism, state secrets, wiretapping, detention and interrogation.”

• Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable fashion, citing the take-charge First Lady digging a White House garden to wonder “if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.It’s a time in America’s history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass,” wrote Dowd. Source Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama 

Isn't it incredible that the same people who sentenced this country to four years of incompetence are now complaining about it?