Bill’s female cabinet members and feminist supporters had no choice but to accept the unappetizing quid pro quo: The Clintons would give women progressive public policies as long as the women didn’t assail Bill for his regressive private behavior with women.

DOWD: 'Annoyed queen, radiating irritation'... http://t.co/xIRbfe4p7Q

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) March 14, 2015

Use of @HillaryClinton shadow images spreading: An Open Letter to hdr22@clintonemail.com http://t.co/z4fWiu32aI pic.twitter.com/5NXsRsBdkp

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) March 14, 2015

It’s not really hunger that’s propelling Hillary now, it's Newton’s 1st law: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion http://t.co/JB4KwgOll6

— Peggy Noonan (@Peggynoonannyc) March 14, 2015

Krauthammer Breaks Down Why Hillary Clinton Is Refusing to Release Her Emails http://t.co/PB5uP0vfJK pic.twitter.com/anXXROFty9

— IJReview (@ijreview) March 12, 2015

Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.

◼ Call Off the Dogs - Maureen Dowd/New York Times

Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.... KEEP READING

Quite a MoDo takedown of David Brock and the dark side of Hillaryland with bonus @GlennThrush appearance. http://t.co/uNQyRuv13G

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) February 15, 2015

From Captain America to Maureen Dowd, Obama is losing the media culture war

◼ The thrill up the leg is gone. - Howard Kurtz/FOX

President Obama’s media supporters are abandoning him. Even the liberal culture seems to be abandoning him. And as he slips into the low 40s in two recent polls, it’s hard to see how he recasts his once-glittering image.

This is the kind of sea change that goes beyond polling numbers. The very mass culture that celebrated Barack Obama, that turned him into an international icon, is now migrating toward the darker side of his legacy, perhaps fueled by a sense of frustration and disappointment.

On the pundit front, the president’s self-description on his Asia trip as a man trying to hit singles and doubles, along with the occasional homer, drew a stinging rebuke from Maureen Dowd. The New York Times columnist’s message: Stop whining....

This comes after her Times colleague David Brooks questioned Obama’s manhood in the Middle East, and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called the president’s Asia trip aimless and said he didn’t project much of anything.

But it’s not just the Beltway types who have soured on the president.

Now Obama also has Captain America against him. A New York Times piece says the new movie is set against the backdrop of an infiltrated U.S. government with evil assassins and killer drones--inspired, the director says, by "the same sort of questions Barack Obama has to address."

"What many screenwriters, novelists and visual artists have seized on is not an inspirational story of the first black president. Instead they have found more compelling story lines in the bleaker, morally fraught parts of Mr. Obama’s legacy."

The piece adds that "the public relations machinery of the White House assiduously tries to control Mr. Obama’s image and legacy, but there is nothing it can do to stop artistic interpretation of his policies."

◼ Is Barry Whiffing? - Maureen Dowd/New York Times
◼ Apathy in the Executive - Peggy Noonan/Wall Street Journal

...Popes aren't presidents, and presidents aren't saints. Both operate within wildly different realities and have wholly different obligations, so to compare the two isn't quite just. And yet I couldn't help think the past week of President Obama, whom I started to think of as poor Obama—whose failings as a leader are now so apparent, and seem so irremediable, partly because they spring from not only his nature and personality but his misunderstanding of what leaders do....

The aspect of the presidency he seems to enjoy most is the perks—the splashy vacations, the planes, the hoops, the golf. When his presidency is over there will be the perks of the post-presidency—foundations, libraries, million-dollar speeches, staff, protection. A literary agent estimated he'll get up to $20 million for his memoirs, Michelle Obama perhaps $12 million....

I do get tired of your hissing and fizzing about the noble sex to which I belong. Mercy, I cry. It is not my fault that Michael Douglas didn’t marry you. He didn’t marry me either, but I don’t hate men because of it. (In fact I am grateful to him, and doubtless he to me).

◼ Is Maureen Dowd Obsolete? - Fred Reed
◼ Gender in the 21st Century: Be it resolved, men are obsolete… - Munk Debates

Is Obama a Lame Duck Already?

◼ This week he was reduced to giving a news conference in which he said he's got juice, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. It was bad. - Peggy Noonan/Wall St. Journal

There's no happy warrior in there, no joy of the battle, just acceptance of what he wearily sees as the landscape. He'd seem hapless if he weren't so verbally able.

So, the president is stuck. But it's too early to write him off as a lame duck because history has a way of intervening. A domestic or international crisis that is well-handled, or a Supreme Court appointment, can make a president relevant. There are 44 months left to Mr. Obama's presidency. He's not a lame duck, he's just lame.

◼ Bottoms Up, Lame Duck - Maureen Dowd/New York Times

The president called a press conference to mark the first 100 days of his second term, and he quickly ended up playing defense, dwelling on how hemmed in he feels.

ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Obama if he was already out of “juice” to pass his agenda, citing the president’s inability to get a watered-down gun bill passed in the Senate, Congress swatting away Obama on the sequester cuts, and the recent passage of a cybersecurity bill in the House with 92 Democrats on board, despite a veto threat from the White House.

◼ Obama: The fall - Charles Krauthammer/Washington Post

From king of the world to dead in the water in six months. Quite a ride.

CAN’T TELL TRUTH FROM FICTION: Megan McArdle reminds disappointed Democrats that The West Wing is only a TV show.

◼ Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn't Actually Work - Megan McArdle /The Daily Beast ◼ via Instapundit

...Jed Bartlett doesn't win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don't have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning....

◼ This weekend, Maureen Dowd proved that the armchair activists are not the only ones who have begun confusing entertaining fictions with real life....

◼ Gentry Liberals and Brass Knuckles: The Case of Maureen Dowd - The American Interest

If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd....

Her efforts to describe a strategy satirize themselves; her attempts to translate a “never-let-go” attitude into practical steps amuse. But none of that causes her to doubt the shining truth: gun control would be ours if the President weren’t so pathetic. If Maureen Dowd’s political fantasies cannot be realized, it is obviously because President Obama just isn’t very good at his job.

The President should watch his back; there are a lot of Dowdians out there in Liberal La La Land, and as an inevitably disappointing second term unfolds they are increasingly ready to blame everything they don’t like about the state of the country on what they are sure is his incompetence, his political cowardice and his sloth.

◼ American Way: So, Mr President, how big is yours? A meaningful legacy is still out there for President Barack Obama - but, as recent events in Boston and over gun control have shown, it's hard to tell if he will have the 'cojones' to secure the place he wants in the minds of future generations - Peter Foster, Washington/Telegraph