I didn’t know it, but apparently I and people like me are older and mostly white malcontents. I’m not sure if that means that most of us are white or if we are mostly white or mostly malcontents or mostly white malcontents. But whatever it means, Maureen Dowd says so, it’s right there in her column, so it must be true, huh? I mean, she wouldn’t make it up. She’s calling it just like she sees it, isn’t she? (See a quote from her op-ed piece below.)

What planet is she living on? I look at the videos, I see…people. People who are concerned and rightly so. I look in the mirror, I see…a woman, older than she once was, mostly white (been that way most of my life), but I don’t see a malcontent. I see a woman who is happier than she has ever been. I am positively glowing with happiness. Sparks crackle from my electric fingertips. I am alive with joy and depth of feeling that makes my younger self look puny and woefully woeful.

Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something. Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming “Proud Member of the Mob.”

President Obama has proven quicksilver instincts, but not in this case. You would think that a politician schooled in community organizing and the foul balls of a presidential campaign would be ready to squash this kind of nuttiness. (Like it or not, Speaker Pelosi, that’s democracy in action.) Instead, the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed.

He knows how to rise to the occasion, even when others are in the dirt. But he may be running out of time. —Quoted from Toilet Paper Brigades, Op-ed piece by Maureen Dowd.