New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd stirred up something of a tweet storm in leftist quarters last weekend with a hit piece on Barack Obama's super-spreader birthday bash, titled, without subtlety, "Behold Barack Antoinette."

The reference is to Marie Antionette, the soon-to-be-beheaded French queen who reportedly dissed the revolutionary masses with her classic brush-off, "Let them eat cake."

In reading the column, I found myself amused at Dowd's discovery that Obama is "a diffident debutante with a distaste for politics."  Given the access to power provided by her lofty perch at the Times, I had to ask myself, "How had it taken her so long to grasp the obvious?"

In comparing Obama to F. Scott Fitzgerald's party-giving Jay Gatsby, Dowd writes, "Barack Obama gave a big, lavish, new-money party at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool.  Being cool is important to him.  One difference is that Gatsby opened his house to the uninvited."

Had Ms. Dowd simply looked at the cover of my new book, Barack Obama's Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, she would have known that her thesis is not original.  Barack Obama's "promised land" had no room for the uninvited or the "disinvitado," let alone the deplorables.

Some background.  In Obama's 2020 memoir A Promised Land, he expressed his fears of climate change at great length.  "I pictured caravans of lost souls wandering a cracked earth in search of arable land," he wrote, "regular Katrina-sized catastrophes across every continent, island nations swallowed up by the sea."

Wrote I in response, "Yet despite these fears, Obama somehow found the courage to buy a seaside estate that gobbled at least three times the energy of the average American home.  The purchase calls to mind another memorable quote from a doomed French royal, 'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.'  Let them eat cake."

I am not accusing Dowd of lifting this metaphor, although she is quite capable of lifting metaphors and worse.  In May 2009, for instance, Dowd was accused of pilfering a paragraph from the blog of Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

I read Dowd's response before I saw the purloined paragraph.  "I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing," Dowd began.  This friend, Dowd continued, "suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column."  Reading this, one might expect Dowd's passage to be a rough paraphrase of Marshall's.  No, not so rough.  Here is what Dowd wrote:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Here is what Marshall wrote earlier:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Granted, Dowd is a plagiarist and a liar, but then again, all plagiarists lie when caught.  I am confident, however, that she did not borrow from me because she, like her mainstream peers, would never deign to read, let alone lift, anything from what I call the "American samizdat" — that is, the largely conservative blogs, public forums, news aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, and the like that sniffed out the fraud in the Obama ascendancy long before the rot became too pungent to ignore.

For years, people like Dowd served as Obama's Praetorian Guard.  They routinely defamed opposition journalists, mocked their work, exposed their past sins, trivialized their information, and twisted their facts, all the while remaining wonderfully and willfully blind to the grift the Obamas were running on America, Michelle even more than Barack.

As early as June 2010, however, Dowd began to realize she'd been had.  On the occasion of the Gulf oil mess, the Pulitzer Prize–winner confessed her own naïveté.

In "Dreams From My Father," Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president.  It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there's so much you don't learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

Had Ms. Dowd read American Thinker in October 2008, she could have spared herself two more years of delusion.  Obama was as much a literary fraud as she was.  Not only did he likely plagiarize sections of Dreams, but he also passed off as his own writing done by others.  Even worse, he did not live the life he said he lived.

Like Jay Gatsby, Obama reinvented his life and crafted for himself a new persona.  Wrote Pulitzer Prize–winner David Garrow in his 2017 Obama biography, Rising Star, Dreams "was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction."

Obama's A Promised Land is nearly as fictional as Dreams.  The title itself deceives.  To be sure, the Obamas found a "promised land" of their own, manifest most showily in their Martha's Vineyard hideaway.  But the title refers to the promised land to which Obama was supposed to lead the "Joshua generation," the post–Jim Crow generation of African-Americans.

Tragically, they never got close.  The dilettante Obama led these unfortunate souls deeper, much deeper, into the wilderness.  Just how deep is evident in the Twitter responses to Dowd's column.  Some samples off the top:

Why are old white women allowed to write vengeful "uppity" pieces in the NYT?

Maureen Dowd referred to Obama as a "diffident debutante" in her column today. She's a racist.

I for one am happy to see the worm has turned in this country when snooty white bigots like Maureen Dowd are so mad they couldn't get an invite to a Black man's birthday party. Love to see it.

Maureen Dowd also often referred to the first Black President of the United States, President Barack Obama, as Barry in her columns. We all can see the subtext here. There should be no place for a writer like Maureen Dowd at the New York Times.

Welcome to the club, Maureen.  We're all white supremacists now.

Jack Cashill's latest book, Barack Obama's Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, is now widely available. See www.cashill.com for more information.

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