Any good television show has a main plot and a side show, usually many side shows. Its not unusual that the side show is the more compelling aspect. You know that Dr. House is going to cure the patient by the end of the show, but you don't know if his team will quit, whether romance will develop with the fetching Dr. Cuddy, or whether his Vicodin addiction is going to destroy his life.

Similarly, the torture debate is no debate at all. Democrats have been outsourcing torture for generations, except for what they inflict directly on the American people. Torture works, which is why everyone uses it.

The big yawn notwithstanding, the side shows are mildly amusing. The harridan Speaker of the House is emphatically denying that she slept with the torturers, and no one with half a brain believes her. She's clammed up, while her critics pile on. Will Nancy resign? Will her colleagues throw her under the bus, ripping the covers off her raft of ethics problems? You can almost envision her on the steps of the Capitol, sun setting behind her, her brow-lifted, botox face illuminated by the funeral pyre of her career, vowing to never be poor again!

Oh right...she's provided well for her family at the Congressional trough. OK then, Raybans and a German-accented promise that "I'll be back..."

Second act...

Maureen Dowd get caught red-handed ripping off a blogger. Allahpundit describes the irony best.

In fact, the beauty of MoDo’s snafu is that not only does it show a major player in the media being led around by nutroots talking points, it involves her lifting stuff from a blog that’s actually called “Talking Points.” Glorious.

Out here in low-information voter land, what's getting through is that Pelosi is in trouble. Torture is left to the prejudices of the listener. Nobody with a job reads Dowd anyways...

Maureen Dowd; notoriously partisan and poison-tongued columnist for the New York Times, provides some insight into the emotional life of the professional left these days. Her characterization of Barack Obama would be entirely at home in the National Review.

Barack Obama must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out. Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

"Yes, we can!" has devolved into "Hey, we might."

"When I said, 'Change we can believe in,' I didn't say, 'Change we can believe in tomorrow,'" he told an audience at a Chicago fundraiser on Wednesday.

"Not, 'Change we can believe in next week.'We knew this was going to take time, because we've got this big, messy, tough democracy."

True enough, but not FDR-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in U.S. history.

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn't use it. He wanted to be a "transformational" president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan's strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

Dowd continues the piece in the mien of a mother explaining to the public that her fugitive son, having committed acts of unspeakable horror, is really a good boy, and that his problems are really the fault of the bad influence of his associates.

The president talks fondly of George Bush the elder, just as Bush the elder does of him. Obama thinks Bush is a poignant figure because he did the right thing, breaking his tax pledge to fix the deficit, even though he got punished for it with one term.

It is clear that the once cocky Obama is feeling that same poignancy about his own presidency. Left in a giant pickle by the hot-dogging Bush the younger, the president who gloriously made history is now stuck in Sisyphus mode.

He thinks he's doing the right things to crawl out of W.'s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly

Dowd's invoking of the "Bush's fault" mantra at this late date, isn't unique. It seems that every one of Obama's remaining supporters has grasped this same slender rhetorical reed. No one who has witnessed the trillions in new spending, and the remarkable reluctance to cut even a penny of the federal budget can seriously evaluate this crisis as a 'tax problem', but when every problem is a nail, every solution requires a hammer.

Dowd goes on to express hope that Hollywood's retelling of Seal Team 6's taking down of bin Laden will somehow reignite some of the 2008 Messiah magic, but in doing so, it becomes evident that her entire piece is just one slow-motion castration of the President. She confirms every public perception of the President's 'unmanliness' and fatal incompetence with pity, excuse-making and finally, the hope that a metaphorical stay at the Betty Ford clinic can somehow rehabilitate his public image.

The ultimate irony is that she has no idea how bad she just made Barack Obama look.