Maureen Dowd: The Caribou Palin Shot on TLC is Obama

Watching liberal media members agonize over the former governor shooting and eating a caribou on Sunday's "Sarah Palin's Alaska" is becoming a spectator sport.

Consider New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd who is so angered by this hunting display she's actually seeing it as a political allegory with Palin's felled prey being the current White House resident:

The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics. The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he’s trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being.

Palin’s father advises her to warm up her trigger finger. And trigger-happy Sarah represents the Republicans, who have spent two years taking shots at the president, including potshots, and tormenting him in an effort to bring him down.

The Republicans think they have hurt their quarry on the tax-cut deal, making him look weak and at odds with his party. There’s an argument to be made for what the president did, but he doesn’t look good doing it.

Eleven years ago, Dowd won a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished commentary." Did she write better back then, or is this the kind of dreck the folks at Pulitzer consider distinguished?

After all, the allegory Dowd espouses is a failed one: the caribou in the story didn't shoot himself. By contrast, if Dowd is correct, and Obama's compromise tax plan will be his undoing, it is self-inflicted.

There was no gun at the President's head Monday forcing him to accept a deal the Left is so angered about. If he ends up going down for this, it was him pulling the trigger not Palin or any other Republican.

Needless to say, Dowd can't come to that conclusion. Unlike the rabid MSNBCers and Netrooters that have for the past two days accused the President of betrayal, Mo can't go there.

Not yet.

This deal is all the GOP's fault - including a woman not currently in office whose only crime was killing a caribou.

It really does take a staggering amount of rationalizations to be a liberal media member these days.