MoDo:

Andrea Tantaros, a Fox contributor and former Republican operative, wrote a harsh Daily News blog post calling the first lady a “material girl” for going on a glitzy vacation at a luxury resort in Marbella with a cavalcade of Secret Service agents, friends, children and staff, even as “most of the country is pinching pennies and downsizing summer sojourns — or forgoing them altogether.”

In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House and the Democratic Party wince.

Let’s think about that one line: “In politics and pop culture, optics are all.”

First there is the lazy equating of politics with pop culture, which makes no effort to distinguish these two things from each other in their relative levels of importance. And then there is the assertion that in politics “optics are all.” Both of these assertions are dangerously and irresponsibly wrong.

It doesn’t matter one tiny bit who has jilted Jennifer Aniston or how many records Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg are selling at the moment. The box office sales of The Other Guys only really matter to Sony Pictures. Pop culture is unimportant almost by definition. Every once in a long while someone comes a long like Bob Dylan or The Beatles and they do something transformative through pop culture that actually means something, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Ninety-nine percent of the time, pop culture is vapid, stupid, and little better than a narcotic that puts people to sleep. Pop culture is a quarter pounder with cheese. It’s meant for mass consumption and it’s bad for you.

Treating politics as a mere extension of pop culture is a cynical act. Columnists like Maureen Dowd actually encourage politicians to engage in this cynicism. Everything is optics, which is a kind way of saying that everything is manipulative bullshit and surface-level chicanery. The proper response to someone who questions the First Lady’s vacation choices is to tell them to grow the fuck up and start taking politics seriously for a change. Instead, we get this:

Michelle has done such a good job that she silenced her vituperative conservative critics for a year and a half. But perhaps the strain of debunking that “angry black woman” stereotype by playing the smiling, conventional first lady, talking to Ladies’ Home Journal about vegetable cleanses and portion sizes, made her want to assert her independence in the one place she could: her schedule.

The inimitable columnist Mary McGrory once said that if a first lady simply made her husband toast, that was enough, given how hard his job was.

And because his predecessor mucked things up so royally, President Obama’s job is ridiculously hard. But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip.

I don’t know what the New York Times expects from Maureen Dowd, but I have to hope it isn’t drivel like this. Reinforcing the most trivial and cheapest shots of the opposition, lowering the political discourse to the level of Access Hollywood, and furthering the narrative that substance and policy don’t matter…that’s what Dowd does for The Times.

While she’s focused on nothing, real action goes on in Congress where lobbyists carve up financial reform, water down health care reform, and prevent urgent action on climate legislation, immigration reform, and economic stimulus. In committee rooms, real legislation is crafted that will impact all Americans, and that is all swept under the rug by the likes of Dowd. She’s actively doing harm, and for some reason she’s still given a platform for her condescending snark.