LET'S KEEP TROOPS IN IRAQ FOR ANOTHER 100 YEARS BECAUSE BARACK OBAMA DOESN'T LIKE ICE CREAM

Here's everything you need to know about Maureen Dowd's feminism. Writing about the Access Hollywood interview of the Obama family, she tells us this:

The girls were impossibly cute and charming and a tribute to the Obamas' parenting. When Malia said she enjoyed decorating and was most excited about a possible move to the White House because she'd have a new bedroom to dress up, it made me want to see the Obama girls in the White House no matter who wins.

"Yes! Finally! At long last, I may have a D.C. female to write about who knows her proper role in life -- to be a princess! Oh, sure, she's still only ten years old, and she'll probably screw me over by getting tattoos as a teenager and wanting to be Samantha Power when she grows up, rather than sitting by the phone overeating and waiting for some hedge-fund manager to call her back -- but for now, GIRLY STEREOTYPES ROCK!"

This is all in a column in which Dowd rescues the non-scandal of the Obama kids' interview from the trash heap of irrelevance to which a sane American public had consigned it, and finds a way to fit the interview into her Heatherish ongoing critique of Barack Obama:

Barack Obama may make it to the Rose Garden, but he'll still be an orchid. For all his attempts to act like a sturdy American perennial, he's a genuine hothouse flower, and everything he is and does is cultivated....

He looked frustrated [during the Access Hollywood interview] when Sasha revealed that "my dad doesn't like sweets" and that he preferred "minty gum" to bubble gum. She then began singsonging "Everybody should like ice cream" before pointing a finger at the person who doesn't: "Except Daddy!"

As Margaret Carlson told Mike Barnicle on "Hardball," in a segment called "Is Obama Too Cool?," about whether he relates to average Americans, sometimes you just want to tell the guy, "Eat the doughnut." ...

I hate these people. I know there isn't a just God because all three of them -- Dowd, Carlson, and Barnicle -- are still walking around; not one of them has been painfully and publicly struck down by lightning.

It always comes down to the same thing -- phony, incredibly image-conscious people who successfully fake ordinariness telling the Democratic candidate that he's (or she's) not genuine. And, of course, what makes Obama not genuine is a genuine desire not to do what everybody else does, because he sincrely doesn't feel like it.