".............This is a good example of punditry in its purest, most useless form. Dowd doesn’t actually say how Obama should apply the lesson of the NBA commissioner banning a bigoted old coot. She just says Obama should do that. Because it’s right. And leadership, or something. Also, if you’re familiar with Dowd’s writing from years past, you know that the big, brash, swing-for-the-fences attitude she wants Obama to embrace was precisely what she disliked about George W. Bush. On the day of Obama’s first inaugural, Dowd wrote a column explicitly differentiating the two on that point: “The optimism was tempered...