Are We Ready For “Angry Black” Obama?
May 30, 2010 BP oil spill, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama White House, Obama smears, corporate fascism
So everyone’s talking about this as “Obama’s Katrina,” even Frank Rich:
For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.
But life isn’t fair, and this president is in a far tougher spot in 2010 than his predecessor was in 2005.
Sure, the US Navy has submersibles; how many Navy submersible crews have experience with underwater oil-drilling? Answer: none. The US Coast Guard doesn’t have enough boom to protect the shores for which they’re responsible.
What ought Obama to have done? He should’ve just dropped an atomic bomb on it. Or designed top kill himself on a napkin. He should’ve farted on the head of BP’s CEO. Lots of good ideas — but what they really come down to is the lack of an angry black man:
Much more after the jump…
Faith-Based President
Mar 31, 2010 Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears
The president gets prayers by Blackberry every day:
The morning devotional is sent each morning via email by White House faith director Joshua DuBois, the Associated Press reports. Obama said he called the daily prayer a “wonderful practice,” adding that it had started during his presidential campaign.
So this is not new, and that is the point of telling people now. Obama is gradually working at the foundations of a negative meme by consistently behaving in the opposite way.
The Revolution Will Be Monetized
Mar 17, 2010 Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama smears, Obama's birth certificate, Paranoia, Paranoia and the Post 9/11 World
Remember the birther-mercial? It was basically a fax scam playing to late-nite rubes across the south:
The ironically-named Gary Kreep, who produced that video under a 501(c)4 for-profit corporation, turns out to also be Executive Director of
A California-based PAC called the Republican Majority Campaign (that) spent nearly all of the $1.7 million it raked in from conservative donors last year, but less than 2% of the money went to supporting candidates or independent political spending.
Like I keep saying: this revolution will be monetized. The tea parties and the Obama-fearmongers are in it for the money. What’s sad is that so many people are gullible enough to fall for their crap.
Virginia Attorney General Busted For Birtherism
Mar 15, 2010 Obama smears, Obama's birth certificate
Simon Owens has the full details.
Cocaine is a Republican Drug
Feb 23, 2010 Glenn Beck, Morning Video, Obama smears
Via Oliver Willis, a nice contrast of CPAC headliner Glenn Beck and CPAC wingnut Jason Mattera:
Seriously, with cocaine being the Republican drug you’d think the CPAC would recognize the Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama. But for that to happen, the GOP would have to be interested in actual governance. They know they want power; but when they have it, their main use seems to be an uninterested and profligate disaster.
Narcissus Pronoun Nontroversy
Feb 16, 2010 Faux Noise™, Obama smears, Obama's communication strategy, Permanent Campaign, language, nontroversy
In the continuing quest to promote their “narcissist” meme, Faux Noise has been counting the number of times the president uses the first-person singular pronoun in his speeches. Of course, they do this without context or comparison. Mark Lieberman makes quick comparative studies of speeches by Palin and John Boehner and finds (unsurprisingly) that this new line of linguistic attack blows up in their faces:
Satire aside, let me emphasize again my conviction that these numbers are meaningless without further context and analysis, except perhaps as an index of pundits’ idiocy or malice. Such proportions vary widely with formality, interactivity, and other obvious factors — and there are several different sorts of I and we, as James Pennebaker explains in his post “What is ‘I’ saying?“, 8/9/2009. But those who think that such counts and rates are a useful measure for one public figure should be honest enough to try the same metric across the board.
Of course, Faux Noise keeps hitting on the idea of Obama’s “permanent campaign” mode as something unprecedented and unnecessary even in the face of their very own 24-7 campaign of noise and nonsense. The White House seems even less interested in the Beltway village than before:
“We ran everything through one strategic filter – how does this help us win the election?” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who held the same title during the campaign. “Anything that didn’t help us do that, we didn’t do.”
[...]
The emphasis on impact is reflected in the 10 interviews Obama has chosen to do so far this year – three with high-profile television anchors, including an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric that was broadcast live before the Super Bowl; four interviews with prominent national magazines; a national radio interview; and the online YouTube interview that incorporated questions from the public.
The 10th interview, with the Bloomberg subsidiary Business Week, was the only one the president has done this year with a reporter who regularly covers the White House, a group often more familiar than anchors or other high-wattage interviewers with the daily ups and downs of the president and his policies.
But it’s all grist for the mill, right? Obama controlling his message is “controlling the press oh noes!” and his speeches are narcissistic because, well, just because. And our permanent campaign to fill our viewers’ heads with bullshit is no reason for the president to step up his game. See how that works?
Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of “Barack”
Feb 5, 2010 Culture Wars, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Glenn Beck, Kulturkampf, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Obama's middle name, Scare Words, progressives
Okay, that’s it Glenn. You’ve gone too far:
BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.
Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.
A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.
There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.
This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.
Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.
Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.
Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.
But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.
In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.
As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”
Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.
Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:
We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.
When Nontroversy Dies
Dec 18, 2009 Michael Goldfarb, Obama smears, nontroversy, wingnutosphere
The Weekly Standard claimed the White House was threatening to close a Nebraska Air Force base to twist Sen. Ben Nelson’s arm on health care reform. Twenty GOP Senators howled for an investigation. The problem: Base Realignment And Closure (BRAC) doesn’t exactly work that way.
An independent commission makes closure recommendations, which Congress has an opportunity to reject. The process is lengthy, high-profile, and defined by built-in mechanisms that prevent just the kind of meddling the conservatives are alleging. And BRAC won’t even make closure decisions for several more years.So the alleged threat would take a long time to execute, would have a low probability of success, and, if found out, would make the White House look far worse than would much easier and immediate forms of pressure. It would be about as effective as threatening to put a hex on Nelson’s dog. It just isn’t plausible. (Emphasis mine)
If it sounds like there’s a small credibility problem there, it’s magnified by the reputation of the author of the Weekly Standard piece in question. You may remember Michael Goldfarb from his amazingly disastrous interview with Rick Sanchez last year:
Now, it seems that John McCain isn’t willing to carry the wingnuts’ water on this nontroversy. Sadly, this attempted smear just isn’t getting traction outside the wingnutosphere.
Now, it seems that John McCain isn’t willing to carry the wingnuts’ water on this nontroversy. Sadly, this attempted smear just isn’t getting traction outside the wingnutosphere.
Joe Klein Is Still A Moron
Dec 4, 2009 Joe Klein, Obama smears
I’ll give him credit for suspending judgment and decrying the overwrought media hype about Obama’s supposed successes and failures. But this ought to be the starting point of an examination, not buried under the lede:Stepping back a bit, I do see a metapattern that extends over the 40 years since Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy began the drift toward more ideological political parties: Democrats have tough first years in the presidency. Of the past seven Presidents, the two Bushes rank at the top in popularity after one year, while Obama and Bill Clinton rank at the bottom, with Jimmy Carter close by. There is a reason for that. Democrats come to office eager to govern the heck out of the country. They take on impossible issues, like budget-balancing and health care reform. They run into roadblocks — from their own unruly ranks as well as from Republicans. They get lost in the details.
Carter was attacked by direct mail campaigns that spread Teh Wacky™ — I remember the neighbors showing me John Bircher materials they got in the mail; I was eight. Clinton was attacked by talk radio, direct mail, and the early wingnutosphere. Now Obama faces a highly-organized effort to undermine his legitimacy and annul his mandate using the full power of the internet, a whole cable channel, and a compliant media stovepipe.
Maybe that’s worth talking about?
Nah. Klein’s got opinions to sell.
Dear Harold Estes
Dec 1, 2009 End Times, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Teh Stupid™ Epistles, sarah palin
I read your missive to the president, and once again feel it necessary to repeat that despite being a veteran myself, I don’t put much stock in those whose primary qualification is listed as “veteran” because what follows is generally bullshit. Likewise, anything reprinted on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page is bound to stink of bovine origins.
Mr. Estes, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of aggrieved comments about the bit where you address a black man as “boy,” “son,” but it was the last line of your epistle that caught my attention:
I sure as hell don’t want to think my president is the enemy in this final battle. (Emphasis mine)
This emphasis on “final battles” betrays you as an End-Timer. You have struck a trifecta here: authoritarian paranoia, religious clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, and Teh Stupid™.
Mr. Estes, it may surprise you to learn that permanent wars and clashes of civilizations are not in the role of the commander-in-chief as envisaged by the founders; the Constitutional articles do not contain such a job description.
Indeed, it would seem to me that in the age of nuclear weapons and wackaloons bent on starting Armageddon, pursuit of domestic tranquility would rather put the making of peace in his job description. And it is with those wackaloons that you stand, Mr. Estes.
The 9/11 hijackers thought they could initiate the End Times that Tuesday, and folks like yourself have been itching to meet them there ever since. Your fear is palpable in the letter, but so is your excitement. You want the end of the world and don’t care how many get hurt in the process.
For there is one thing notably missing in your piece, Mr. Estes: a description of how surging any number of troops into Afghanistan leads to victory. How can America win if our “partner” elects himself Mahmoud Ahmedinejad style? And since there are practical, logistical limits to how many troops we can support in Afghanistan, how do you propose we reach anything near the troop levels that counterinsurgency manuals recommend?
I see no answers, only fear and loathing.
I beg you to educate yourself.
