Sadly, No!

The Pantload, explaining to the kidz how Barack and Michelle Obama are yuppies:

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals – think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” – who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Um, Doughbob? If they’re too young to remember what a yuppie is, I seriously doubt they know about Alex P. Keaton and ‘Family Ties’.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies – like the Obamas.

‘Self-loathing liberal yuppies.’ Folks, we’ve come full circle, given the well-known construction of liberal = fascist. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you M. Goldberg’s pièce de résistance: The self-hating Nazi.

Welp, apparently Obama is now unqualified to be president because he eats vegetables.

I used to get a kick out of mocking the French. Now I realize they were right about us all along.

UPDATE: OH MY GOD. Roger Simon, channeling the goddamn Heathers:

Clinton’s statement was not as important as her downing that shot of whiskey. Presidential campaigning is about image making, and there is no better image than being a man (or woman) of the people. Who is actually less elitist or more in touch with average Americans makes little difference.

I am not sure that Hillary Clinton of Wellesley College and Yale Law School feels the pain of ordinary people any more keenly than Barack Obama of Columbia University and Harvard Law School. They are both lawyers who are married to lawyers. They are both millionaires. They both live in very nice houses. Wolves have not gathered at their doors in a long time. But while Americans place the office of the presidency on a pedestal and demand (though they do not always receive) higher standards from our presidents, we also demand that they be like us.

Goddammit you stupid preppy Villager asshole, I demand no such fucking thing. I don’t want the people I elect to government to down shots. I don’t want them to clear brush. I vote for them to run the goddamn government. What the hell is wrong with you demented freaks? This shit is important – it really matters to people. Both Clinton and Obama supporters give blood, sweat and tears to their candidates because they are sick and goddamn tired of our government being run by a pack of incompetent, war-mongering jack-offs and they want the government to be run by sane people for a change. I repeat: this shit is important. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask all those thousands of dead Iraqis if they give a rat’s ass whether the president of the United States likes to drink beer. Jesus H., you’re a grotesque monster.

ABOVE: Bill Donohue reads
his favorite book

---

Well, the pope and his little pope-mobile are coming here to DC and, good gay abortionists that we are, we would be doing our reputation a disservice if we didn’t post something about the pope in honor of the historic visit. And, thankfully, Billy Donohue, the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for Straight White Geriatric Male Catholics and Blastocysts, has been happy to oblige us with some material. Bill Maher said some naughty things about the pope and Donohue hasn’t gotten so worked about anything since some sculptor did an anatomically correct Jesus with dark, rather than white, chocolate. And the best thing about a Billy tantrum is that he totally unmoors himself from truth and reality, says pretty much whatever pops into his medieval brain, declares that the truth and then accuses the other side of lying.

So, of course, Bill Donohue titles his reply piece “Maher Lies About the Pope.” Let’s see who’s lying, shall we?

Maher’s obsession with the Catholic Church continues, only this time there isn’t enough material for him to use as a club, so he literally makes things up. His lies include the following statement: ‘When the—when the current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney—he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the statute of limitations ran out.’

A similar lie was floated by an angry ex-Catholic bigot, Rosie O’Donnell.

Boy, this must be serious if Donahue pulls out the Defense League’s super powerful death-ray gun — “Rosie said it! It has to be false!!”

The fact is that before he was named pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had absolutely nothing to do with policing allegations of sexual abuse until 2002, after the scandal erupted that January. And he certainly never counseled bishops to keep sexual abuse secret—this is a bald face lie.

“The fact is”? Have we discovered the true identity of Gary Ruppert? And you know when something starts with “the fact is” it usually isn’t, and Donahue here is telling a teeny little fib. Well, actually it’s a basilica-sized whopper. Before saying Ratzi never counseled bishops to keep sexual abuse secret, Donahue should have made sure that there were no inconvenient letters floating around. Like, say, this one:

Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had ‘obstructed justice’ after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church’s investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.

The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001.

It asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as John Paul II’s successor last week. …

It orders that ‘preliminary investigations’ into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger’s office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the ‘functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests’.

‘Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,’ Ratzinger’s letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.

Oops.

Indeed, a week before Pope John Paul II died, [Cardinal Ratzinger] addressed the scandal by saying, ‘How much filth there is in the church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely’ to God.

At which point all pedophile priests were immediately turned over to the authorities, the Catholic Church made amends to every single altar boy ever dandled by a priest, and the whole scandal instantly vanished, which never would have happened if Ratzinger hadn’t made that comment.

OH MY GOD:

Critical mass has been reached. “Bitter” and “cling” will forever be tied to Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in the same way that “Tuzla” and “the laugh” will always evoke Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) when a political junkie thinks of the 2008 Democratic race.

Goddammit, I hate our press corps. I have never in my life seen a such a large collection of catty, shallow and gossipy pieces of garbage. Instead of, say, talking about health care, gas prices, inflation, the Iraq war or the environment, these useless gasbags waste our time finding the most idiotic and petty anecdotes to spread around, all while dutifully handing John Effing McCain boxes of donuts. Do I really give a rat’s ass about how Hillary Clinton laughs? Are you serious?

UPDATE: Normally, people who flip on their CAPS-lock key and flail away at their keyboards have very little of worth to say. This WaPo commentor, however, is making complete sense:

YOU SHALLOW POLITICO WANNABES, FORGET THAT MOST OF THE ELECTORATE ARE BITTER.

I AM BITTER OVER THE IRAQ WAR, I AM BITTER OVER THE ECONOMY, I AM BITTER ABOUT THIS RISING GAS PRICE, FOOD COST, HEALTHCARE COST

I AM BITTER THAT YOU DUMBA$$E$ IN THE MEDIA FAIL TO REPORT ON IMPORTANT ISSUES, YOU FAIL TO SEE THAT FOLKS ARE REALLY BITTER. YOU RATHER PREFER TO SPEND YOUR TIME COINING DUMB WORDS LIKE “BITTER GATE”

WE ARE BITTER!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT G.W. BUSH APPROVAL RATING. 29%

Pretty much. The Washington Post basically needs to fire itself.

Eugene Robinson echoes a lot of what I said yesterday about this “bittergate” nonsense. My one caveat: he spends entirely too much time blaming Hillary Clinton for using this idiotic line of attack without mentioning that our national press corps just laps it right up. This is not to absolve Hillary, mind you. She of all people should know that the “LIE-brul elitist” charge is going to be lobbed at her repeatedly in the fall campaign if she wins the nomination. But there is no way on God’s green earth that she’d be using it if our press corps didn’t salivate over the mere prospect of writing about it. As Bob Somerby will no doubt say today, the press corps never discusses its own conduct.

This is the sort of thing that I’ve always dreamed the Ole Perfesser would write. But now that he’s actually written it, I’m at a loss for words. It has become completely impossible to parody this dweeb more than he already parodies himself:

IN THE MAIL: David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, No doubt this will set off a storm among the narrow-minded robophobes out there. Stand up to the haters!

Glenn, we’re not “haters” – we’re “laughers.” As in, we think your obsession with downloading your brain into a robot body just so you can boink hot cyborg babes is utterly ridiculous. And thus, we’re laughing at you.

UPDATE: Oh lordy, it’s even worse than I’d imagined:

“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans,” Levy writes, “while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

Levy goes on to imagine a world of robot prostitutes, or “sexbots,” which would offer people a chance to practice their technique before entering a human relationship. “With a robot prostitute,” he writes, “the control of disease is implicit — simply remove the active parts and put them in the disinfecting machine.”

That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. No wonder Glenn’s so eager to get it on with these cyberbabes.

This is very encouraging:

Several audience members told CNN after the speech they came to the forum to hear each candidate talk about trade issues, and were not interested in the political back-and-forth of the Democratic primary race.

When Clinton focused on policy and expounded on enforcing trade agreements, creating new jobs and standing up to China, she received some hearty ovations.

The Democrats would be much better prepared to beat St. BBQ in the fall if they talked more about this stuff and less about each other.

(Via Righteous Bubba)

UPDATE: Here’s some more stuff that people like Jake Tapper and Chris Matthews won’t be talking about:

Steve Tarpin can bake a graham cracker crust in his sleep, but explaining why the price for his Key lime pies went from $20 to $25 required mastering a thornier topic: global economics.

He recently wrote a letter to his customers and posted it near the cash register listing the factors — dairy prices driven higher by conglomerates buying up milk supplies, heat waves in Europe and California, demand from emerging markets and the weak dollar. […]

U.S. food prices rose 4 percent in 2007, compared with an average 2.5 percent annual rise for the last 15 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the agency says 2008 could be worse, with a rise of as much as 4.5 percent.

Higher prices for food and energy are again expected to play a leading role in pushing the government’s consumer price index higher for March.

Of course, the real question is whether or not Hillary Clinton has an annoying laugh or whether Barack Obama has a good bowling score. That’s much more important than not being able to afford food.

Yessir, this latest “controversy” swirling around Barack Obama is about as silly and ridiculous as they come. AlterNet has been kind enough to publish my take on the affair. Please go read (and give me pageviews :-))! Here’s an excerpt:

But is Barack Obama really an elitist as his opponents claim? Well of course he is — he’s running for president of the United States! He wouldn’t have gotten this far in life if he’d spent the past 20 years driving a truck or moonlighting as a fry cook at Arby’s. Like every other successful politician in the United States, Obama is a member of America’s political ruling class, which means that like every other presidential candidate in recent memory, he is typically insulated from the lives of ordinary people. Does Obama really have any idea what it’s like to live like a “Real American?” Of course he doesn’t, and neither do John McCain and Hillary Clinton! Does any rational person out there believe that Obama, Clinton and McCain spend their free time away from the campaign trail hanging out at Jimmy Ray’s Chicken’n’Beer Depot playing darts with the common folk?

In theory, this point should be fairly obvious. Even before getting elected, most politicians made a good deal of money in their careers as lawyers, doctors, actors or oil tycoons — you know, real salt-of-the-earth sort of work. But for reasons that have long confounded sane people everywhere, our national millionaire press corps gives positive coverage to political candidates who are the most adept at lying about their ability to connect with regular folks.

Is it proper to give myself a “heh-indeed?” Oh well, I’ll do it anyway:

Heh. Indeed.

UPDATE: As if on cue, America’s Stupidest Investigative Journalist tells us what we’ve all been dying to hear: that Wayne LaPierre thinks Obama’s an elitist! Thanks for the update, Jake! We’re completely surprised!

Imagine coming across a headline like this:

‘Don’t go, President Bush, don’t go’

… and on Clownhall no less. Wouldn’t you just be jumping at the thought that somewhere out there in Lower Wingnuttia there’s someone who actually wants to keep that epic failure around?

Alas, Paul Jacob is urging Bush not to go to China. Feh.

Guess we’ll have to look in on old Burt:

Visitors from a Weird Planet

By Burt Prelutsky

When I tell liberals that I can’t figure them out, they tend to assume I’m owning up to my own intellectual shortcomings. They figure their thinking is so profound that it’s simply beyond the scope of little old me. Well, let them enjoy their fantasies. The truth is, I can’t fathom their belief system because it seems so divorced from reality that if we discovered tomorrow that, like the pods in the movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” liberals only look like human beings, but are actually from outer space, I’d be the one saying, “Aha, now it all makes perfect sense.”

Guffaw. But what makes Burt think liberals are really King Donovan (he refuses to see the 1978 remake because he hates everything that happened after Brown v. Board of Education)?

Back in the 1960s, the Democrats went in for social engineering in a big way. They concentrated particularly on black Americans. One of the first things they did was to increase welfare, but only to those homes that didn’t have men living in them.

Fuckers! You mean to tell me that liberals tried to help poor, single mothers ahead of stable households? What heartless pricks!

That not only created dependency on the part of black women and children, but, inevitably, led young blacks to grow up without male authority figures around to keep them in line. The results weren’t too great for the grown-ups, either. Single black mothers, more often than not uneducated teenagers, were faced with the prospect of trying to raise and discipline unruly young guys; while far too many black men became as rootless and irresponsible as their offspring.

Welfare queens and “unruly young blacks” with nobody around to “keep them in line”. Like, you just named my worst nightmare, Burt Prelutsky. Also, D. Aristophanes just rushed off to take a cold shower over the ‘Don’t go, President Bush, don’t go’ letdown. My name is Bull Connor.

Liberals always chuckle when conservatives suggest that instead of merely having young girls practice getting prophylactics on bananas in so-called sex education classes, that abstinence be promoted in our schools.

Well, we’re chuckling because bananas are inherently funny. I could have sworn you knew as much yourself, Burt, back when you were booking minstrel acts on the Vaudeville circuit.

Still, at the risk of being chuckled at, I have to ask what is so amusing about those millions of abortions taking place in America and what’s so damn funny about 25% of American girls, according to a recent survey, suffering from a sexually transmitted disease?

It’s not funny at all. Not least because, while cocks are funny, they’re not as funny as bananas, yet the rubbers have to be put on cocks and not just bananas to start reducing the pregnancy and STDs amongst the growing number of teenagers being kept in ignorance about same by the likes of you. What could be funny is if we resurrect chastity belts.

Another area in which liberals give every indication that they’re from another galaxy is the second amendment. For well over 30 years, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to name one of our more prominent left-wingers, has made it his mission to disarm law-abiding Americans. He would contend that he wants all guns confiscated …

Really? He would “contend” that? Can I do that too? Here’s one: ‘Burt Prelutsky would contend that he wants all black people jailed.’ Hey, this is fun!

… but any sensible person knows that the criminal class will always have access to contraband, be it drugs or weapons. But, wouldn’t you think, considering his own personal history, that Kennedy would devote his time and energy to doing away with automobiles and bodies of water?

Chappaquiddick jokes stopped being funny before Chappaquiddick even happened, but I have to admit this one’s cleverer than most.

Some people, including a certain number of Republicans, wonder why I support John McCain and, in spite of his faults, will vote for him in November.

No, Burt, nobody wonders that. We know you are a Republican tool who would support a ham sandwich for president to avoid the horrors of Hitlery Hussein Obama.

It’s because even if he’s not as conservative as I’d wish, I am convinced he’s an earthling and not a pod. When it comes to presidential elections, I am a realist, not an idealist. From my vantage point, it comes down to settling for half a loaf rather than ending up with a couple of crumbs.

My mistake. You’d settle for half a ham sandwich.

Before the Sunday Beltway Boffin shows kick off (confession: I regularly watch Meet the Press, both to scream at the screen and because of a tenuous connection to Tim Russert), let’s reflect on the past few days (and by extension, months) of tilting between Obama and Clinton supporters.

I’m referring, of course, to Obama’s ‘bitter’ speech in San Francisco and his various follow-ups to same. Much as Clinton herself has done in the past, Obama crossed the line in throwing a fellow Dem under the bus:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

Politics is a dog fight, etc. and this race for the Democratic nomination is especially intense, because it’s just so close. But really, there’s no place for either candidate to bash the other in such a way that lumps that opponent, directly or by-proxy, together with Bush and/or McCain. Particularly in such a way that it can be used later by the McCain camp in the general election campaign against whichever Dem secures the nomination.

Certainly such a charge has been leveled at Hillary in the past. It pisses me off to no end when she does that sort of thing. I’m a Barack supporter and I think he’ll be our candidate for president. But I’d happily vote for Clinton if that’s how it all goes down come the convention. And in my opinion, Obama should immediately stop equating the Bill Clinton administration with the Bush cabal, anytime, under any circumstances, ever. More on this later.

Meanwhile, it was sick-making to see the Clinton camp’s reaction to Obama’s so-called ‘gaffe’ mirror almost exactly the spin dispensed by the McCain camp:

Late Friday evening, the Clinton and McCain campaigns criticized Mr. Obama once again for failing to express regret for his remark.

“Instead of apologizing for offending small town America, Senator Obama chose to repeat and embrace the comments he made earlier this week,” said Phil Singer, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. He added, “Americans are tired of a President who looks down on them, they want a President who will stand up for them for a change.”

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, issued a similar response.

“Instead of apologizing to small town Americans for dismissing their values, Barack Obama arrogantly tried to spin his way out of his outrageous San Francisco remarks,” Mr. Bounds said, adding: “You can’t be more out of touch than that.”

Of course, you have to twist yourself into the sort of Philadelphia pretzel that Obama would surely spurn in favor of fois gras in order to conclude that he is ‘offending small town America’, ‘dismissing their values’, ‘looks down on them’ or is ‘out of touch’. Much as Lambert of Correntewire pretzels himself here:

What struck me was that Obama was really talking about the income inequality chart reproduced on the left; that’s the process that made the jobs go away. So it’s Obama who can’t “explain”, because his Unity schtick prevents him from talking about real conflict over things like, oh, money and power. And because Obama can’t talk about that, he displaces the discourse onto class markers like guns, and religion. The real condescension, to me, is Obama’s brand of meta-leadership through personal conversion as a solution to “bitterness” and a general cure for what ails the body politic, not the class markers (cf. Matthew 11:28), since Obama’s meta is analytically distorting and will prove wholly inadequate to the task at hand. Although I’m ticked off at his use of class markers, too.

Whuzza? Obama ‘can’t talk about’ … ‘things like, oh, money and power’? WTF? Isn’t that what this whole big giant ‘gaffe’ in a teapot is about … Obama daring to talk about the resentments of working class and poor Americans — how their ‘bitterness’ is justified by a system that marginalizes them as an afterthought on the road to newer, greener, global economic pastures, while simultaneously giving them little or no voice in that process and thus leaving them with nowhere to turn but the insidiously proffered wedge politics of the Right?

Let’s be fucking real here, and not let our partisanship for either candidate cause us to take our eyes off the goddamn prize. The shorter Lambert — ‘Obama was technically right, and that makes him so very, very wrong’ — is just sectarianism at its most ridiculously blindered.

As for why Obama was in fact very, very wrong to bash the Clinton administration along with the Bushies. Aside from the 11th Commandment violation, Obama should be very careful about dismissing the sort of governance that he himself would almost certainly emulate. Which is to say that it’s absolutely possible to criticize Clintonomics from the Left (as Lambert in fact demonstrates with the income inequality chart), but in reality Obama is by every indication a Centrist and a Third-Wayer of Clintonesque intellectual pedigree … and given the circumstances of the 1990s would have almost certainly governed similarly to Bill.

And that’s fine. It’s Pollyanna-ish to assume we’d get anything different from a national candidate in this day and age, though a prolonged economic meltdown offers the pardon-the-pun bitter hope of some actual structural changes. What’s more, the smarter sort of Third Way policy can do actual good, especially when compared to the outright starve-the-beast rapacity of the GOP’s ‘economic’ agenda.

And at this point, from a pure political point of view, does anybody have anything but outright nostalgia for the Clinton years?

As Obama says, this little tempest too shall pass. I’m just getting worried that the tempests are coming with far greater frequency right now, and getting a bit distressed by the fractious fault lines that are emerging between erstwhile political foes who really ought to get back on the road to being allies.

Sorry for all the no-joking and whatnot.