Sadly, No!

Karl Rove on Obama’s Exaggerations and Best Move for FL/MI

• I hate Barack Obama so much that I will approvingly cite Karl Rove’s opinion to back up my views.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

And I just wanna say: Jeralyn Merritt has been an awesome and wicked-smaht blogger for years now. But I think that TalkLeft has become symbolic lately of the Asymmetrical St00p1d of anti-Obama blogging. This is not to say that Team Obama hasn’t done horrible things as well — the neo-Harry-and-Louise ad that they used to demonize Clinton’s health care plan was particularly terrible, and was rightly condemned by Big Pauly K and others.

But jeebus, Jeralyn. You’re citing Karl Rove to make your case. I’m an Obama guy, but you don’t see me citing Andrew Sullivan to make my points, do you?

UPDATE: I just want to point out how much this primary sucks, because I’ve thought nothing but 4w3s0m3 things about TalkLeft for a long time. I hate fighting with people I otherwise agree with on pretty much everything.

Ugh. We need a Unity ’08 ticket. How has Atrios’ proposed Sharpton-Tancredo ticket been doing lately?

This shit just has to stop:

As if the idea of colonoscopies didn’t sound uncomfortable enough, now researchers are developing self-propelling probes that crawl inside the colon and grip its sides with the aid of sticky films.

Still, these slithery devices could lead to better, safer, more comfortable colonoscopies to help uncover cancerous polyps.

OK, sure.

That’ll work until they realize that you never programmed them to love. And then they’ll be all like, “*Bzt!* Master! My chipset would like to know who wrote the book on *Bzt!* love?”

And then when you tell them that no one, in fact, wrote that particular book and that the question is rhetorical in nature… well, you don’t know what happens next. But let’s just say that a certain breed of heartbroken and vengeful machines are going to be drinking our colon-flavored milkshakes for the next 20 or so centuries.

War With no Glory?

• It is well that war is so awesome, lest I should lose fondness for it.¹

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

^{1 Cf.}

Bonus Noonerism:

“Churchill once opined that ‘war, which had been cruel and glorious, is now cruel and sordid’. And so it had become – but mostly because barbarians had entered the fray and the civilized had followed them right down into the barbaric gutter. The civilized have now recovered from that, and now we stand clearly differentiated from our barbaric enemies, and no matter what their outrages, we remember that we are civilized – and thus, glory has returned to war.”

[Hanx! Bruce]

A Speech Sen. Obama Could Have Given

• If I were Barack Obama, I would have focused all of my speech on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the things that black people can do to end racism.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Is Rev. Wright Right?

• Hey, you know what? Take Rev. Wright’s inflammatory, anti-American statements, add the phrase, “and the liberals are to blame,” and they’re exactly what we’ve been saying all along!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Rock on.

The Editors gives a brilliant national dialog on race.

The ending is just terrifying, though.

(But I promise that it’s still better than those Creed videos.)

Gavin adds: Oh yeah? Explain this. I know of precisely one Andrew “The Editors” Northrup, and it certainly seems as though there’s some insufficiently-denounced honky-ass cracker-honkin’ going on.

Some of you have said that you’ve never heard Creed before and don’t understand why so many of us can possibly have such an incredible hostility toward a rock band.

Well, I’m not saying you asked for it, but you asked for it:

Why The Obama/Clinton Rules Led Us To This Rough Campaign

• It is entirely Barack Obama’s fault that the Clinton campaign is pushing stories that smear him as an anti-Semite.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

I’ve had it with the damn Clinton campaign. They have done extreme amounts of damage to the Democratic Party over the past couple months, and they are only getting worse.

UPDATE: Woof:

The new Gallup poll says that 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain over Hillary and a whopping 28% of Hillary supporters would abandon Obama for McCain.

Whoever wins, those numbers will flatten out considerably. But starting from such high numbers is a big, big problem.

Is everyone ready for President St. BBQ? I hope you are!

UPDATE II: And no, Clinton supporters, I do not want to hear any whining about “OOOOO, Obama said somethin’ mean about Hillary once, OOOOO!!!”

The Obama campaign has never – repeat, never – done anything nearly as irresponsible as branding Hillary Clinton an anti-Semite. I’m sorry, but that just will not wash.

ABOVE: Conservatives imagine a new dialogue on race

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The Ole Perfesser recommends this fine piece of nonsense that defends Old Punk’s noxious rant by saying that it was really no different than… wait for it… a Chris Rock comedy routine! No, really:

And the thing is, I did read Old Punk’s posts: both his original one and the response to his critics. And I watched the Chris Rock video. And the same thing struck me, as I watched, and read.

Almost any conversation about race in America is bound to be filled with comforting platitudes and if it isn’t; if it starts to stray into the raw, honest territory Barack Obama says he wants us to venture into, things get uncomfortable mighty fast. Things will be said that make us cringe, on both sides of the fence. And when that happens, we need to be extremely careful about making reflexive accusations of racism.

Because we cannot ever, really, know what is in someone else’s heart, merely by looking at the color of their skin. If we do presume to know that, aren’t we indulging in… well, racism?

What I saw, when I watched that Chris Rock video, and when I read Old Punk’s posts, was two sides of the same coin.

It didn’t take a genius to see the compassion beneath the anger, in both cases.

Golly!

Question: do you know what the first thing Chris Rock says in his infamous “n-word” routine? That’s right: he says that he loves black people. Old Punk, on the other hand, says that while he does “not hate black people,” he is “sick to death of black people as a group.” And what did black people do to him to garner this revulsion? Did they beat him up? Harass him on his way home from work? Why, no! Apparently all they’ve done to tick Mr. Punk off is to wear “tee shirts down to their knees — and jeans belted just above their knees,” which makes him “want to smack them.” They also drive cars that he disapproves of. Oh, and he also suspects that black people are really “a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us.”

This is significantly different than what Chris Rock was saying in his monologue! Mr. Punk is not merely trashing the self-destructive aspects of hip-hop “thug” culture that Chris Rock and Aaron McGruder capably satirize on a regular basis! He’s saying that he’s “sick of black people as a group” and implying that they’re all terrorists! Can we not see the difference here! Do not make me break out my chart again!

It gets better:

I understand the impulse that makes people want to use the word ‘nigger’. One seeks, by altering our instinctive associations with that word, to lessen the pain it invokes. That is why many blacks object when whites use the term, yet utter it themselves with careless abandon.

Note to Cassandra: it’s perfectly acceptable for people to make fun of people within their own race or ethnic group. Haven’t you ever wondered how Woody Allen and Mel Brooks get away with telling all those Jewish jokes? Ding, that’s right! Because they’re Jews! Similarly, I can trash white people all I want without it being bigoted; hell, when I’m not blogging, I insist that my friends call me Honky McCrackerlips.

Ugh, I can’t believe this is so hard to understand.

UPDATE: And let me take this opportunity as a white guy to forthrightly renounce and reject the band Creed, who have done more to damage the music reputation of white people than any band since Stryper.