Tone deaf
Oh, no. Oh, HELLS, no! Did you see this thing? Obama’s weekly address this week?
It was all about how “some people” in Congress are putting party ahead of enacting the glorious Obama agenda, blah blah blah. But — get this — he had himself photographed sitting in front of a shelf of jam jars and a sack of potatoes in some general store in flyover country. Oh, just read:
Hello from the Country Corner Farm in Alpha, Illinois! For the past few days, I’ve been traveling to small towns and farm towns here in the heartland of this country. I sat down with small business owners in Gutenberg, Iowa; and ranchers and farmers in Peosta. I had lunch with veterans in Cannon Falls, Minnesota; and talked to plant workers at a seed distributor in Atkinson, Illinois. And to the girls volleyball team at Maquoketa High School, let me just say one thing: Go Cardinals.
He said “Go Cardinals” with all the enthusiasm of “dose of clap.”
Saying words like “Peosta” and “Cannon Falls” and whatever other goofy-ass placenames you sister-fucking hayseeds call your hopeless, tragic dead-end cowtowns, automagically transforms him into Populist Man. Can’t you feel it?
Country Corner. Small towns. Farm towns. Heartland. Small business owners. Ranchers. Farmer. Veterans. Plant workers. Seed distributor. Dang, there’s more ersatz cornpone stuffed into that one paragraph than a whole fucking season of Hee Haw.
Oh, but this is the best bit: they released the video on the 20th, two days after he jetted away to his $50,000 a week getaway home at Martha’s Vineyard. You know, the vacation everybody’s talking about.
Be-yoo-ti-ful.
By the way, he managed to sound fairly upbeat, but somehow every screengrab I took, he looked like he was sucking a lemon.
August 22, 2011 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 39
Okay, I may have added the tassels
This is the shot Drudge is going with today. Consensus among the commenters at Ace‘s is that it’s a picture from last Summer’s Vineyard vacation.
I think that must be true. Because it’s already all over Google Images, and his daughter (cropped, I forget which one she is) is a good deal older now.
Also, not even President Dorkulus would be caught on camera a second time wearing a dork helmet and riding a girl’s bike.
p.s. I don’t really know anything about this guy yet, but I like the contrast.
August 18, 2011 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 48
Oh, man
Did you see this thing in the National Journal? Seems White House aides are concerned about damage to what they call Obama’s “leadership brand.” Yeah, fellas. What you have there is totally a branding problem.
[Obama] then launched into a long reply that previewed what is to come after Labor Day. It is then, he said, that he will propose a “very specific plan” on the economy. And if Congress does not adopt it, “then we’ll be running against a Congress that’s not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear.” He concluded his answer stating that “the other side is unreasonable. And you … don’t want to reward unreasonableness. Look, I get that.”
Excellent. Because we have slipped sideways into an alternate universe where blaming other people for you problems doesn’t make you sound like a whiny crybaby bitch.
Wait, what? Labor Day??!? That’s three weeks from now. After another Vineyard vacation. Three years wasn’t enough time to come up with some specifics we can kick around?
According to the two senior officials, the plan to arrest that decline is for Obama to no longer be seen as above the fray. While they believe Republicans were both wrong and unfair to claim the president had no plan to bring down the deficit, they know it hurt him. So they will try to show the president as having specific plans and then show him fighting for them.
Does the wording of this strike you as distinctly weird? Not that Obama will actually be doing certain things, instead they will try to show him doing things. Like they’re going get the NY Times to run a picture of him holding a piece of paper marked SPECIFIC PLANS and another picture of him putting up his dukes.
No more will the president be focusing primarily on issues that can attract bipartisan support and appeal to a Republican House. And no longer will he be so willing to let Congress work out the details on its own.
Oh, now I get it. The new plan is to alienate the one third or so of the country that likes Republican ideas and turn off the one third or so in the middle that likes happy clappy bipartisanship to appeal to the one third or so of the country that was bound to vote for him anyway.
He so smart.
August 17, 2011 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 33
Odds and ends
Hoo boy! Did you see this over at Michelle‘s? The (government funded) Smithsonian Institute was so gosh-darned excited by Obama’s challenge to out-innovate the Chinese (remember him wittering on about a “Sputnik moment“?), they’ve launched a new blog called the Department of Innovation. This is the logo.
Ha. Hahaha. Hahahaha. AHHHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ahem. Beg pardon. Three gears configured thusly are incapable of turning. If the top gear is going clockwise, it’ll turn the gear on the right counter-clockwise, and the gear bottom left will be pulled in both directions at once. Total gridlock. Perfect.
The blog post gets about ten comments in before people start ragging on them about it.
As an illustrator who used to work for an engineering company, I sympathize. I did retarded shit like this all the time. In fact, I may have made this exact mistake at some point.
But wouldn’t you think someone at the SMITHSONIAN FREAKING INSTITUTE would pick up on it before it escaped into the wild?
Next up, a modern explanation for the behavior of Peter the Wild Man. He was an 18th Century feral child, found naked in a forest in Germany in 1725 and brought to London by George I as a sort of a pet.
Actually, “modern explanations” bore me stiff — especially when they’re based on a close examination of not very skillful portraiture — but I enjoyed reading about Peter. Whatever was wrong with the poor bastard.
I especially liked the non-sequitur at the end: “His very existence exposed the shallow artifice of Georgian society as a bit of a sham.”
Um, what?
And finally, Christopher Taylor‘s second book, Old Habits, is out in a print-on-demand edition. I haven’t read it. I have utterly sworn off paper as a means of transporting information. But if you follow Christopher’s excellent blog, you know dude can write.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
August 12, 2011 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 57
Ugh. What a tool.
“There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.”
This from a man who has done nothing but blow with the wind, hoping to prop up his re-election chances.
I think this is what I hate most in the modern Left: that absolute flat refusal to acknowledge that the other guy has a philosophy.
Liberal and conservative ideas are hardly new. They both have a pedigree, a body of supporting literature, a track record of successes and failures. They are two competing and largely incompatible sets of beliefs about how the world works.
But to Obama and his handmaidens in the media, everyone knows the liberal answer is the only answer. You either do it their way or you lack education. Or he needs to ‘splain some more. Or you’re playing politics. Or you’re dumb. Or evil. It’s like the last few hundred years of political dialogue never happened for them.
It has to be a pretense. It sure is rage-making.
August 11, 2011 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 22
I love bacon SO much…!
I love bacon so much, I get lardons! (They used to be called bacon bits before people starting vacationing abroad, apparently).
So! Not much to do but sit around, eat lardons and wait to see if London goes up in flames again tonight. I have to be up early in the morning, so it had better get a move on.
Mono the elderish just wrote to send me some video links of the rioting and ask what I thought was going to happen. I’ll steal tonight’s post from the answer I gave him.
Errr…I don’t know. I’ve been coming to the UK for almost fifteen years, and the whole time I’ve wondered what it would take to get the Brits riled up enough to push back. They have plenty of provocation — a rampant nanny state, swingeing taxes, out of control immigration, Islamist terrorism, now riots in the streets — and I keep thinking now they will boil over, surely.
I keep thinking wrong. I’m too American to read the vibe right.
See, the Brits make a positive virtue of putting up with shit. I don’t know if it has its roots in WWII or if the Blitz just tamped the attitude down into their DNA, but “Keep Calm and Carry On” is not mere ironic kitsch. It’s deep in their self-image. We are the unflappable people. Let lesser people flap.
It’s not cowardice — far from it! — we’re talking people who faced down nightly bombing raids with a shrug and a cup of tea. It may be that not ‘overreacting’ to the riots is the way they will choose to distinguish themselves from the rioters. See: tea served on a riot shield.
On the other hand…well. Sooner or later, all this world-going-to-hell stuff will surely be too much even for the Unflappable People.
August 9, 2011 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 23
Be glad this blog’s in black and white
Wow. I know Hillary’s touring Bali at the moment, but I think when you’ve reached the muumuu level of fashion degradation, you need to stop digging.
Huma isn’t taking very good care of her lately. She’s off her game.
Yeah, it’s the same shot Drudge is going with. I’ve got absolutely jack shit today. Never left the house.
I know I shouldn’t complain, what with most of the US at or over 100 degrees at the moment, but it’s been miserable here lately. Cold, gray and wet. Day after day of it.
This is my third Summer in the UK and the first two were lovely. Sunny. Cool breeze. This is my first taste of what England can do to a vacation.
How miserable? It’s wet and mid-fifties and we’ve lit the fire.
I think I’ll go upstairs, throw the blankets over my head and strike until the sun comes back.
July 21, 2011 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 23
Takin’ his ball, goin’ home
Sung to the tune of “fired up, ready to go!”
The backstory: Obama may (or may not) have stormed out of the budget meeting last night. Ace thinks it was premeditated theater, but I’m not so sure. That weird remark to the effect that “Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have put up with this”…what was that about?
Me, I think it made him look petulant and amateurish, but I suspect his side is eating it up. In fact I know so. Here’s my takeaway from the Politico article:
“Obama lit him up. Cantor sat in stunned silence,” said an official in the meeting. “It was incredible. If the public saw Obama he would win in a landslide.”
Bolding mine. Two things strike me about that: 1) they see everything — absolutely everything — through the lens of Obama’s re-election bid and 2) they think America would just love-LOVE-LOVE to see President Prettyniceguy morph into President Screamingjerk.
They’re wrong on the second point, and the first point scares me juiceless. Take it from a small, damp island on the edge of Europe: we are all of us together, trembling on the edge of an utter economic meltdown. And nobody has the slightest idea what that means.
Addendum: the word has gone out to hang the budget impasse around Eric Cantor’s neck. Let’s hope that works as well as that time they sank Limbaugh and that other time they made Palin irrelevant.
July 14, 2011 — 4:23 pm
Comments: 28
Me, I’d be all, like, GRRRRR
No. No, no, no. Huma Abedin’s “more saddened than angry” reaction to her husband’s willy-waving is just not plausible.
Yeah. No. Don’t bother reminding me of other political wives who stood by their men. Those ladies had years, whole lives, children with in their shitbag spouses. They had incentive.
Abedin and Weiner had been married one month when he took up with this blackjack dealer. Married, July 10. First contact on the FaceBook transcript, August 13.
One month. Newlyweds.
Very public marriage. Googlable.
So when he sex-talked this Vegas lady, he effectively said, “sexually, emotionally — my brand new wife doesn’t cut it.”
I don’t care if Huma Abedin hails from a culture where multiple wives is the norm, they still have jealousy where she comes from. “Sad” would have nothing to do with it — I would be incandescent with rage at the insult, never mind the rest of it.
I mean, unless I’d married a career path instead of a man.
June 9, 2011 — 11:03 pm
Comments: 30
Know Your Mustelid!
Honestly, some people couldn’t tell a marten from a weasel if you hit them in the face with one.
HOQUIAM, Wash. – Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into an apartment and assaulted a man in Washington state.
The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker answered, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten,” then punched him in the nose and fled.
And with the news that Mrs Weiner is pregnant, the Weinergate scandal is officially No Longer Fun for me.
Oh, not because I have a soft spot for motherhood (the failure to reproduce myself is my gift to the gene pool. You’re welcome).
It’s because — for people as ambitious and calculating as I take the Weiners to be — the suddenness and enormity of what just happened to Huma Abedin is…staggering. It makes cold sweat bead along my hairline, empathetically.
FAR harder to endure than if she’d married him for love (I cynically assume she didn’t).
Of course, I always had a sneaking sympathy for Lady MacBeth, too.
June 8, 2011 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 36