TREND-WATCHING:
OBAMA DOES STEWART

WEIRDNESS ENSUES

"Bless you, my son -- be healed."

There's been just enough chatter about the President's latest and deepest dip into triviality and degradation of the office -- that is, his desperate bid for the yout' vote via an appearance on The Daily Show with now-I'm-silly/now-I'm-serious Jon Stewart -- to compel me to dial it up on the internets and watch it post-facto.

The President's entrance met with hormone-driven rock-star screaming on a ridiculous scale, and he then sat down at a Hollywood game-show-ized Romanesque desk, whose classic symmetry was marred by a strange extra panel sticking out to the left to cover the lower half of the seated guest, like a modesty barrier in front of the toilet in a prison cell -- is there something about the seated President that the public shouldn't see? Does he instinctively kick his shoes off, to reveal white socks, or something like that? That was weird.

Then Stuart posed the first questions of what was, weirdly, kind of a velvety "j'accuse", generally challenging Mr. Obama on what his fan-base had been led to expect during the Hopey Changey Yes We Can campaign, and on the degree to which his administration has proved disappointing. Who knew?

That Obama became a bit testy and poked his finger back at Stewart was not weird, but entirely to be expected. As was the fact that Obama, unscripted, once again proved himself a long-winded bore. Despite being in the presence of The One We've Been Waiting For, even Stewart got impatient for an opportunity to speak as the vacuous platitudes and lame excuses rolled on and on.

For genuine weirdness, however, nothing topped the President's parting shot:

"...the other thing that might have made a difference is if you had held the Rally to Restore Sanity two years ago..."

[Stewart and fellow fake newsman Stephen Colbert are holding some Irony Festival on the capital mall on Halloween Eve. Whatever.]

What does that even mean? Two years ago was the election/national-bong-fest-and-hot-flash which swept Mr. O into office. Is he trying to tell us that a Rally for Sanity in 2008 would made a difference in who won? and we'd now have President McCain?

Not a bad idea, that -- on his worst day, McCain wouldn't have unraveled the nation like his opponent has.

My best guess is that the President was trying to be funny.

FAIL.

OREO MCFLURRY POLITICS

Try for a moment to imagine the fallout if this had been said by a high-profile politician who was all-white instead of only half-white [racially speaking, dontcha know].

Try to imagine whether even half a dozen years ago you would ever have believed that the following words would be uttered on an American campaign trail, by someone who fancies himself fit to be the sitting President of the United States. But hey -- this is the one we've been waiting for. On his recent stump visit to Rhode Island, dragging out yet again his "Republicans-drove-the-national-car-into-the-ditch" metaphor, President Obama is only half kidding as he extends the image, to claim:

...we can't have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class up in front. We don't mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

Well, shiver my post-racial timbers.

Republicans: the new second-class citizen, the new three-fifths of a person. These tea-baggers really need to learn to know their place and not get so uppity as to think they have any business running the show. That's something better left to the experts, with all their science and arguments.

Isn't this a great new way to get your point across? Forget the reductio ad Hitlerum et Nazium. Bring on the "Let's make our enemies Jump Jim Crow." Oh, and who are these enemies? We report, you decide. Mr. Obama will help, as he spreads cheer and enthusiasm among his base:

And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder — and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2...

"Yes, we can"? Or "Yeah, you better!" Apparently this is what now constitutes a Democratic leadership charm offensive. Good luck with that.




DEMOCRATS of AMURRICAH:
FEELING A COLD WIND
FROM THE GREAT WHITE NORTH?

Who'dda thunk it? In perennially liberal Ontario, and even more devoutly liberal/socialist Toronto, the once-unthinkable has occurred. The citizenry appears to have had a Tea-fit, and today voted in as mayor a chubby, rough and tumble populist with a colourful background but a devotion stopping the perennial waste of gobs of money on endless trivialities, which Torontonians finally find attractive.

Welcome, Rob Ford, to the big chair on city council (still populated by a lot of libs, but about to be both shaken and stirred). A sign of the times, perhaps, a shot about to be heard round the world south of the 49th.

There's no real Tea Party movement in Canada ('cause there wasn't one in 1773), but there's never been any shortage of folks drinking their cuppa on a frosty morning.

Sorry, but would it be possible for you to kindly not, you know, sort of tread on me, eh?

LEFT-LEANING JOURNO MUGGED
BY REALITY

Well, he truly is a liberal type, and I don't see him evolving into a neo-con any time soon [the popular definition of a neo-con being "a liberal who has been mugged by reality"] -- nevertheless Juan Williams, respectable journalist, historian of the Civil Rights movement, and decent rational man, has most certainly been mugged, battered, worked over, dead-fished, sat upon, spat upon, and ratted on by his former employers at National Public Radio.

It is all too easy to believe (Williams himself and others have since observed) that NPR was just waiting for an opportunity to cut him loose, basically because he is a rational human being instead of a leftist ideologue, and he has the almighty gall to be comfortable putting the F and B in "Fair and Balanced" over at FoxNews: the ultimate sin against the MSM creed.

They saw their opening when he made a completely personal revelation about feeling unnerved at the prospect of getting on a plane with fellow passengers decked out in full Muslim array -- not because he felt proud of it, or even justified, but simply because he is a real person having the same kind of very normal responses one can expect from informed Americans in the wake of the 9/11 massacres.

Cue the bloodhounds. Top and middle brass at NPR barely took time to draw breath before making Williams walk the plank, without so much as a face-to-face meeting with any of them, or a chance to reflect on Williams' prestige and reputation or his eleven years of service to the network. All just seepage under the bridge. Twenty-four hours after his live-TV off-the-cuff musings on the dreaded O'Reilly program, Williams was National Public History.

About that bridge that his career seeped under?: call it a Bridge Too Far. The backlash against this brainless drive-by career and character assassination [one of his bosses tossed off a remark about how Williams should keep these sorts of feelings between himself and his head-shrinker...] has been swift and bipartisan. Put Juan Williams among the top five names nobody could imagine being on any sane person's pundit hit-list.

Oh, wait --- that was "sane" person -- I forgot we're talking about NPR, an "independent" broadcaster that seems to be for sale cheap to George Soros, and that may now be gunning for Mara Liasson's smart & liberal "Washington-helmet-head..."

Listen (doo-dah-doo), do you want to know a secret? (doo-dah-doo) Do you promise not to tell? (woe-ooh-woe-oh....): Juan, you're not alone. I sat in a hot and crowded airline waiting area where a man lounged around wearing a ridiculously heavy parka, with his face totally swathed in a kaffiyah (the classic Arafat-style black and white head-scarf) revealing only his eyes, niqab-style -- and I couldn't take my eyes off him.

He eventually fell asleep on two seats, and when we were finally called to board, I was massively relieved to see that he was not getting on our flight -- had he done so, I would have been a complete nervous wreck the whole time.

So there. This is life at the dawn of the 21st century.


GIGANTIC "HEH"

Ms. Barbara Boxer is the junior senator from the Left Coast, a decades-long politico of sterling intelligence (i.e., you could fit her brain into a silver teaspoon), who be-clowned herself last year, when she scolded a Brigadier General of the Army for calling her "ma'am" (as respectful military personnel are wont, and mandated, to do), because she preferred to be called "Senator" (presumably as a poor substitute for "Your Goddessness").

Those who would just as soon not send her back to the Senate for another round of embarrassing verbal flatus, have produced the following ad to memorialize that Special Moment with Brigadier General Walsh. Gustate et videte:



In the clearing stands a Boxer... who carries the reminder of every glove that laid h[er] down...

Ahhhhhhh.

THE VIEW FROM THE LEFT, ON A MATTER OF INTEREST --
AND, PERHAPS, OF IMPORTANCE

regarding....

PRESIDENT SOURPUSS


Liberal-leaning newspundit Mark Shields declines for the moment to talk policy, and takes a reading on the psychology of the present administration. He checks his dampened litmus paper and detects trace elements of PURITANISM.







Read A Joyless Capital. And don't you dare laugh.

















Gr-r-r-r-r-r......
























And we all know how well that Puritan-thingy turned out, don't we, Goody Proctor?

Sometimes well-intentioned people try to write songs for good causes, but the product falls way short of matching quality with sincerity -- that's another way of saying that the lyrics are usually cringe-making.

I think these guys have succeeded musically, lyrically, visually, and politically.

I LIKE IT.



It's Jamie Teachenor and Ben Clark, and they rock.

[Hat-tip Hugh Hewitt]