Olberminute

As Jim Treacher writes, “Keith Olbermann’s entire career, summed up in 63 seconds.”

Video by John Sexton of Big Journalism, who adds, “You have to admire the blatant hypocrisy of the left-wing media. You could get whiplash watching an operator like Keith Olbermann do a reversal on politically-tinged dog stories.”

The original goal of the Obamedia was to follow the dog attacks on Romney with the polygamy attack. But click to an earlier post from Treacher to watch as CNN, “puts a match to the left’s latest exploding cigar.”

Speaking of the ‘Bam Bites Dog story, Kathy Shaidle links to a related quote from Mark Steyn’s After America to describe what the story tells us about President Fido Eater:

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism.

Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him.

Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America.

Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism.

What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the [elite]; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

But I think it’s worth also quoting from the passage just before the above quote from Steyn, because it helps to set the Obama Bites Dog story up:

When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them. When he addresses the monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru. There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11. During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities. As the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.

That same chilly tone is present in Obama’s reading of his autobiography in the dog eating passage. Take another listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luMxW1zUVu8

As I wrote last week, Obama Bites Dog is fun pushback for the right. But ultimately, it’s not what Obama did as a child — it’s how he describes it so dispassionately, looking back as a mature, hyper-educated adult. According to the timetable at Wikipedia, Dreams from My Father was published in 1995, just before Obama turned 34 years old. He recorded the audio edition a decade later. If he had immediately followed the above passage with something along the lines, “I look back at those days when I was kid, horrified that I ever did such a thing, which is why, though I’m proud of my Third World upbringing, I’m even more prouder that such practices aren’t an acceptable way to treat Man’s Best Friend in America,” he could have squared the circle. But instead, he really does sound like, as Maureen Dowd would say, President Spock, newly beamed down to 2012 America from an alien planet.

Or as Kate McMillan writes, “try this experiment — sit a normal, American 6 year old down at a plate and tell him it’s dog meat. Watch what happens.”

Related: “Stone heart, glass jaw.”