Bill Maher isn’t letting the quick implosion of the Washington Post’s “bullying” story about Mitt Romney’s teenage days from stopping him embarrassing himself:

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in “bullying” in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being “gently masturbated by a pop star.”

Apparently, that last phrase is a stock part of Maher’s shtick; he’s used it before — here’s an excerpt from his May 3, 2005 appearance on the CBS Late Late Show, hosted by Craig Ferguson:

Bill Maher: “I think that there is no perspective. People have no perspective, especially about crime. You know, zero tolerance. You know, of course, nobody ever wants to see a child, you know, diddled. That’s just plain wrong. But even the people who are testifying against him, they’re saying that he serviced them. They didn’t service him.”

Craig Ferguson: “You don’t have kids, do you, Bill?”

Maher: “No.”

Ferguson: “No. I have a son. It makes me crazy, this thing, this Michael Jackson thing. It drives me, the idea of someone touching my kid, I would go, I nearly swore there. I’d go crazy.”

Maher: “Very wrong. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid. I was savagely beaten once by bullies in the schoolyard. Savagely beaten. If I had a choice between being savagely beaten and being gently masturbated by a pop star. It’s just me.”

Ferguson: “The always controversial Bill Maher, everybody.”

Maher: “What? That’s it?”

Ferguson: “Bill Maher. We’ll be right back with Rain Pryor.”

Based on that transcript, and the clip I once watched of the incident (which may still be available on YouTube), Ferguson had the good sense to get Maher off the air as quickly as possible. Would that Maher’s employers at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a similar level of decorum.

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I downloaded Edward Klein’s new book The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House last night and started reading it on the Kindle; I certainly hope he’s got the documentation to verify all of his quotes, because it’s simply a devastating book. One early Obama biographer quoted the future president as saying, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***.” Rest assured, Klein is one of the rare journalists — rarer even still a former Newsweek and New York Times editor — who doesn’t — and he goes out of his way to find those who share similar views of Mr Obama.

Based on Klein’s research, and the quotes from those who’ve associated themselves with Obama at one point or another in his life, not surprisingly at this point in time, and pace the title of the Phil Spector song, to know the president is not to love him. The result if a laugh-aloud funny book, popping the gas out of the Hindenburg-sized ego of Mr. Obama on almost every page. (As you may know, the title of Klein’s book comes from an early quote regarding Obama from Bill Clinton; it speaks volumes when Obama makes Bill and Hillary appear as the grown-ups in the room.)

Yesterday, Power Line quoted this excerpt from Klein’s book:

He also had a run-in with Steven Rogers, a wealthy businessman who became the Gund Family Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Early in his campaign for the U.S. Senate he gave Mr Obama $3,000 and arranged for thousands more dollars to be donated to him on one condition: he come and speak at the school when he got elected.

After becoming a Senator Mr Obama is said to have gone back on his offer because he was too busy and told Mr Rogers: ‘Come on man, you should know better when politicians make promises’.

In a furious tirade Mr Rogers screamed at him: ‘You’re a dirty rotten m*****f*****. What kind of s*** are you trying to pull? F*** you, you big-eared m*****f*****.’

A year later Mr Obama finally showed up but by then Mr Rogers’ had all but written him off as a friend.

As John Hinderaker added in response:

That strikes me as a wonderfully revealing anecdote. “Come on, man. You should know better when politicians make promises.” Have we ever seen a politician as cynical as Barack Obama? I can’t think of one offhand. Compared to Obama, Richard Nixon was an idealist.

Meanwhile, the New York Post quotes a much longer passage from Klein’s book, showcasing an epic cat fight between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey:

However, by the time Oprah and Gayle landed in Washington a month after the election, Oprah’s relationship with the Obamas had come unglued.

OPRAH had tried to ignore the ominous change in tone coming from the Obama transition team. As Barack Obama’s inauguration drew near, Oprah’s calls to Michelle went unreturned.

Instead, Oprah heard from Max Doebler, the newly appointed White House ceremonies coordinator, who told Oprah that she needed to talk to him first about the interview. What’s more, Doebler said, Oprah had to run her interview questions past Jeff Stephens, a deputy speech writer, for prior approval.

“It was a pain as far as Oprah was concerned,” said a high-ranking executive of Harpo Studios, Oprah’s production company. “Oprah isn’t a snob, but she doesn’t like having to put up with mid-level clerks. These guys were $75,000-a-year men. Oprah was like, ‘Hello, what is this s–t!’

“But she did it; she went to Washington with Gayle and met with both Doebler and Stephens to hash out the details. I was surprised that she went there, hat in hand.”

It soon became apparent that something had gone wrong between Oprah and the new administration — or, more precisely, between Oprah and Michelle Obama.

The problem seemed to originate from two of Michelle’s advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Desirée Rogers, the new White House social secretary. They resented Oprah’s meddling in their bailiwick. Among other things, Oprah had a plan to redecorate the Lincoln bedroom. She also had ideas about how Michelle could put more zing into White House social events.

As the person who controlled access to the first couple, Valerie Jarrett saw Oprah as a potential threat to her power. If Oprah went unchecked, she would bypass Valerie and go directly to the president and first lady. What good was it being the gatekeeper if you couldn’t lock the gate when you wanted? And so Valerie set about turning Michelle against Oprah. Oprah was too close to the president . . . Oprah was acting like she was the first lady . . . Oprah didn’t know her place . . . Oprah was a bad influence . . . Valerie advised Michelle to “distance herself” from Oprah and cut her out of the White House inner circle.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

ACCORDING to sources, Oprah told Gayle King that she felt like getting Michelle on the phone and really letting her have it. Oprah raged: “Michelle hates fat people and doesn’t want me waddling around the White House!”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Oprah only wants to cash in, using the White House as a backdrop for her show to perk up her ratings,” Michelle was quoted as telling her staff. “Oprah, with her yo-yo dieting and huge girth, is a terrible role model. Kids will look at Oprah, who’s rich and famous and huge, and figure it’s OK to be fat.”

Oprah went through the roof when she heard about Michelle’s remarks. “If Michelle thinks I need more fame and money,” said Oprah, “she’s nuts.”

At the risk of using a cliche thoroughly deconstructed in one of the latter chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, this is one time where karma meets dogma — certainly ideology at least — and karma may have won out.

I’m only a few chapters into The Amateur, but based upon what I’ve read, it’s certainly worth picking up, and may well contribute to what — at least at the moment — appears to be an accelerating preference cascade that’s working against the president.

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Regarding  the startling “Positionality” of Harvard Law’s “first woman of color,” Elizabeth Warren, “Do they need a second woman of color? I’m thinking of applying.”

– Mark Steyn at the Corner, linking to our post earlier today on Warren.

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As spotted by the Watts Up With That blog. Note the 2007 date and the highlighted passage in the article:

Its always important to remember what has been predicted by the elders of science, and to review those predictions when the time is right. In four months, just 132 days from now at the end of summer on the Autumnal Equinox September 22nd 2012, the Arctic will be “nearly ice free” according to a prominent NASA scientist in a National Geographic article on December 12, 2007.

Fred Siegel of City Journal once dubbed this trend “Progressives Against Progress:”

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Which is why, not at all coincidentally, such crankery went into overdrive in the naughts, culminating in Obama’s now failed rash of venture socialism. As many recent “not-so-final countdowns” will be coming due in the next few months and years, the Internet is going to have lots of fun pointing them out — something the MSM “unexpectedly” does so rarely.

(H/T: SDA)

Related: “Warmist Professor: I Call Global Warming Skeptics ‘Deniers’ So People Compare Them To Holocaust Deniers — What makes this even more grotesque is the professor is a Holocaust survivor.”

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Wow, when Obama wrote in 2006, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he wasn’t kidding — six years later, an Atlantic writer dubs him, “Barack Obama: Our First Gay-Female-Hispanic-Asian-Jewish President,” running down the various encomiums Obama’s received from Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, Geraldo Rivera and other incredibly cheap dates fawning acolytes, including:

In June 2010, The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker took the question mark out of the way.  “Obama: Our first female president,” her headline declared. Her column made the case that his crisis management style was more typically female.

First Jewish President: Like this week’s issue of Newsweek, New York magazine went big on their Morrison reappropriation. Former White House counsel Abner Mikva told John Heilemann  “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” The magazine made it their cover.

First Asian-American President: In 2009, Associated Foreign Press ran with the headline, “Obama the first Asian-American president?” As evidence, the article notes that in his first hundred days,  “Obama appointed a record three Asian-Americans cabinet members and quickly focused his attention across the Pacific. He invited Japan’s prime minister as his first guest and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Asia on her maiden trip.”

First Hispanic President: Geraldo Rivera spoke in March 2009 about the hopes the Hispanic community had for Obama’s immigration policies, alleging “Barack Obama is the first Hispanic president the same way Bill Clinton was the first black [one].”

My God, he really is the second coming of Peter Lemon Moodring, isn’t he?

Related: Perhaps he’s Zelig as well: Seth Mandel of Commentary notes that Obama has had his name shoehorned into every White House presidential biography beginning with Coolidge, with the exception of Gerald Ford.

More: Chicago machine politician hyped to mythopoeic status by media at the start of his presidential bid cautions college students not to believe the same media that created his legend.

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I shouted out who played the Kennedys, when after all, it was Barack Hussein. At the Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl writes, “Despite endorsing Obama in 2008, JFK’s daughter Caroline now considers Obama a ‘liar,’ according to a family source in Edward Klein’s new book on Obama called ‘The Amateur.’ After spotlighting numerous examples of bad blood between the Kennedy family and the man Teddy and Caroline designed as JFK’s successor in 2008, Seidl concludes:

Ethel Kennedy, “the matriarch of the family,” similarly felt scorned, according to Klein. He tells a story of her invitation — extended to the First Family — being ignored by the Obamas. She got so upset “that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture.”

And to top it all of, Caroline, the family source tells Klein in the book, believes “that as a loyal Democrat, she has nowhere to go, no one else to possibly support except Obama.”

(Related: Explosive New Book: Bill Clinton Thought Obama an ‘Amateur,’ Urged Hillary to Quit and Run in 2012)

And guess what: “the Obamas know that she has nowhere else to go, so they see no point in being nice to her.”

That “really pisses her off.”

Wait, the Obama administration is cruel to a prominent female Democrat — I’m shocked, shocked!

But really, where else can Caroline and the rest of the Kennedy clan go?

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Found the Rhetorican, George Lucas has a little fun with his fellow One Percenters in posh Marin County, after they rejected his proposal to build a movie studio (which would bring jobs, revenue, and additional taxes into the area). First, his PR department issued a statement that reads:

The level of bitterness and anger expressed by the homeowners in Lucas Valley has convinced us that, even if we were to spend more time and acquire the necessary approvals, we would not be able to maintain a constructive relationship with our neighbors.

We love working and living in Marin, but the residents of Lucas Valley have fought this project for 25 years, and enough is enough.  Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business.  Many years ago, we tried to stop the Lucas Valley Estates project from being built, but we failed, and we now have a subdivision on our doorstep.

Next — well, we’ll let Movies.com take it from here:

[Lucas] wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”

He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.

Mr. Lucas, we may hate you for turning your back on the original trilogy, but our hat is off to you on this one. Well played.

Heh. Incidentally, the press release from Lucasfilm’s PR department that Movies.com quotes goes on to note:

While we managed to build on Skywalker Ranch after one year master plan approval and another year PDP approval, it took over 10 years for the Master Plan approval on Big Rock and Grady Ranches. It took us three years for a PDP on Big Rock and now we are four years into trying to get a PDP permit for Grady Ranch with no end in sight.

As the company grew we realized we needed more space than what we were building in Lucas Valley at Skywalker Ranch, and it could not accommodate the whole company. We then worked to find more land on which to expand our corporate headquarters, our video game enterprise LucasArts, and our visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. We were told there was no way we would be able to build a facility of that size in Marin County and therefore we moved the majority of our employees from Marin to the Presidio in San Francisco. We’ve had a great partnership with the Presidio Trust and created a low impact facility which offers great benefit to its surrounding community

How out of touch is Marin? They make San Francisco look like a pro-business city — at least from Lucas’s perspective. On the other hand, it’s a rather distorted perspective. Considering Lucas thinks of communist Vietnam as the good guys, why should he be angry at a local government that attempts to thwart his business plans — or be surprised at “The level of bitterness and anger” expressed by his fellow California leftists, simply because they’ve aimed their rancor towards him?

Found via The Rhetorican, who goes on to note, “Now all they need over there is a state prison and Marin County will finally be representative of California state government’s three main constituencies: ‘the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees.’”

Update: Will Smith gets mugged reality, decides not to move to France anytime soon. Don’t miss the video.

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Over at Time-Warner owned CNN, anchor  Ali Velshi believes the election is already over:

VELSHI: Joining me now from Washington is, CNN’s chief national correspondent John King. John, I have a thesis I want to run by you. Mitt Romney has already lost the election because of this.

Voters in Ohio, auto workers and union members are alienated by his stance on the bailout. You know, John, because you spend a lot of time in Ohio like I have. It is GM country in large part.

They will hand that state to President Obama and without Ohio, probably Romney doesn’t get to the White House. What do you think?

In February of 2010, Velshi was the CNN anchor who presented on-air a cake to the Obama administration, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Obama “stimulus” program, saying, “Happy birthday, dear stimulus. Our producer Ben Tinker (ph) baked this cake. It is a stimulus happy birthday — first birthday cake, which is also a pie chart. It is the birthday of the stimulus.” (See photo below.) So as even as CNN may be the last news network whose PR attempts to feign objectivity, it seems safe to say we know Velshi’s already picked sides in 2012. Similarly, as Noel Sheppard writes today at Newsbusters, “CNN’s Don Lemon Compares Mitt Romney to 60s Segregationist George Wallace,” for having the same views on gay marriage that Obama publicly professed to having until this past week.

In a new post titled “Newsweek’s Cover & Why Obama Turned Gay for Pay–He Knows He’s Being Fired,” Tammy Bruce also believes the election is over; but comes to an entirely opposite conclusion than Velshi:

The following revelation come from a dinner conversation at a fancy restaurant last night (she’s a 1percenter, I’m proudly Friends with 1percenters In the midst of some complaining about Obama, the conversation naturally turned to him becoming Gay for Pay, as phrase normally used for heterosexual young male hustlers who are willing to sleep with men if the price is right. Obama’s sudden support for gay marriage, and the fundraising-mania surrounding his confession, makes the phrase unfortunately apt for the Preezy of the United Steezy.

That said, we then wondered why Obama would really do it. We know he doesn’t give a damn about the issue, and oh sure, he’ll get a bit more cash from the left, but it really won’t even make a dent in what he wants to fund-raise or plans on spending. None of the swing-states at risk during the election were hanging by a thread on this issue (to say the least), and in fact this will likely hurt him in at least North Carolina and Virginia.

Then it dawned on me–Obama’s internal polls must show him losing to Romney, and handily. The latest Rasmussen certainly show the Golfer-in-Chief in trouble and behind the GOP nom. He must realize it’s over and is now simply looking to establish his “legacy,” while reinforcing leftist relationships he desperately wants to keep–like with Hollywood–after we kick his ass to the curb. For an obsessed, cynical and narcissistic president like Obama, he only makes moves that serve his agenda one way or another–and the only upside to this exists out of the White House. Liberal gays will vote for him anyway, and 1 in 6 of his top bundlers have already raised $500,000+ for him. I believe he’s frantic to not have his legacy be the truth–one of disaster brought by narcissism and incompetence, he hopes this sort of story, covers like Newsweek, will be the thing that allows him to walk away at least within his liberal/leftist base as not a complete pariah.

Even more telling–throughout this conversation in the table next to us were a couple of gay men. When I declared my realization that Obama knew he was out, it was, well, a little louder than I would have liked. The two fellows next to us looked over, and as I expected some snarky remark back, they both just looked depressed and then down at their very French appetizers. They knew, too, that they were being played by Obama and that as gays we were all now being saddled with a gigantic “gay friendly” failure of a Preezy.

Mickey Kaus reaches a somewhat similar conclusion; he ponders if Obama is “Thinking two steps ahead?”

If Barack Obama loses the 2012 election, do you think he’s going to quit elective politics, serve on a series of corporate and foundation boards, write a best-selling children’s book on being a Dad and a Lugaresque memoir describing how Fox News and Peter Orszag betrayed him? I don’t. I think he’s going to run again, Grover Cleveland style. That casts possible additional (distant) light on today’s endorsement of same-sex marriage: It may or may not help Obama in 2012. But it would much more reliably likely help him in 2016, when public opinion can be expected to have shifted further in favor of this social innovation. It would certainly help him in the Democratic primaries. ….

It certainly seems plausible (and as Kaus goes on to add, he’s not suggesting that Obama’s throwing in the towel this year, unlike Bruce’s theory). At least Bill Clinton seemed to enjoy governing — running for office is the only thing Obama seems qualified to do — but first we have to get through the campaign he’s running now. So who’s right? CNN’s cake-proffering palace guard anchor or Tammy Bruce? We’ll know in the coming weeks and months.

Update: Welcome Five Feet of Fury Readers.

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Update: Welcome readers clicking in from:

• Instapundit.com
• Lucianne.com
• Neo-Neocon
• Rand Simberg
• The Week
• Yahoo News
• The PJM homepage.

Original post follows below.

Well, this happened:

To make sense of the strange Time and Newsweek covers appearing at your supermarket news stand recently — Newsweek seemingly going from cover stories on light S&M one week to Obama as “The First Gay President” the next; Time magazine concurrently featuring a breast-feeding three-year-old(!) boy – it helps to understand the history of newsweeklies.

Time began publishing in 1923 as the first weekly news magazine; Newsweek debuted a decade later as a copycat publication. (It was bought by the Washington Post in 1961, and in 2010 famously unloaded by the now-ailing newspaper for a dollar.) As Alan Brinkley wrote in The Publisher, his 2010 biography of Time founder Henry Luce, Luce and his then-business partner Brit Hadden (who died at age 31 in 1929) were originally going to call their publication “Facts” when they first conceived of the notion of a weekly news magazine in the early 1920s. One night in 1922 though, as Brinkley writes, while Luce was riding the subway home, he came across an advertising card above the windows of the subway car that used the phrase “Time for a Change” or something similar in its copy, which convinced him that “Time” was the correct title for his nascent magazine idea:

Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others.

It also helps to understand what a novelty a weekly news magazine was in the 1920s, by comparing it to the competing information mediums of the era, as Brinkley goes on to do. The first radio networks, the direct precursors to today’s NBC, CBS, and (slightly more circuitously) ABC, were formed in that era. Movies were extraordinarily popular, though they still lacked sound until the end of the decade. That was the media culture in which Time was born, Brinkley writes:

With the exception of the national wire services, whose stories were filtered through local newspaper editors with their own interests and tastes, Time—which even in its early, frail years had subscribers in every state—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ. No newspaper had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news in the 1920s consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Newsreels were not yet prominent. Even with its relatively modest circulation in the 1920s, Time established itself as an important force in journalism if for no other reason than that it reached men and women in all parts of the country and promised to rescue them from isolation and provincialism and prepare them for the cosmopolitan world.

As John Podhoretz wrote in 2009, recounting his experiences at Time in the early 1980s, until the World Wide Web arrived in the early 1990s, newsweeklies were still hugely influential, through the eighties and nineties, with its top journalists receiving limousine service and tony expense accounts:

Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief…at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home…and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I’d bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter—and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, “Get me my helicopter.”

Once Matt Drudge blew open the story of Bill Clinton’s dalliances with Monica Lewinsky, a story that Newsweek attempted to suppress, the walls quickly began to fall, and savvy news consumers quickly began to receive their news elsewhere — including from news aggregation sites such as Drudge and Instapundit, which can be and are updated numerous times a day, unlike the increasingly lethargic schedule of the newsweeklies.

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Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20^th century, American universities  had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’

Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.

And when you’re done watching, check out David P. Goldman at his “Spengler” column (and that nom de blog dovetails remarkably well with our theme, doesn’t it?) on “Philistinism and Failure,” and follow David’s link to Fred Siegel from the April issue of Commentary, for his brilliant article on “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” for much more on this theme.

A handy, portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.  The script of this week’s show, with plenty of hyperlinks to the books and blog posts that inspired it, follows on the next page.

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Perhaps the opening quote in Jonah Goldberg’s new book,  The Tyranny of Clichés, from George Orwell — “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” — unduly influenced me. But as I joked with Jonah at the start of our two-part interview, when I first read the galleys of The Tyranny of Clichés back in February, my first thought, despite how pretentious it sounds, was that whereas Liberal Fascism was the equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the alternative history book within the book of George Orwell’s 1984, The Tyranny of Clichés was sort of like the Cliff Notes to the Newspeak Dictionary.

As to the tyrannical nature of cliches, and how they’re used to steal bases in political arguments, Jonah writes in his new book:

I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”

Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and then stop talking, as if they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required. “We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim, misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.

Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie Inception— setting up, working their way through your programming— all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating of clichés.

Click below to listen to the podcast:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(16.5 minutes long; 15.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Watch for Part II of our interview tomorrow, in which Jonah will discuss the entomology of liberal clichés such as “diversity” and “social justice,” and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “The Middle Class” as a cliché he rode to victory in 1992. Plus a look back at how Liberal Fascism was received by the right, the left, and by historians.

A transcript of Part I of our interview begins on the next page. (Part II’s transcript will appear tomorrow.)

Update (5/8/12): Part II is now online here.

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At Commentary, Seth Mandel explores how Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts, is “playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future.” As Mandel writes, “Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich:”

The sad part about all this is that Warren is clearly intelligent and dedicated to her (redistributionist) cause. Back in August, Christopher Caldwell wrote a piece on her in the Weekly Standard in which he praised her earlier writing as “brilliant and counterintuitive work.” Though many on the right object to Warren’s politics, no one thought she was ill-equipped intellectually for the important debate on economic policy now sweeping the public sphere.

Yet in the age of Obama, this is how campaigns are run. Warren may have interesting things to say, but she, too, has become something of a liberal cliché. Despite her obvious smarts, she has reflexively fallen back on charges of sexism, even when they are so ridiculous as to make you cringe. If Warren, a rich, white, Harvard professor, is a victim, everyone is.

Why does this matter? Because it reveals that the left thinks affirmative action is a joke, another cudgel with which to attack political opponents at the expense of minorities who might, thanks to liberalism’s insistence on keeping students in failed school districts, actually put the policy to some good use. And because if Elizabeth Warren is unable to advance coherent liberal policy arguments, then there may be none to advance.

John Fund dubs Warren the Check-the-Box Lady:

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate running against Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, claimed for a decade in law-school directories that she was Native American even though her only evidence for her status was family “lore.”

After days of stonewalling, she now says she claimed minority status only in order to find others with tribal roots. “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off,” she told reporters this week.

“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” Warren said, who has never mentioned her Native American heritage while she has been a Senate candidate. Yesterday, however, the candidate informed a Boston news station that her “high cheekbones” were testimony to her Native American background.

After a week of digging, helpful scholars at the New England Historic Genealogical Society say they have a hint that Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother may have been Cherokee. An electronic transcript of an 1894 marriage application back in Warren’s Oklahoma lists her ancestor as Cherokee. That would make Warren 1/32nd Native American. But the genealogists say the actual marriage certificate doesn’t list any Cherokee ancestry.

Noting that Warren suddenly dropped any claim to Native American ancestry as soon as she was hired at Harvard, Howie Carr of the Boston Herald concludes: “Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right.”

Actually, this is one time where a couple of pictures really is worth a thousand words. With a little help from her fellow “liberals” in the MSM, she’s also doing a wonderful job making a hash of racism in 2012 as well:

 Update: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey writes, “Democrats worried about Warren in Massachusetts,” quoting Larry Sabato:

“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth” — as opposed to say fellow Massachusetts liberals such as John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy? But then, as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe once wrote, “That which is permitted to Massachusetts congressmen is not permitted to congressmen from other states” — apparently that applies to would-be liberal senators there, as well.

More: Oh, and speaking of Kerry, our one-time proponent of radical chic, and champion of the Great Recession’s ability to “reduce” “global warming” has somehow transformed himself along the way into quite the “prescient” investor…

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“Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog,” as explored by Tim Stanley in the London Telegraph:

There was a brief media firestorm yesterday when Vanity Fair broke the news that Obama’s famous “New York girlfriend” was a fiction. She appears in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, described in some detail by her appearance, voice and mannerisms. But a new biography of Obama – with an excerpt published in Vanity Fair – “reveals” that she was actually an amalgam of several different women. Politico immediately ran with “Obama: ‘New York girlfriend’ was composite” and Drudge headlined with “Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in a Memoir.” Coming hot on the heels of the news that the Pres once ate a dog, his weirdo factor seems to have hit the roof.

Actually, it turns out that Obama always said that his New York squeeze was a fake. Within a couple of hours of the story breaking, journalists pointed out that at the beginning of Dreams From My Father it reads, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Politico was forced to print a humiliating correction and David Graham of The Atlantic went in for the kill: “Politico has served as an unwitting pawn in a game conservative spinmeisters are playing to redefine Obama between now and November … It’s much the same as the flap over Obama eating dog, in which a different piece of Dreams From My Father, in which he describes eating canine meat as a boy in Indonesia, was rediscovered. While conservative activists and journalists present these stories while claiming that Obama wasn’t properly vetted four years ago, what’s actually happening is they’re reintroducing facts to the record, this time with a far more negative spin.”

Wow, they move fast at the Atlantic — on Sunday morning, Garance Franke-Ruta tweeted “My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner lst nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.” Now another Atlantic scribe is claiming that everybody knows this stuff, it’s all old news — move along, these aren’t the dogs you were looking for. Why are we discussing the president’s past, anyhow?

But to answer the other half of his complaint, given how many members of the Politico were on the JournoList in 2008, that self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama, it’s a little late for anybody there to worry now about being used as pawns.

Fortunately, the Telegraph’s Stanley isn’t buying the spin from the American left:

I’m not sure. What stands out from the composite story isn’t that Obama amalgamated characters, it’s that the press hadn’t noticed until now. As with the dog story, this confirms the suspicion that the mainstream media gave Obama a free pass in 2008 and declined to check too deeply into his background. Even The Atlantic’s Graham admits that he’s never read Dreams From My Father, and neither, it would seem, has anyone else in the press corps. They have the excuse that the book is incredibly narcissistic and boring, but otherwise isn’t this exactly the sort of character assessment/assassination that should have happened four years ago?

Not at all. The American legacy media in general (and the Atlantic in particular, what with Michael Kelly sadly deceased and Mark Steyn traded in 2007 for Andrew Sullivan and draft choices to be named later) serves as a de facto extension of the DNC. Near the start of 2008, Democrats very quickly coalesced around the least experienced candidate to be their nominee, a man who described himself cheerfully as “a blank screen.”

Here’s a flashback to Real Clear Politics at the end of 2006, where Froma Harrop wrote that “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing:”

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

Obama does seem to have an impressive resume and polish. And it’s not his fault that a mania for some new political face intrudes on every presidential election season. But one does wish, for the sake of democracy, that we could skip the crush and give less glamorous contenders who actually say something more of a hearing.

Any time now, fellas. A year later, the press had been given their marching orders, their job was to keep bad news about their man out  of circulation, keep him as a self described political chameleon — even at the expense of their reputations, even at the expense of selling newspapers or bolstering their TV ratings.

Back to the London Telegraph for Stanley conclusion:

That’s the significance of the canine and composite revelations – both of them, aside from their delightful “dish” factors, not really revelations at all. That we are only discussing them this late into Obama’s career suggests that the vetting that should have happened four years ago was unforgivably neglected. But, hey, it’s never too late to start.

I agree — but as we’ve seen, the MSM having vacated their job long ago, that’s largely the job of new media, not old.

Update: “Barack Obama, Sarong Man for America.”

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And now for news of fresh Blue State disaster, both home and abroad.

But first, some background. Back in 2010, Theodore Dalrymple explored the revival of centralized economic planning in general, and the fortunes of its most prominent 20th proponent, John Kenneth Galbraith, specifically:

His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortuneand the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not least through his sparring with William F. Buckley, Jr. (a close personal friend). His omnipresence as the voice of economics was both the result and the cause of a whole climate of opinion.

As is commonly the way, a reaction set in. Galbraith, who lived from 1908 to 2006, grew not only old, but old hat. His Keynesianism appeared outmoded in an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity apparently brought about by adherence to economic theories very different from his. No one believed any longer that demand management—the governmental regulation and, if necessary, provision of the demand for goods and services within the whole economy—was the way to combine prosperity with social justice. Rather, the market’s invisible hand and unconscious wisdom would lead us into the sunny uplands of expanding wealth and diminishing poverty.

But recently, there has been a reaction to the reaction. No sooner had Lehman Brothers collapsed than the printing presses started to roll out copies of Galbraith’s book on the debacle of 1929, The Great Crash. In fact, it couldn’t be printed fast enough, paperback books being affordable even in times of crisis. Galbraith was the hero of a recent PBS documentary extolling the value of big government. And demand management à la Galbraith is now back with a vengeance, of course. If the improvidently indebted but now impecunious private citizen won’t spend and thereby expand economic activity, the improvidently indebted but infinitely expandable government will do it for him.

So how’s that working out? Pretty badly, if these recent stories are any indication. First up, at Big Peace, founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, John J. Xenakis has this news of fresh disaster from Europe: “Spain Unemployment Near 25%; Britain Enters Double-Dip Recession”:

• Spain’s economy keeps spiraling downward as unemployment rises to 25%
• Switzerland considers paying illegal aliens to leave Switzerland
• Britain’s economy moves into a ‘double-dip’ recession
• Germany’s Angela Merkel angrily repudiates François Hollande’s campaign promises
• Greece’s elections driven by anti-austerity, anti-immigrant fervor
• Romania’s government collapses, Czech government survives, in anti-austerity anger

While President Reagan was working to expand entrepreneurship in the US in the 1980s, statist-oriented economists trumpeted the top-down economy of Japan as the better model — recall ’80s and early ’90s era-films such as Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun. Two decades later,  Ross Douthat describes Japan as the “Incredible Shrinking Country,” facing demographic, and presumably economic, collapse as well, in the New York Times, and living out a real-life version of The Children of Men, PD James’ 1992 novel:

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

Yet the traditional stigma around out-of-wedlock childbearing endures, which means that unmarried Japanese are more likely to embrace “voluntary childlessness” than the unwed parenting that’s becoming an American norm. And the traditional Japanese suspicion of immigration (another possible source for demographic vitality) has endured into the 21st century as well. Eberstadt notes that “in 2009 Japan naturalized barely a third as many new citizens as Switzerland, a country with a population only 6 percent the size of Japan’s and a reputation of its own for standoffishness.”

These trends are forging a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain in James’s dystopia. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori”—“young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

And speaking of Japan and Europe, “Europe faces Japan syndrome as credit demand implodes,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the London Telegraph:

This slump in loan demand is more or less what happened during Japan’s Lost Decade as Mr and Mrs Watanabe shunned debt. Zero interest rates did nothing. The Bank of Japan was “pushing on a string” (though it never really launched bond purchases with any serious determination).

It is true that banks have slowed the pace of credit tightening, but they are nevertheless still tightening. “A banking crisis remains very much in play for much of the region,” said David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income.

The credit squeeze is entirely predictable – and was widely predicted – given that banks must raise their core Tier 1 capital ratios to 9pc by July to meet EU rules, or face nationalisation. (The pro-cyclical folly of this beggars belief: by all means impose higher buffers, but not during a recession, and not by letting banks slash their balance sheets. The US at least forced its banks to raise capital, an entirely different policy since it does not lead to a lending crunch.)

The IMF said last week that Europe’s banks would slash their balance sheets by €2 trillion – or 7pc – by next year. This amounts to an economic shock. The Fund said deleveraging on this scale at a time of sharp fiscal tightening risks a “bad equilibrium”.

Indeed it does. It ensures hell for countries containing 200m people, or more. Judging by the rise of Sinn Fein, the Dutch Freedom Party, the Dutch Socialist Party (hard-Left), France’s Front National, and some true fire-breathers in Greece, they victims will not readily put up with this.

Oh well, what’s another potential “European Civil War” amongst friends and neighbors? Over on this side of the Atlantic, America’s Bluest of Blue regions are undergoing similar demographic and economic convulsions, as we’ll explore right after the page break.

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From Lileks’ latest addition to his Website, “News and Ads of ’70s Radio,”Confused young hippies: see the world with the new mod Navy:”

I’m pretty sure that post-dates the original ad for recruits looking to serve on Her Majesty’s Psychedelic Service:

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Courtesy of my colleagues at PJM/PJTV, Bill Whittle and Andrew Klavan, who goof, MST3K and Pop-Up Video style, on Tom Hanks’ palace guard narrative stylings. As the doggedly determined bete noire of Obama and his dinner choices Jim Treacher writes:

I didn’t watch that dreck when it came out last month, so thanks to Whittle & Klavan for giving me an excuse. Wow, that’s the most embarrassing thing Tom Hanks has done since The Man with One Red Shoe. (Shut up, I liked Joe Versus the Volcano.) Fifty years from now, people will look back and wonder how a guy as seemingly smart as Hanks could’ve been so credulous. If there are still any functioning computers by then. Or the electricity to run them.

California will likely lead the way in that regard, sad to say.

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“Is New York Times boss piloting a ‘ghost ship?’” The above video asks. (Short answer: yes.)

To make sense of the latest bit of timely Taiwanese digital surrealism, P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters has the backstory:

New York Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr has suddenly become the moose in the room that everybody now wants to talk about, including his disgruntled staffers…and Taiwanese animators who have produced an hilarious video about his bizarre management style (below the fold). The Taiwanese parody is based on a recent email sent by Times science and health reporter Don McNeil to about 150 fellow staffers.

Reading McNeil’s explosive email, one gets the impression that Sulzberger’s primary qualification to helm the Times was to live through birth:

The Times is in labor turmoil. Journalists are openly angry. Even the sacred Page One meeting has had a protest.

The company has no C.E.O.

Arthur has cancelled his annual State of the Times address.

He didn’t even speak at Anthony Shadid’s memorial. Jill “greeted us in his name” as he sat there.

The antlers that the animated version of Sulzberger wears throughout the above video are a reference to Pinch’s infamous stuffed moose from the Jayson Blair-era:

The moose is loose On the empty stage, Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd sat side by side. They got no applause and no catcalls, though some audience comments were cheered. In a surreal moment that reminded one staffer of Shari Lewis’ old TV show, Sulzberger produced a stuffed toy moose that he sometimes trots out as a symbol of open communication. Its use struck some in the audience as a tone-deaf and patronizing gesture. Sulzberger handed the moose to Raines, who laid it aside.

As James Lileks wrote at the time, “grown-ups do not use metaphorical mooses to break the ice:”

Let’s imagine how that would have worked in WW2:

Patton: Dammit, Ike, I -

Eisenhower: uh uh uh, George. I don’t see Mr. Moose. I hear moosey feelings, but the table looks pretty mooseless to me.

Patton: (fingers pearl handle of his revolver) (drops a dirty, wet rag on the table) That’s my moose. It fell under the tank treads. Sir, about Normandy -

Eisenhower: What did you call you moose? You’re supposed to give it a name!

Patton: As soon I saw it was under the treads, I named it Monty.

Lileks wrote almost a decade ago that “adults no longer run the Times;” today, they’re also pretty scarce at the other end of the Northeast Corridor. QED:

“The president has a very difficult time with the business community. Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican that’s just a fact of life.”

– Bill Daley, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff.

But then, as Ann Althouse asks, while Obama is “slow-jamming the news” with a late-night television host and hitting the fund-raising circuit 24/7, who is running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

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Back in 2010, in an essay titled, “Our Puritanical Progressives,” George Will flashed back to the days of the toughest Super-Villain Batman and Robin went up against in the 1950s, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Today, many comic book fans likely think of Wertham as some sort of arch-conservative member of the biblical Moral Majority; Will reminded readers that he was nothing of the sort:

In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science — very loosely defined — to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law who translated portions of “Das Kapital” into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.

Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her “prison psychoses.” Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”

Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the “homoerotic tendencies” were patent.

Flash-forward to today, and this headline at the Huffington Post, hard at work on solving the pressing issues of mankind: “Batman Is Gay: Comic Writer Grant Morrison Says Concept Of Superhero Character Is ‘Sexually Deviant:’”

Action Comics writer Grant Morrison, who is best known for revamping DC Comics’ family of Batman titles, spoke at length about comic superheroes in an interview with Playboy magazine, confirming maybe those Batman and Robin rumors aren’t so far-fetched after all, because the title character is “very, very gay.”

“He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant,” Morrison told the magazine. “Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.”

To paraphrase Moe Szyslak, Jeez, where ya been, Homer? The whole Man of Steel industry has gone gay. But then, who hasn’t, as Kathy Shaidle writes:

Well, as most of you have noticed at this point:

Stuff you used to joke about as a kid = now a “serious” thing

And never forget (or else):

Everyone is secretly gay — except Hitler and other bad people!

Speaking of which…

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Barack Obama, egoist in chief:

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Jimmy Carter, micro-manager in chief:

Carter attempted to compensate for his stiff personal skills and bad relations with Congress by adopting a crushing routine, working as much as 80 hours a week and reading as many as 300 pages of paperwork every night. It is doubtful that such a heroic workload was either productive or helpful in guiding his staff. It took six months before Carter would give up personally reviewing all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Carter denied supervising the White House tennis court at a 1979 press conference, though his denial confirmed the perception that he was the Micro-Manager-in-Chief: “I have never personally monitored who used or did not use the White House tennis court. I have let my secretary, Susan Clough, receive requests from members of the White House staff who wanted to use the tennis court at certain times, so that more than one person would not want to use the same tennis court simultaneously, unless they were either on opposite sides of the net or engaged in a doubles contest.”)

To be fair to the 39th president, to history’s knowledge, he never ate the killer rabbit.

Update: “Amusing Headline of the Day: ‘Barack Obama: An Underdog Story.’”

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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:

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.”

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