"Arms! Legs! Curves!...A Real Marriage"

Back in late January, PBS’s John Ridley wrote:

“Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.”

And the first true American president apparently has the first true American marriage, according to Stacy Schiff of New York magazine, which sounds remarkably like a passage from Tiger Beat or 16:

The girl is spicy and newfangled. She’s ushering us around a social corner as much as a political one. Professional rivals, Rock and Doris leaped out of bed in those pj’s the year Obama was born; only now are we discovering what a functioning marriage between equals actually looks like. …After decades of fake financials and fictitious balance sheets, WMDs that weren’t there and detention centers that were, our new First Lady is the genuine article. She has a real body — arms! Legs! Curves! And she has a real marriage.

As Jason Moaz of Commentary writes:

Funny, but I seem to recall that all the first ladies in my lifetime prior to Michelle Obama have been in possession of the full compliment of limbs and parts that constitute the human form . And for all the talk during the Lewinsky scandal of an alleged propensity on the part of our presidents for extramarital dalliances, the fact is that most recent presidential marriages have been remarkably stable — “real,” if you will.

New York magazine notwithstanding, this, then, is the “power” of both Obamas — the power to take ostensibly intelligent writers and reduce them to producing the kind of incredulous, historically illiterate prose that on any other topic wouldn’t make it past the earliest stages of the editing process.

But as Moaz implies, the layers and layers of editors and fact checkers who are supposed to oversee MSM writers are equally likely to succumb to this “power” as well.

Update: More thoughts from Newsbusters.