Patterico outlines the LA Times’ repetition of hooey:
In a story about the Messiah’s Crackberry, the L.A. Times tells us:
Even if [Obama] won’t be scanning his own groceries or buying his own milk  former President George H.W. Bush was portrayed as out of touch with those markers of American life  he may be in casual contact with friends who are.
The paper neglects to mention the fact that the portrayal of Bush 41 as “out of touch†with supermarket scanners . . . is false.
But who cares about that? The key thing is that he has been portrayed that way. Whether the portrayal is true is of secondary importance.
That’s how editors would treat a slander about one of their own . . . right?
This is professional journalism at its shining best, my friends.
We know that The One spent part of MLK Day painting, and good for him, but this, from his inauguration speech, made me laugh:
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
Does anyone think that Obama has, a single day in his life, worked till his hands were raw? I mean, he may have worked on his jump shot until he had a blister on his foot, but hard physical labor? Does anyone believe he’s ever cut his own lawn? Dug post-holes? Shingled a roof?
We’ve seen Bush do this stuff at his ranch in Crawford, and even fatass Al Gore, in his youth, drove a hand plow behind a team of mules under the pitiless sun.
Bwahahahahahahaha! Not!
Teh One has done so much, Dan. He was a community organizer for goodness sake! When will you wingers start to appreciate that?
Mau-mauing the flak catchers isn’t for the faint of heart, Dan. It takes guts to wrangle those greenbacks out of the bureaucrats.
“former President George H.W. Bush was portrayed as out of touch with those markers of American life”
Who exactly portrayed him as such? /rhetorical? off
Wait, but aren’t those things for the hoi palloi to do? He’s a fucking lightbringer/worker/maker/somethinger Dan. He’s above it and it is that type that should be president.
Yes. He organizes things to decide who does the work, and other people get to do the work.
That’s fair, innit?
Are we now engaging in some sort’a of Tolstoyan theory of the clarifying effect of manual labor toward thought, Dan?
How Russian this litmus!
But O!s a man of the people, thor, in a way George Bush could never be.
“Even if [Obama] won’t be scanning his own groceries or buying his own milk  former President George H.W. Bush was portrayed as out of touch with those markers of American life  he may be in casual contact with friends who are.”
I vividly remember the debate, hosted by CNN, between Clinton and big Bush, where they would take calls with questions from “everyday Americans”. Astoundingly, the very first call happened to be George Stephanopolous, then Clinton’s campaign communications director. Immediately he was all over Bush, declaring him out of touch, and challenging him to quote the price of milk and bread; without giving him a chance to answer, he kept repeating the questions in a taunting and truculent manner, over and over again. And the moderator, Bernard Shaw, simply gazed at Mr. Bush, in his familiar sleepy-eyed, non-plussed way, as if to say, “Gee Mr. President, I just don’t know how Gov. Clintons communications director could happen to be this first in line to ask questions…now give the boy an answer!“; of couse he couldn’t answer, someone else had been doing his shopping for the prior 15 years he had been in government, and specifically the prior 8 while he had been the VP…
But, you know, once a necessary lie has been repeated enough, it simply becomes the troooooof!
And, I mean, why dispense with a useful necessary lie; one that can be used over-and-over again, a gift that keeps on giving…
Whatever pursuits filled Mr. Obama’s youth, one can be sure that hard labor, or any menial labor, was not among them. He was raised by his semi-affluent grandparent, his grandmother the vice president of a bank; one that obviously paid enough that they moved from Seattle to take advantage of the opportunity. He attended a prestigious prep school, which the family paid for. And was able to move away to college. While I’m certain that he recieved some scholarships, it couldn’t have paid all his expenses…
And in the intervening years, while spending a lot of hours and shoe leather being a community organizer, I don’t believe that manual labor was involved…
Having said that I admire his academic success. And, I never said that it iss somehow better to work harder than it is to work smarter…
But I do think it’s folly for him to impute that the pioneers that went west did so for our collective benefit. They did it to make something if themselves, and for their family’s benefit. Not for the altruistic, and socialistic, utopian dream that Obama wants to imply…
And that kind of self reliance and initiative is precisely what will suffer if he’s allowed to take society in the direction his ideology would prefer…
Personally, I thought the more laughable part of the speach-segment you quoted was the repetition of “For us”, followed by a list of actions which were mostly just the opposite. Does anyone seriously believe that western settlers panned creek beds “for us”? Or that people set out to America from famine-ravaged Ireland “for us”? It seems the President isn’t content to merely argue in favor of socialism, but wants us to believe that any individualistic action that has a generally positive effect is in fact motivated by allegiance to the borg.
showy, I’m pretty sure those Africans were sold into slavery by Arabs for us.
Didn’t mean to rip-off Bob Reed there.
Dan, I’m not sure I’m catching your joke. Just sort of generalized, facetious silliness, or you’re arguing that arguing that the actions that are actually “for us” are usually bad ones? If the latter, I’d disagree with your example. And I mean that purely from the standpoint of logic, not PC indignation.
Facetious. Ironic. Destabilizing the imputation of motive. Agreeing with Bob. And showy.
So I gather, after reading the analysis of Obama’s remarks that said remarks were egregious bullshit?
Works for me.
But, isn’t there a “truthiness” to the Bush I story? I thought that “truthiness” was all that was required to print an unattractive story about a Republican.
I apologize in advance for over-analyzing an off-hand remark, but the reason I’m belaboring it is that I’ve seen too often people using examples like that as a general refutation of capitalism, and it pisses me off. Because the imputation of motive is clear in that example, despite the fact that you intentionally reversed it – the motive was personal gain. And so the thinking goes, that was for personal gain, it was bad, therefore actions predicated on personal gain are not to be trusted. I’m well aware that’s not what you were saying, and I generally get your irony there. I just wanted to point that out because, as I’ve said, I’ve heard that illogical argument for socialism too many times, whether from Whoopi Goldberg or a friend in a D.C. bar.
I got a pinkie cramp once from texting too much- that’s sort of like hoeing the back forty…
Naw, nothing to apologize for, showy. I could have said that it was all unicorn farts and faerie dust and left it at that, but I had to go for brutal.
I hope it was just ill-conceived unicorn farts and faerie dust. Mindless pap intended to make people feel good and little else. What I fear, and generally assume, is that this is the President (to steal from another commenter) hoeing the back forty.
Except he’s working on getting you to hoe his back forty. The only Illinous politician not touched by corruption. No. It’s true! Honest!
“Except he’s working on getting you to hoe his back forty.”
No, we are the back forty. And he’s hoeing that field in order to prepare it for the seed of increased socialism.