Foul
By Mitch Berg
As P.J. O’Rourke once said, life is full of ironies, if you’re stupid.
So let’s look beyond a few ironies:
- That someone who writes for the Huffington Post can call someone – anyone – a “political mercenary”.
- That someone writing on the Huffpo can yap about “orchestrated smear campaigns”.
- That same person can call anyone – in this case Fox News – a “mouthpiece” for…well, anything.
- That anyone on the left – the group that seethes with condescension and much worse for any ethnic or social minority that doesn’t hew to the lefty path – can call anyone a racist with a straight face.
Again – we’re looking beyond each of these. Andy Ostroy is…well, like most everyone who writes for the HuffPo – some level of lefty apparatchik or another.
But – assuming he’s not yanking something or another from whole cloth – he might have a point:
Have the right-wing media mercenaries over at Fox News lost their fucking minds?
[Did I mention Ostroy is a classy lad? No? Good].
During a discussion Wednesday between commentators Michelle Malkin and Megyn Kelly on whether Republican attacks on Michelle Obama have been too harsh, the following banner ran across the bottom of the screen:
OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA!
This blatantly racist, unconscionable remark is an outrage.
If that is indeed what happened, then it is an outrage. And incredibly stupid. Michele Obama is a prickly woman with a millenarian streak about her – and we’ve talked about this and the dangers it provides democracy in the past.
But “Babymama?”
Bad network. Bad. No donut.
Sheesh.
and is part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to incite America’s bigoted dumbasses
Hm. Carefully orchestrated?
Leaving aside the very high likelihood that it was just some overworked, underpaid, twentysomething numbnuts working the Chyron who wrote the offending crawler (anyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom, can I get an amen?) – does anyone seriously think that any such “careful orchestration” would escape serious inquiry (meaning: other than Andy Ostroy or Grace Kelly)?
Fox is nothing more than a shameless, unapologetic mouthpiece for the ruthless Republican attack-machine
He must be an “investigative journalist”, too.
At any rate – there are so many things to criticize Michele Obama over. This is not one of them.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:06 am
Go to Michelle’s site and read the whole story…including lefty comments re “baby mama” and “baby daddy”. It’s selective, manufactured outrage as usual. Just like the Imus “n” word fiasco.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Fox, stupid as usual. We agree.
Hey, let’s celebrate with a couple DONUTS OF TERROR! at Dunkin’ and share a friendly FIST BUMP OF TERROR!
June 13th, 2008 at 6:15 am
It’s selective, manufactured outrage
Naturally. But calling a black man’s wife his “baby mama” for whatever reason is really, really dumb. So even though the Huffpo jagoff’s outrage IS manufactured, there’s a legitimately stupid statement behind it all. This time.
Why feed the trolls? Make ’em reach for the ridiculous stuff, quit giving them the easy shots.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Isn’t “baby mama” a bit redundant?
June 13th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Hey, AC, why don’t you pull that brown shirt from the back of your closet, you know, the one with the swastika, and go goosestepping down Broadway, shouting Heil Hitler. Then report back whether symbolism means anything.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I agree that it’s classless for Fox to use that term, even when the person it’s directed at has been known to call her husband her “baby’s daddy,” which is pretty similar.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/02/se.06.html
June 13th, 2008 at 10:00 am
It does beg several questions:
Is there an actual screen shot or tape of this ?
Or is this just some person who thought they saw something that flashed for half a second on a crawl on the bottom of a screen that a typical person who be only half paying attention to ?
And isn’t this the same logic as Rush Limbaugh claiming a tape exists of Mrs Obama saying some bad things about white people but no one seems to be able to produce ?
While I concede that hearsay and conjecture are kinds of evidence, I think I’d like to see proof before I assume anything mentioned above is true.
After all, it’s not what happened–it’s what a person can prove happened.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Some of our friends are a little slow on the uptake where pop culture is concerned and that is a problem. The fist bump thing (a/k/a Dap) has essentially replaced the high five. If it’s a terrorist gesture, we’d better get Homeland Security to shut down the Shoreview Little League, because I see dapping going on all the time there on the team that I coach.
As for Rachel Ray, I would assume that if she’s looking to show solidarity with Palestinian terrorists, she would need more than that scarf; she’d have to let her beard grow out a bit so she could look like Arafat.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:51 am
JustMe: Is there an actual screen shot or tape of this ?
Yes
Screen shots are worthless, though, for proof. If you’re good enough then you can literally fake something so well that it won’t be detectable, at least when you have lossy formats like jpeg and tools designed to hide copying properly. It won’t be long until you can get movie fakery that good (since ALL mainstream movie compression is lossy).
June 13th, 2008 at 11:07 am
That is a whiteboy (incorrect) use of the term baby mama. Your “Baby mama” isn’t just the mama of your babies. It’s literally a baby mama, a young girl (too young) who’s the mama of your kids. Usually without benefit of marraige. Michelle and Barry got married at a pretty middle class professional age. No baby mamas there.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am
This has been misunderstood.
Fox is merely attempting, in a culturally sensative way, to reach out to voters that have heretofore only seen polling places as a good opportunity to get a free deck of smokes from George Soros operatives.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:47 am
JM: “And isn’t this the same logic as Rush Limbaugh claiming a tape exists of Mrs Obama saying some bad things about white people but no one seems to be able to produce ?
That would be Larry Johnson, a Tic hack, not RL. I think we know where your talking points are coming from, JM.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Nerdbert: Thanks for the clarification and the link.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
How is it even racist? Seriously.