John?  Perhaps you wouldn’t have to worry about getting covered by the “JV squad” if you ever did anything besides bitch uncontrollably and be wrong about everything.

Could it be…himself?????

CNN decides to investigate the possible impact that the Greatest Black Superhero On Earth will have on the black community.  Because they’re in the midst of studying the black community in America, the obvious thing to do is to consider how Barack Obama will make white people feel.

But there are others who warn that an Obama presidency could hurt African-Americans. They say that an Obama victory could cause white Americans to ignore entrenched racial divisions while claiming that America has reached the racial Promised Land.

Paul Street, author of the forthcoming book, “Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics,” says Obama risks becoming an Oval Office version of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. She and former Secretary of State Colin Powell are African-American figures whose popularity allows some white Americans to congratulate themselves for not being racist, he says

“They’re cited as proof that racism is no longer a significant barrier to black advancement and interracial equality,” says Street.

“This isn’t new. Go to the 19th century and Southern aristocrats would point to a certain African-American landowner who was doing well to prove that whites are not racist.”

Barack Obama did not face the Two-Headed Tunisian Tiger to be felled by mere “Oprahfication”.  The conqueror of the lost city of Blacklantis is not to succumb to the pleasures of abating “white guilt”!

Street’s commentary is actually right on - racists and those who fear they’re racist often grab on to My Black Friend™ to prove that they’re not racist, ignoring the fact that racism is a systematic form of oppression and prejudice, not simply refusing to let the landscaper get a drink of water.

Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it gets.  CNN’s airing a two-night special starting tomorrow called Black in America.  To show you how seriously they’re taking this, they’ve got a promo video up showing an interview with Chris Tucker.  Because the best way to show progress in Black America is to interview a guy who’s worked exactly three times in the past ten years.  Detective Carter shall lead the way!

By the standard of what’s about to come next, that interview looks like Sidney Poitier and Cornel West discussing the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

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John McCain gets a rejection letter.

In an e-mail to the McCain campaign, Opinion Page Editor David Shipley said he could not accept the piece as written, but would be “pleased, though, to look at another draft.”

“Let me suggest an approach,” he wrote Friday. “The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans. It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece.”

Shipley was, in fact, being quite polite, since what he probably should have said was “The Obama piece worked for me because it wasn’t a snot-covered tissue of lies.”

To make this point, [Obama] mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

It’s hard to imagine a lower life form than Michael Savage.

This performance unleashed a torrent of calls for his firing and targeting of his advertisers, however, Savage isn’t breaking a sweat—should we be surprised at this cretin’s defiance? He’s only backtracking on his claim that 99% of the cases of autism are invalid—that was “a little high.”

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every autistic child as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview Monday morning that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

...On his program lastWednesday, Mr. Savage suggested that “99 percent of the cases” of autism were a result of lax parenting. He told his audience: “They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life.“ He added, “Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ”

Asked Monday if he actually believed that 99 out every 100 cases of autism was misdiagnosed, Mr. Savage conceded that figure was “a little high.” “It was hyperbole,” he said.

...“He characterizes children with autism who are very, very ill — disabled children — as essentially bad kids; the only thing wrong with them is they have parents who don’t discipline them,” said John Gilmore, executive director of Autism United and the father of an 8-year-old diagnosed with autism. “That completely misrepresents what is going on with children with autism.”

Autism United held a press conference today to announce a national protest against Savage in San Francisco (Savage’s hometow) on July 23 with autism groups and parents from across the nation.

“Those of us who know more about autism than Michael Savage have a responsibility to call him out on this issue,” Congressman [Mike] Doyle (PA-14)added.  “If I were a radio station that broadcast his show or a company that sponsored it, I’d certainly reconsider my association with it, and if I were a parent of an autistic child, I’d certainly demand that.”

Related:
* Michael Savage of “The Savage Garden”: Autism Is A Fraud, A Racket.

Watching CNN this morning, it’s readily apparent that old habits will be hard to break.

A conversation I had more than once this weekend involved Janeane Garofalo, and not just because Janeane Garofalo is fun to talk about.  During the runup to war, and even during its execution, the anti-war face of TV news debate was either Phil Donahue (cancelled) or Garofalo (celebrity).  The standard trick was to place her against a Very Serious Member of the Foreign Policy Community, letting them rattle on about the various ways that ethnic and religious subgroups of Iraq would be trampled into bliss using the magic power of unprovoked invasion.  Garofalo’s standard answer was that invading a country based on bad evidence, a shaky rationale and no clear aim except making oil cheaper would probably turn out very, very poorly.  That answer was generally met with, at best, a scoff, coupled with the sort of stern yet irrelevant lecturing that informed us going to war was a very weighty decision whose obvious righteousness was validated by the fact that we were going to war, dammit.

Five years later, and some hippie who criticized the war in the first place is on his way to Iraq to talk to a prime minister who agrees with him on getting the fuck out...and said hippie could be president soon. 

First, let’s talk about how Obama’s trip is being covered.  Despite the fact that his foreign policy vision has been largely validated in the past week - McCain caught up to Obama on Afghanistan and the aforementioned endorsement by Maliki - the main discussion today and over the past few days has been whether or not the press is covering Obama’s trip too much and whether or not the coverage of them talking about the coverage results in too much (and too favorable) coverage for Obama.  It’s a tesseract of inanity - a new fourth dimension of coverage about the coverage of the coverage will soon emerge, with Jessica Yellin invited on to discuss how she talked about her in-depth discussion of the impact of Obama’s trip on the race…without ever mentioning what Obama did, how he did it or who he did it with.

Call it the Fafblogging of the media: CNN is the whole world’s only source for CNN!

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Reading over Joel Stein’s description of several crappy ways to make fun of Obama, it’s startling to read that the media isn’t trying to find ways to make funny things funny, but ways to even find actual funny things. 

One of the things we discussed in the panel yesterday is that humor is humor because it points at the truth and reveals it - if the same people who notice when Obama switches from orange Listerine to green can’t find something obviously true and mockably funny about the man, then perhaps that is not the funny they’re looking for.

“That’s not the funny I’m looking for?  Yes, yes, continue on.”

The reason that this column is so telling is because what’s actually funny about this election is the precise thing Stein is doing: floundering around in the big pool of Obama’s charismatic Negrosity trying to figure out how to get out and dry off before they start pissing in it.  Democratic candidates become mockable when they become othered, turned into something strange and alien and worthy of derision, which then becomes conventional wisdom and a shorthand for everything wrong with them.  What Obama did was have the audacity to come in as a preexisting other - a black man - that throws off this creation process.  You can’t “other” him without taking who he is into account, and given the rather uninspiring ability of our media overlords to figure out new and exciting ways of thinking about things, it’ll be about Halloween before someone gets the bright idea of picking up an issue of Essence and figuring out how to address people who aren’t white male monied Protestants with a penchant for a belief in a social contract that doesn’t result in us eating each other in a Netflix-sponsored battle ring.

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The New York Times was at the fuck panel.

Also, to the NYT commenters: I am, in fact, black.

Barack Obama went to the gym three times yesterday.

I’m just sad now. 

In a year where Democrats are highly favored to win the Presidency and increase their Congressional majorities enough to turn Joe Lieberman into the junior Senator of the Connecticut for Lieberman party, it’s a very, very bad thing that Obama is consistently ahead of John McCain in virtually every poll, and has been for months. 

The central problem with the expectations game that the media plays was never that expectations were being set and then not being met by the relevant actors.  It’s that most of the expectations are set by people purposefully acting like morons.  This post from January at Swampland (oh, Swampland…) is a quintessential version of the “expectations game” - Obama crushed South Carolina, proceeded to win the majority of Super Tuesday states, proceeded to win twelve primaries in a row…and that exact post, minus Edwards and plus other states, was the exact same “expectations game” Obama had to face for the next three months. 

It kind of reminds me of the end of Wargames, where WOPR plays tic-tac-toe until it realizes that there are no winners.  Except imagine if they’d forgotten to program in the ultimate goal of tic-tac-toe, so WOPR just kept playing until it decided what the rules where, declared victory, and then carried on with launching the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal into the Soviet Union’s rancid Godless piehole. 

“Why, that Obama won’t let us make fun of him at all!  He’s such an uptight, controlled, anal, humorless sacred cow…”

“Oh my God, I think I’m on to something!  And I finally get to use the word ‘aeolist’!”

I look forward to weeks of forced laughter from reporters pretending this is hilarious.

The next time I make a joke that falls flat, I ask you, the Pandatariat, to immediately declare that everyone else’s sense of humor is dead on my behalf.

The problem that I and most of the people who didn’t like the New Yorker cover had wasn’t that it was some gravely offensive thing that hurt our souls.  Gary Kamiya actually lays it out in his critique of people who didn’t like the joke:

If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering—but oh so semiotically sophisticated—left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test. There’s no arguing taste in humor, of course, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that those who find Barry Blitt’s drawing completely unfunny have traded their appreciation of subtlety and nuance for an instrumental, ends-obsessed, political-unto-death worldview.

This is, of course, the pooh-poohing of us dour fraidy-cats who lack the sufficient fortitude to Laugh At Ourselves (or other things whose inherent humor is apparently a test of our basic decency) - but, uh, if the point of satire is to exaggerate negative stereotypes, and our main complaint is that it didn’t actually exaggerate anything, how are we bad people for thinking that?  There’s an answer!

trios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven’t seen—oops, I shouldn’t have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites—but I haven’t come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.

Yeah, but right wingers frequently say that bin Laden and Democrats are in league and it’s not as if there wasn’t an entire movie that hinged on liberals burning flags or anything.  “But they’ve never said that exact thing in that exact way about this exact person!”, you may say.  And I simply sigh and leave you to wonder why they don’t make the entire plane out of the black box.

It’s one thing to criticize people for not getting the joke, it’s another to not even understand the joke that you’re defending.  As much as we all love being lectured by those with the superior comprehension skills that we all read about (but ironically didn’t understand), sometimes it’s acceptable to admit that a joke simply flopped and move on.

UPDATE: Mahablog has more.

Andrew Romano is complaining that we’re expecting too much from McCain when it comes to the intertubes.

For one thing, McCain’s computer illiteracy doesn’t reflect a lack of curiosity—it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain’s job in the U.S. Senate—where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers—has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary). When aides are responding to your messages and briefing you on every imaginable subject, the incentive to get online sort of disappears.

Here’s the problem - the Internet is rapidly becoming the basic communication tool of our times.  To use an analogy that’s more McCain’s speed, it would be like Theodore Roosevelt showing up in the White House unsure of what a telephone was, or FDR not knowing how to tune a radio or Nixon not understanding how to turn on a television.  Nobody expects McCain to design a web site or produce his own Youtube videos.  Please, God, no Youtube videos from the McCain camp.

But we do expect him to be at least passingly familiar with a computer and/or the internet, able to understand its basic use, particularly as it’s one of the building blocks of the 21st century economy. Nobody expected FDR to assemble the microphone he used for his fireside chats, but it would have been mightily fucked up if he didn’t understand how people made their fancy sound boxes steal his voice.

It’s much easier than, you know, actually saying things myself.

John Kass, columnist for the Chicago Tribune steps in on the Obama flip-flop parade and decides, like many in the media, to speak for the bloggerati:

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

This is one of the great functions of a liberal media whose major liberal members spend most of their time proving how liberal they aren’t.  The major reporting and/or commentating on the ideological proclivities of a major section of the American public comes largely from people who have no real connection whatsoever to said ideology except, perhaps, an ironic one.  The only time we get to read about ourselves is when someone who bought a Che t-shirt in college on a lark tells me that I’m so blisteringly angry or depressed (about something I shouldn’t be, of course) that I’ve starting spraypainting Hummers and browsing porn on public library computers in indolent protest.

I, for one, am only doing one of those things.

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The hallmark of good satire is that it’s good enough to perhaps be taken credulously by those who aren’t too swift, but also ridiculous enough to show that whoever does take it seriously is a bit slow in the head.

This is not good satire. 

The Obama campaign is condemning as “tasteless and offensive” a New Yorker magazine cover that depicts Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a turban, fist-bumping his gun-slinging wife.

An American flag burns in their fireplace.

The New Yorker says it’s satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.

The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.”

The main problem with the image is that there’s absolutely no indication of satire involved.  Take the New Yorker header off, and you’ve got something that could go up at any number of county Republican Parties with no alteration whatsoever.  As Kevin Drum points out, what’s missing is any indication of agency in the picture - there’s no poke at the people saying this, merely a reflection of what’s being said.  It’s not actually satirizing the phenomenon of right-wing e-mail forwards, it’s just creating the ultimate version thereof.  To put it in a different context, it’s like holding a satirized Klan rally by holding a Klan rally…with a laser show that makes a three-story image of a burning cross.  A bigger, badder, better version of the thing you’re attempting to mock doesn’t constitute mockery, it just constitutes a gaudier version of the thing you’re addressing.