Richard Cohen is the dumbest motherfucker alive.  After spending the first half of his column excoriating Obama for his rejection of public financing (again - a decision which, in our Elite Pundit world, was an utterly monumental blow to his credibility and for the people that are actually going to determine the next president was barely a blip on the radar), Cohen then lapses into some sort of ritualized he-man worship which I’m sure included references to sweat-soaked fatigues and a rainy night in the sexiest barracks ever in the original version.

In some recent magazine articles, I and certain of my colleagues have been accused of being soft on McCain, forgiving him his flips, his flops and his mostly conservative ideology. I do not plead guilty to this charge, because, over the years, the man’s imperfections have not escaped my keen eye. But, for the record, let’s recapitulate: McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife’s corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I’ve said it all.

No, actually, you haven’t.  Declaring yourself correct before you actually make your point is generally considered bad form, even worse when you sloppily toss together a shitty case and fling it at nameless, faceless accusers. 

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I would have an easier time having faith in our media if it had even the most remote connection to reality.

Not one, but two articles in which Obama is targeted, and McCain is given a pass despite his gross inconsistency on the exact matter at hand.

First, Obama <3s ethanol:

Jason Furman, the Obama campaign’s economic policy director, said Mr. Obama’s stance on ethanol was based on its merits. “That is what has always motivated him on this issue, and will continue to determine his policy going forward,” Mr. Furman said.

Asked if Mr. Obama brought any predisposition or bias to the ethanol debate because he represents a corn-growing state that stands to benefit from a boom, Mr. Furman said, “He wants to represent the United States of America, and his policies are based on what’s best for the country.”

John McCain, however, is stalking the plains of the Midwest, boldly standing up to ethanol:

Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to achieve “energy security” while also slowing down the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.

Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.

Unfortunately (and there’s always an unfortunately), he doesn’t actually oppose ethanol anymore:

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Because no matter what happens, the media always picks up on two narratives: can people trust the Democrat, and how does the Democrat stop people from trusting the Republican? 

With Gore, it was the NASCAR Dads and the beer test, with Kerry it was security moms and the national security gap, and with Obama it’ll be the trustworthiness gap, or whatever else the pundit class decides people don’t like about him. 

“McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes,” writes Broder. “His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.”

This is the case in point - the reason that McCain has the reputation is because of the pundit class.  The reason that he’ll maintain that reputation is because of the pundit class.  Once something is cemented in their heads, it’s never worth examining - or even rejecting - unless, of course, they’ve got permission to cattily leap in that direction.  McCain and Mickey Kaus could be fucking goats at the 11th Annual Keep Our Goats Free Of Human Penis Parade, and Howard Kurtz would show up the next Sunday solemnly asking his panel of reporters, including Mickey Kaus by satellite, whether or not the Obama campaign risks defiling the process he said he’d raise up from the sewer by discussing interspecies sex in public.

UPDATE:  The Jed Report points out that McCain, blessedly, has yet to make any major mistakes while Obama has virtually alienated all but the largest of cities and flamboyant of homosexuals.  Or something.

Twenty dollars to the first person who can give any rational reason why Michelle Obama is mentioned in Maureen Dowd’s latest piece.

This isn’t even the failure to write something relevant (the entire article is basically a laundry list of Weird Things The French President’s Wife Did), but Maureen Dowd’s wholehearted failure as a person.  When I saw The Happening, one of the reasons I saw it is because I really do enjoy watching people who’ve demonstrated some modicum of intelligence shoot for the moon in service of something obviously awful and fail.  It’s a spectacular sight, watching the step-by-step demolition of someone’s meticulously executed plans under the crushing brunt of reality and good taste.

Maureen Dowd used to be that person, the too clever by half orchestrator of crazy shit…but at least it was crazy shit with a point.  Having lost the Clintons as the background of her unyielding rambling, she seems to have become unmoored, looking for anything that potentially involves oral sex and a Democrat to write a column that’s no longer even half clever.

I no longer wonder why the New York Times lacks the respect for their history necessary to fire Dowd and put in anyone or anything - the obituary editor, some classifieds, random pictures of squirrels in Central Park - that would restore a modicum of relevance to the space she occupies.  I just wonder why Dowd lacks the self-respect to use the great gift she’s been given to do anything worthwhile.

...Blowjobs! 

For those of you not familiar with the series, Resident Evil is a game that’s about the purest of pastimes - fucking up zombies and other nasties with an ever-expanding lineup of weapons. 

Resident Evil 5 takes the series to Africa…and then there’s controversy. 

On Your Black Writers today, Tolu Olorunda takes exception to the RE5 trailer:

What I witnessed [in the RE5 trailer] was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing… It wasted no time in capitalizing upon the long history of blatant depictions of Africans as savages and helpless imbeciles. The trailer featured a Caucasian male mutilating African villages, along with Africans. With the not-so ancient history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, the issue of racial insensitivity and indifference must be brought to the centerfold…

My opinion?  The trailer above shows a disturbing insensitivity to the rather loaded images of a heavily armed white guy mowing down rabid Africans.  But I don’t think the game is intentionally racist, simply totally tone deaf to what’s implied by the previous sentence.

But there’s something more disturbing than the trailer.  It’s the dumbasses who watched it and couldn’t see anything even potentially wrong with it.

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A couple of times a year you see a rash of news articles about some institute or scientists trying to prove there’s a way to tell whether someone is gay by one trait or another. In the LA Times we have a nice listing of some of the proto-scientific gaydar crap out there—it’s pretty amusing.

Studies contradict each other, and some promising paths don’t pan out. (A link between male homosexuality and finger lengths isn’t holding up,  and a claim that gays have distinctive fingerprint ridge patterns is largely discredited.) Scientists don’t always agree on how to interpret the results, and more progress has been made with regard to men than to women.

Below the fold are some of the entertaining items in this particular report.

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It’s just too over-the-top to ignore. This loser, Larry Sinclair, has been peddling a ridiculous story about having blown Obama in a party-hard limo in Illinois; he held a

three-ring circus

news conference at the National Press Club today. 

Sinclair, who has a 27-year criminal record of petty crimes and fraud arrests, should win an award for the dumbest mo’fo’ ever— he has an outstanding warrant in Colorado on theft and forgery charges, so today’s high-profile appearance in DC resulted in two U.S. marshals cuffing him and hauling him away right on the spot.

He and his attorney managed to hold the press conference before the cuffs were clicked on. And it was a circus. Dave Weigel of Reason:

How did Sinclair hold up? Rather terribly. He started with a lengthy statement that admitted most (not all) of his crimes and dispatched Sibley to run around the room with a microphone. As Seth Colter Walls recounts, most of the questions were legalistic and (somewhat) credulous. Sinclair was asked who funded the event (donors, over the internet), how he made his living (he’s on disability), and whether Obama was “well hung” (I’m not going to dignify his answer here). The only new “evidence” he presented was the name of a limo driver and the bar where he claimed to have met Obama (who, in Sinclair’s story, used his real name and job title as he rendevouzed with a cruising criminal he’d never met before).

Even his attorney was off the hook.

It got worse when Sinclair’s lawyer Montgomery Sibley—whose license is currently suspended in D.C. and Florida—showed up in a kilt and told reporters that his above-average endowment made slacks tight and uncomfortable.

I think my favorite part of this segment is when the host says, “This is John McCain we’re talking about!”

John McCain is a magical war shaman, as all Republicans are, and the idea of someone saying he hasn’t actually led a large organization or developed war policy is like, well, telling them there were people who had problems with Tim Russert’s credibility.

Second is when the host gets her Serious Face on, leans in, and talks about the special insight that John McCain has - particularly into torture.

Just go get him some doughnuts already, for God’s sake.

Via the AP:

Al Gore made his

What’s most interesting, though:

second time Obama has

I think its a good strategy, myself.

(Background here.)

Our condolences to his friends, family and coworkers.

Via Instaputz (read more Instaputz!), Chuck Todd:

I think the media will start their candidate fact-checking in the weeks ahead… i think there just hasn’t been a focus on this right now as we’ve had to cover the Clinton end game and the general election launch. I suspect these candidate fact checking stories to pop up a lot in July.

This brings up one of my consistent pet peeves about political coverage - why are fact checking stories always so “special”, and why do they require such a ramp up of previously unconsidered proportions?

Every major American media source I’ve seen goes fucking gonzo over their own ability to look up information like a congressional voting record or an old New York Times story from all the way back in 2006.  You get special sections of the paper/site/show to fact check, with new graphics, “dedicated” reporters (who appear to work on this about once every ten days or so) and, the best part, straight reporting that never, ever touches on what the fact checks say unless it becomes conventional wisdom.  That straight reporting also never, ever tries to do fact checking itself, instead leaving it to the campaigns to charge and countercharge.

The Washington Post has its own sporadic fact checker, Michael Dobbs, who runs a blog called “The Fact Checker”.  It is, of course, not important enough to make it into the actual pages of the paper as actual stories, but it’s most certainly going to be promoted to the moon once you need someplace to run to get “the straight talk” (or whatever asinine catchphrase they come up with) days after a candidate lies on the stump.

When you have to make a special production about your willingness to fulfill a basic part of your job description, that’s when you really need reconsider your profession.

UPDATE: Fox News Senior VP of Programming Bill Shine came up with this lame statement: “A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment.”

Jesse linked to Atrios’s post on this, but I had to put up something. Last week, E.D. Hill bleated about the Obama’s fist bump/dap as a secret communication between terrorists. Now we have the network broadcasting refreshingly direct racist attacks on the Obamas. This during a segment with anchor Megyn Kelly and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin who is, naturally, a FNC contributor:

Baby Mama? If Fox is going to try to float that they are just being “down with the Negroes” in this landmark campaign, the bigoted network should at least

get its sh*t right

. Oliver Willis:

So here’s the thing (because during this campaign I’m apparently learning that we black people have our own secret code and hand signals so this stuff has to be explained like you are speaking to a child at times), using the phrase “baby mama” to describe this woman implies that like too many people in the black community, she is a mother on her own with no man around doing his job.

Except, Barack and Michelle Obama are the exact opposite of this, and that is one of the reason America - especially black America - are so proud of them.

Let’s go to the Urban Dictionary. Does this describe Mrs. Obama to you?

baby mama. A term used to define an unmarried young woman (but can be a woman of any age) who has had a child. As mentioned before in another definition, most of the time it is used for when it was simply a sexual relationship, compared to ex-wife or girlfriend. Usually this has a negative connotation, a lot of baby mamas are seen as desperate, gold digging, emotionally starved, shady women who had a baby out of spite or to keep a man. Sometimes they may act like this because of missed child support payments, unfulfilled promises by the father, or convenient sex by the father. Either or both may exist in any situation.

It’s high time that Fox News just stop with the pussyfooting around with these games and run the more direct “

nigger

” on any Chyron running over video of the Obamas. Being a generous person, I’ll help Fox out - a few more direct descriptions for them to use are below the fold.

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Jonathan Martin, showing why the biggest thing McCain has to fear from the press is paper cuts from all the mash notes he’s going to get.

I’ve written about this before and I think it gets to what makes McCain so appealing—he’s really not a typical, wind-up politician.

He did something similar last fall, promising to beat Hillary (!) “like a drum.”

What I wrote at the time:

McCain, of course, is not given to such red meat rhetoric and has pointedly criticized his GOP rivals for ridiculing the senator. So I was intrigued enough to read the story beyond just the opening sentence that included that quote.

And sure enough, McCain couldn’t keep up the joke.

“That’s a line I used frankly in 2000 when I said I could beat Al Gore like a drum,” McCain told reporters after his speech. “It got good coverage then.”

I think it’s sweet how no matter what McCain says, his friends always know who he really is underneath. 

UPDATE: Also, when McCain is found to have blatantly contradicted himself on raising the Social Security cap:

ABC’s Teddy Davis and Gregory Wallace find that, despite having criticized Obama for wanting to raise the income cap on Social Security taxes, McCain himself was once open to, you guessed it, raising the income cap on Social Security taxes.

On this and other issues, McCain is a victim of his own accessibility over the years: he’s given so many interviews that oppo researchers and dogged reporters can find contradictions (real or close) in his record.

Only in Maverickland is someone a “victim of their own accessibility” because they just happen to say two things that happen to completely contradict each other.  It’s like when I was caught embezzling money that one time - I was just a victim of my checking account’s capacity.

Just visit their groups, and you can talk about politics and faith with the white

moderate

liberal, race with the one black dude…or conservatism with Ramesh Ponnuru.

You should never have to ask yourself why these people hire Anne Applebaum.

(By the way, thanks to the fine folks at the Apple Store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, MI for fixing my laptop!)