Aside from toppling two-time defending champion Cincinnati to win the title, the Ramblers are noted in the annals of sports for having four African-American starters at a time when colleges in the South refused to take the court against a team with even one minority player.Nice feel-good civil-rights story -- but not for Andrew Malcolm of IBD! Title:
The celebration of racial progress that Obama will hide todayWhatever could that mean?
President Obama is addicted to photo ops, especially sports ones with happy collegiate and pro champions giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition.
The smiling audience and the president basking in the reflected winning glory of athletic champions is a sure-fire, feel-good TV story, especially in summer. Poker aside, there's hardly a national title that Obama hasn't celebrated for photographers at the White House.Oh, so Malcolm's upset that Obama's hogging the spotlight? Actually, just the opposite:
The man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has decided to celebrate with the aging national champions in the Oval Office by himself. Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA intelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with fellow Americans.
Add that to the lengthy list of Obama disappointments.The great thing about a column like this (half of which, BTW, is just random insults) is that, if Obama chose last-minute to hold the event in a stadium instead, Malcolm could have just flipped the two sections: Obama secrecy CIA "most transparent" har, but when reflected winning glory addicted to monogrammed jersey ops! Lengthy list of disappointments! It would work just as well.
Conservative column writing has been a version of Mad Libs for a while now, but they seem to have almost eliminated the need to make it look coherent. Soon they'll just ship the punters a bunch of refrigerator magnets (UNDER THE BUS, MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY, BENGHAZI, etc.) and let them mix and match themselves.
It seems that finding any excuse to insult Obama is basically Malcolm's job at IBD, not that he hasn't already established kind of a pattern. It's funny, though, how both IBD and the WSJ put these really rabid haters on the payroll. You'd almost think that Obama has been really bad for investors; as it turns out, not so much. (Not that they'd give him credit, necessarily.)
ReplyDeleteIsn't Malcolm the dude whose job in the Bush administration was to be an assistant press toady for the First Lady's office? I have such a hard time getting them all straight.
ReplyDeleteAnd what's the world coming to, when a president participates in photo opportunities? Except when he doesn't.
And, golly, the idea that the president decided to meet quietly with some elderly gentleman chaps Malcolm's ass. Why didn't the president haul the old geezers out into the blinding hot sun of July for Malcolm's benefit?
ReplyDeletehis own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition
ReplyDeleteOkay? I get that your Gordon Gekkos like to cling to whatever athletic hobbies they have, be it basketball or spelunking or whatever the case may be, in an attempt to occlude the fact that they're so impossibly distant from the rigors of everyday life as to be laughable, and to try to forget that as upper-class white men they are literally the blandest, most uninteresting humans on the planet, but when it comes down to it, athletic prowess has exactly zero bearing on one's qualifications for the presidency. Just ask FDR.
No, no, no, I repeat, and repeat again, there is no right-wing analogue of Bush Derangement Syndrome.
ReplyDeleteNo, no, no, I say.
I can't imagine why a dude whose life ambition is to have a place from which to scream his opinions at people has an issue with someone else getting more attention than him...
ReplyDelete" Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA
ReplyDeleteintelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with
fellow Americans. "
Yeah, that would explain why it was written up in the newspapers and ACCOMPANIED BY A PICTURE!! Moron.
No president has ever posed with a championship team who give him a custom jersey. It's just like Hitler!
ReplyDeleteWho can forget the image of Hitler receiving his his custom tunic from the Dusseldorf Jewstompers?
ReplyDeleteSoon they'll just ship the punters a bunch of refrigerator magnets
ReplyDeleteJust send them this:
giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition.
ReplyDeleteWhat?
Sure, smart guy, but was that jersey monogrammed? Huh? Huh?
ReplyDeleteFDR? Hell, how about asking every single President from the 18th and 19th centuries?
ReplyDeleteBut Chet Arthur was a surprisingly adept rope-climber, and Pierce a master of quoits.
ReplyDeleteRamblergate is worse than anything Nixon ever did because Nixon never promised transparency. Impeach now.
ReplyDeleteHaha, Andy Malcolm. The former assistant press flack for Laura Bush, who has two modes of inside-baseball reportage:
ReplyDelete1) Everything Obummer does is dumb and wrong!
2) Super Sarah, the Power Palin!!!!!1
He'd be more terrible if he wasn't such a painful lightweight. LA Times thought his blog was useless enough that they punted him to the IDB's site, where he is read by the tens.
That should be Düsseldorfer Judenstampfer.
ReplyDeleteI don't even know what a quoit is and this was sill funny.
ReplyDeleteWell, to my best knowledge there was no real BDS. The phrase was used to discredit the legitimate and oh so plentiful criticisms of the hopefully worst president of the twentyfirst century. I'm pretty sure the western world can't bear a second one like him.
ReplyDeletePlus all that vampire hunting kept Lincoln lean and fit.
ReplyDeleteWhy let facts get in the way of a good Obama-bashing?
ReplyDeleteObviously photoshopped; I mean, Eddie Van Halen is sitting in front of him.
ReplyDeleteThat's true. I'm just mostly surprised that the madrassa had a hoops team.
ReplyDeleteYou know that, and I know that, but, c'mon, they don't know that.
ReplyDeleteLightweight?
ReplyDeleteToo kind for a low-rent Cal Thomas.
Ah, well, Nixon never promised that because he knew his nose would grow to outlandish proportions.
ReplyDeleteWe hate the fact that Obama is celebrating the achievements of black athletes in the Jim Crow era, and we hate even more the fact that he won't invite us to those celebrations!
ReplyDeleteMakes sense on some planet...
It was autographed by a U.S. president!
ReplyDelete"Did you hear? The President is celebrating the achievements of Jim Crow---"
ReplyDelete"What? Why weren't we invited? We love Jim Crow!"
It really is like mad libs, isn't it? If the president had held the event in a stadium, Malcolm would have complained about wasting tax dollars for a photo op. I have to admit, I'm kinda jealous of someone who can make a living producing this sort of lazy bullshit.
ReplyDeleteYes, he had a sweet gig, and he 'moved on' to IBD.
ReplyDeleteAnd Teddy Roosevelt wrestled an alligator from the DC zoo once a week in order to stay in shape.
ReplyDeleteSeriously. The Bush years left an idelible mark on my liver. Almost every morning some fresh idiocy or atrocity smacked you in the face. BDS? No. PTSD... yeah.
ReplyDeleteOh Jay, you naïf... That's not hoops. It's soccer, played with the severed heads of Christian martyrs.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Howard Taft was the most svelte and pretty ballerina to ever grace my erotic fancies...
ReplyDeleteNo, the Jewstompers are from Dusseldorf, Alabama. The team from the Düsseldorf in Germany were called the Bücherverbrenner back in the day.
ReplyDeleteI like the whole: "This thing happened and it was so secret no one knows about it, including me. This article you're reading? You're not actually reading it. It doesn't exist. Aren't you outraged by that?"
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad that Black Hitler and the Five Evil Supremes have destroyed traditional marriage. Because now I can gay marry Roy AND This comment.
ReplyDeleteI want to watch one of those soccer games with this comment
ReplyDeleteI'm betting he'll be down to writing for Ulcerative Colitis Weekly before long.
ReplyDeleteAh, I stand corrected. My favorite from are still the Berliner Völkermörder, but they never mader major league. Voll die Moppelkotze.
ReplyDelete"from that period" i blame my currently slightly inebriated state.
ReplyDeleteHe'll get bounced after a week (not a place where being a pain in the ass is appreciated, I would think). Then he'll get picked up by the Daily Cholera, and we'll know he's hit rock-bottom.
ReplyDeleteI want to don a white hood and burn cross with this comment. Just like Charles Murray.
ReplyDeletecrosses
ReplyDeleteAndrew Malcolm always struck me as the saddest of the right-wing Mad Libs shufflers: even for someone whose only job is pushing inchoate rage, he just doesn't have the skreedar for it. Or would you call it rage deafness? Take the above: joining two things no one cares about in a manner that doesn't make any sense.
ReplyDeleteMad Libs is being kind; everything Malcolm writes is about as comprehensible as a Scrabble board.
*pulls up a chair*
ReplyDeleteTell me more.
Oh, no you don't! There I was, regaling you all with my tales of K-Lo and Der Krauthammer, and BAM! Tigrismus swore a bloodoath to kill me if I ever did that sort of thing again.
ReplyDeleteI think you're starting to outdrunken me...
ReplyDeleteActually the joke would make sense if I wrote that they eventually made major league. Live and learn I guess.
ReplyDeleteNa, I have stopped, in lieu of beer and I don't want to open the wine.
ReplyDeletePlease do. We can compare livers later.
ReplyDeleteLiberals were "deranged" by BushCo's actions. Conservatives are deranged by the very existence of a Liberal President. Their reaction to our Black President goes WAYYY beyond deranged.
ReplyDeleteDAMM, Obama is surrounded by really good lookin' guys.
ReplyDeleteThat's some off-the-charts sarcasm I'm detecting.
ReplyDelete*grumbling to myself* "How does no and shit fit together?".
ReplyDeletei really enjoyed reading it. thanks
ReplyDeleteChekov, Horace- Rule your mind
Exercise and Weight Loss, Cleansing
Andy-Malcolm-level suckitude: The LA Times keeps Der Pantscheissloader and dumps you.
ReplyDeleteOr ship the punters a punter. . .
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of monogrammed team jerseys. . .
ReplyDeleteThat is precious. Although it's really just the same schtick the real papers use, though they're less obvious about it; they're always deliberately ignoring their own contribution to the ludicrous state of political discourse in the U.S.
ReplyDeleteHeisenberg is giggling somewhere.
Are you sure? I'm uncertain. Must be the principle of the thing,
ReplyDeleteGeorge W. Bush valiantly wrestled a Segway AND a pretzel, all within 8 years.
ReplyDeleteJust tell me: were the Koch Brothers and Jonah the Whale dressed as crocodiles with red capes in your dreamworld?
ReplyDeleteAnd fought both to a draw, if I remember correctly.
ReplyDeleteAdd that to the lengthy list of Obama disappointments.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to imagine Obama doing something that wouldn't provide Andrew Malcolm with an addition to his list.
Conquering Russia?
Switching parties?
Resignation?
Suicide?
Nah, not even those. If Obama did any or all of those things Malcolm's response would be either "What took him so long?", or "Sure, but he really didn't MEAN it".
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's pretty funny when the "both sides are equally extreme" moderates dismiss all the right-wing dipshittery about Obama because liberals were supposedly the same way about Bush. Uh, no we weren't. Bush actually did start an expensive and destructive war based on lies, etc., etc. Nobody was questioning Bush's citizenship or his eligibility to hold office, and questioning the outcome of the 2000 election in Florida isn't anywhere near the same level as birtherism, because a) it's not racist as shit, and b) reasons 2 through 500.
ReplyDeleteNot jail--just a couple of years cleaning Shroedinger's cat box.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I would never have known that column wasn't written by Glenn Greenwald.
ReplyDeleteAnd Keanu Reeves is on his right! Whoa!
ReplyDeleteThe 18th and 19th century presidents were practically hippies. They only wore natural fiber clothes, used almost no fossil fuels, and ate organic food. Grant drank only artisanal organic small-batch whiskeys that today's hipsters with their ironic 19th century facial hair would envy. If they needed to go somewhere they walked or rode a horse. Hippies!
ReplyDeleteExcept Grover Cleveland, who was essentially the Chris Christie of his day.
Because you have a problem with reading comprehension?
ReplyDeleteIt's OK to admit it. That's the first step to improving! :)
If Malcolm claims to be ignorant of something he's writing about, well. it's hard to argue with him.
ReplyDeleteThey're like that in the REAL world, already. Now imagine how bad my nightmares are.
ReplyDeleteI hate doing that - if I look away and back again, there may or may not be more cat shit in it.
ReplyDeleteDude, I'm late to the party, but that's obvs. Alex.
ReplyDelete