Obama addresses the Rev. Wright controversy, hither and yon:

And I don’t recall one of these silly media feeding frenzies handled quite so deftly - using the stupid tabloid attention as an opportunity to raise the tone of debate; score some substantive points against his real political opponents (not HRC); and, oh btw, make one’s self look good in the process. I don’t know if Obama gets advice on how to handle this stuff - and if he does, he gets very good advice. In any case, he’s scary good. He can win this thing.

And he should win this thing. We face challenges in the coming years - nothing unprecedented, nothing which can’t be handled, but challenges of the sort that come around every few decades or so - and I think these are the sort of situations which require more than the capable, technocratic, managerial solutions which worked in the 90’s (and which might have averted the present circumstances had it continued through the ’00’s, but never mind). We face environmental crises which, if unchecked, will be far worse than the Dust Bowl (although we are also much more capable of dealing with these problems than we were 75 years ago.) We’ve got economic problems whose depths have not been sounded, we’ve got a ‘war’ with no particular objective we need to extricate ourselves from, we’ve got structural inadequacies in health care and other areas of domestic policy where we lag behind the rest of the developed world, and we’ve still - two decades on - not adjusted our military/foreign policy stance to the post-Cold War environment. The preferred responses to these problems, judging by various old and new media outlets, is to offer ever more preposterous explanations of why the facts in front of your face are neither facts nor anywhere near your face; or to try to pull the most bershon face this side of Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club and sigh that everything’s been going to hell since Hadrian built that foolish wall or whatever. The better response is not blind obedience to Dear Leader Barack Obama, but it is a situation which requires leadership, leadership of the sort which sets a clear direction and does not merely react to the media feeding frenzy de jour*. I’d prefer if Obama was more willing to take difficult, Doddlike stands as a Congressman, but I’d prefer if I was 6′6″ with a silky fadeaway jumpshot. Obama shows more potential than I in both departments. The bastard.

And now, I will use this moment of national coming-together to help John Cole understand the world in which we live. Innocent as a babe newborn, he asks:

McQ can’t be that stupid. He really can’t. He was in the military for years and handled heavy weaponry, so I hope to God he really is not that stupid.

No, John, he’s not that stupid. When you respond to wingnuttery of this sort, you are not responding to sincerely-held beliefs. You see, when the wingnut feels threatened, it excretes a foul substance which forms a protective layer of disingenuous stupidity designed to deflect dissonant facts and beliefs which could damage the wingnut’s tender underbelly of pure stupid. In order to harden this protective layer into an impervious carapace of ignorance, the wingnut needs to come to believe this tactically-held nonsense - needs to incorporate this protective layer into its body of stupid beliefs by making itself believe them for real. But then, of course, if this carapace is threatened, it too will have to be protected by a layer of disingenuous stupidity, and so on and so on until you start writing books called Liberal Fascism. It is very similar to the process by which an oyster creates a pearl, except that instead of being ‘beautiful’ it is ‘fucking stupid’, and instead of being ‘worth money’ it’s ‘fucking embarrassingly stupid’, and scallops don’t run the country and get treated as very serious people whose every rancid effluence is a noble contribution to political discourse. Indeed, in the course of my study I have identified 15 distinct types of stupid and pantomime stupid which make up the Wingnut Ego Defense Superstructure, and I’d love to talk some more about them, but I have to go rub habanero juice in my paper cuts.

Also? It’s “Confederate Wankee”. I’m here to help. And here are the different area codes where Ludacris has ‘hoes’.

* Unless, obviously, that media feeding frenzy involves $5500/hr hookers. Inquiring minds want to know.

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