Idiot of the Week #7 ~ Elizabeth Hasselbeck

Somehow Elizabeth Hasselbeck manages to compare Jeremiah Wright's occasionally fiery orations from the pulpit to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before moving on to people. Even before she went there (and nobody could figure out where there was, including Elizabeth herself) four minutes into the segment, she criticized Obama for not distancing himself more from Pastor Wright, while pretending that Republicans like John McCain don't cozy-up to preachers with less than mainstream views. Apparently she wasn't paying attention when McCain recently embraced the likes of John Hagee and Rod Parsley (Hey, Elizabeth, here's their words of wisdom), two wingnuts who make a lot less sense than Jeremiah Wright, yet McCain remains "proud" to have their support.

Later on in that episode of The View, perkily dim Elizabeth mimicked the Fox & Friends idiots, who can't wrap their simple minds around what Obama meant when he used the innocuous phrase "typical white person." Elizabeth thinks that she does not see race. (She also thinks she wouldn't be intimidated running into a gathering of black boys on a city sidewalk, yeah, right.) She doesn't comprehend that, whatever one thinks of Wright's more inflammatory statements, there is a big difference between black "racism" (i.e. anger) in the face of centuries of oppression and white racism in the face of centuries of oppressing. (Joy Behar tries, unsuccessfully, to illuminate the distinction.) Of course black people, like white people, can be guilty of misplaced racial anger and hatred. There are black wingnuts just as there are white wingnuts. But to focus on Wright's and, by association, Obama's alleged racism is to ignore true racism, the dark elephant in the room that Obama eloquently and honestly took on. Elizabeth and her ilk think they are "opening" up the discussion by throwing back accusations, when actually they're closing it down because they can't tolerate a "typical black person's" unfamiliar anger at them. So instead of thinking about where that anger might come from, they, like Barbara Bush, who didn't want to waste her beautiful mind thinking about the ugly consequences of war, prefer to keep their beautiful minds in a beautiful white place. The issue of race becomes about us, the beautiful white people, not them, those loud, pissed-off black folks.

Meanwhile, keep a close watch on Obama's lunch. It may contain white bread, and who knows where that could lead?

Idiot(s) of the Week # 6 ~ FOX & Friends

It's no secret that FOX news is chock full of idiots, but this week's prize goes to the reptilian Steve Doocy and the stunningly bimboesque Gretchen Carlson. (Looking at Carlson's bio, I learned she was "the first classical violinist to be crowned Miss America." If only she'd stuck to the violin instead of attempting lucid debate.) So, after Barack Obama gave his eloquent and honest speech on race in the aftermath of the Pastor Wright controversy, what did FOX & Friends choose to focus on? Obama's reference to his grandmother as "a typical white person." "It's a huge problem!" Gretchen screams, before later saying, hilariously, that she's trying to talk about race "deep down."

Somehow "typical white person" was construed as "making a gross generalization about a whole group of society." Never mind that Obama's intention was merely to point out that, like most people, his grandmother was a product of her times, and her viewpoints reflected that. It was in no way white-bashing (he is white, after all, as well as black) or an attempt to evade Pastor Wright's words. (His message being that, like his grandmother, Pastor Wright was a product of his times.) But, instead of discussing the substance of his speech, they talked about how offensive these three words were to the poor white people. (The general drift being that all those angry black people in their weird, angry black churches are the true racists.) Only Brian Kilmeade brought some measure of intelligence to the proceedings; at least he was able to actually interpret Obama's unambiguous words, though his attempts to explain them to his numb-skulled colleagues were unsuccessful.

I didn't have the joy of watching the entire morning of deep discussion at FOX & Friends, but Chris Wallace saw enough of it to take the idiots publicly to task for their "two hours of Obama bashing." You know that a high level of idiocy must be achieved before a FOX anchor slaps his own for deliberate distortions. Expect more and more distortions and typical (to repeat that offensive word) bias from FOX as the November election approaches. At the end of his scolding, Wallace correctly points out that it is the media who likes to deflect from the real issues at hand, not Obama. While FOX & Friends were debating Obama's grandma ad nauseam, Obama had gone on to make major policy speeches on Iraq and the economy which, not surprisingly, were barely covered at all. And FOX isn't the only network to blame. Whenever a candidate tries to say something of substance, the media finds something insubstantial to dwell on so the election becomes an empty horse race, or in the case of FOX news, an unsubtle propaganda campaign aimed towards scaring the electorate into voting for the candidate of FOX's choice.