The Lesson's in There Somewhere

Macho, macho man... I drink the beer of a macho man.

(HuffPo)

"Beer won't cool the fury of those who can't accept the reality that America's racial profile will no longer reflect their own."

— Frank Rich, NYTimes

Read more at the NYTimes

While that's a great point, here's the Pièce de résistance: "Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates: Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism."

"Sometimes the most revealing expressions of this resentment emerge in juvenile asides — Bill Kristol (on The Weekly Standard’s blog) ridiculing Gates for writing a flowery travel magazine article about his privileged vacation home of Martha's Vineyard, or Heather MacDonald (in National Review) mocking Gates as a 'limousine liberal' for his supposedly hypocritical admission that he has a 'regular car service' and a 'regular driver' to fetch him at the airport. Who does Henry Louis Gates Jr. think he is, William F. Buckley Jr.?"

More confounding to Americans than race is the teachable moment on class. The inner hope of so many of us to make it big on American Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and YouTube... or whatever the modern equivalent for your particular ship coming in suddenly, if not unaccountably... it's a guilty pleasure that obliterates our sympathy for those who are unaccountably trampled in the ruthlessly Darwinist race to be voted the favorite.

Even those with little hope of ever making it are resentful of those who cry foul, and the haves use this enter-class hostility to their advantage againt the have-nots.

Read more Frink Rich at the NYTimes

Imagine the Brouhaha...

...if Obama had picked the micro-brew and the cop had taken the Budweiser.

Lites... Camera... Action? Not so much.

(HuffPo)

"The White House meeting drew such media interest that press secretary Robert Gibbs said he looked forward to facing no more questions about what beers each man would drink. For the record, it was Bud Light for Obama, Sam Adams Light for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley and nonalcoholic Buckler for Biden."

— Ben Feller, AP

Read More.

Instead, Obama was stuck choking down dishwater mixed with rubbing alcohol, just to avoid the Dijon mustard backlash from the arugula-phobes on the right.

If Obama had ordered a faux-Belgian brew with an orange slice on the side, he would have been pilloried on the right by the anti-endive police and the Chablis-and-brie-conspiracy crazies.

"Hopefully, instead of ginning up anger and hyperbole everybody can just spend a little bit of time with some self-reflection and recognizing that other people have different points of view."

I would have expected Biden to go with vodka on the rocks, and I wonder if he doesn't drink or if the event planners hope to shift the center of the culture war by throwing in this not-so-obvious pick.

From the Commentariat:

"Bottom line to me is, Obama should have kept his opinion (which was all it was as he had no facts) to himself and should realize that the POTUS does not need to involve himself in a low level city problem."

— zipowitz

The POTUS does not need to involve himself in a low level city problem?

Tell that to Terri Schiavo, who got an act of the Republican congress and the GOP president's opinion all up in her business.

A GOP butt-in-ski is perfectly fine for the FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge echo-network when a wedge issue is just what is needed to get their guy reelected, but Obama's out of line for answering the question when he's asked about a friend to whom he had just spoken.

I see.

Obama was wrong for distracting the press from the healthcare debate, which he arguably may have intended to do, since negotiations were falling apart.

Read More.

Obama "Unfocused"

When race relations are easier to talk about than healthcare reform, we have a really big problem.

Change... the subject?

(HuffPo)

"When you get Stephanopoulos, Huffington, Will, Brazil, and Krugman to agree on the high-holy conservative talkRadio trope that Obama, of all people, was unfocused, something went seriously wrong."

— RaptureAlready!

See more.

Anyone who saw the first 3/4 of Wednesdays infamous healthcare press conference would have come away informed, but if you stayed to the end, you would have forgotten all of that.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart: 50 minutes of healthcare policy... 30 seconds of racial controversy... I wonder what the media will lead with tomorrow?

It may be that healthcare reform was never really possible in the first place, and if it fails this time, Gates-gate will be the historical moment we will point to and blame, saying that it happened then and there, where healthcare reform went off the rails. That the Senate announced the following day that Obama's legislative deadline is dead says a lot about how blurry his point got that night.

Here's what we SHOULD be talking about.



It's not that Obama didn't make a great case Wednesday night, but he should have known the press would ditch healthcare's imperative in favor of a racist scandal.

More cynical voices say that's a perfectly obvious outcome, that it's hard to ignore their notion that Obama may have intended it. They have a point.

Watch This Week with George.