Dumb and Dumbererere

Kenneth P. Vogel — keep that name on the tip of your tongue, Bad Tabloid Hall of Fame jurists! — has managed to create a post today that ought to win whatever the journalistic equivalent of the Darwin Award is, or whatever the tabloid equivalent of the Raspberry Awards might be.

It is seldom that a hack writer approaches that most sublime peak of “oh dear ghod!” mediocrity and a moment ought be taken in the annals of journalism (or with just the ONE ‘n’ in the spelling of that first word) to pay our deepest respects to what Mr. Vogel has done gone and went and did.

From that BASTION of intelligent political reportage and NOT the grasping scandal sheet slash website out of Washington DeeCee that jealously tries to get the scoop on every news cycle, whether caught embarassingly or not. I’m speaking, of course, of POLITICO:

Roman Polanski backers gave $34K to Barack Obama, DNC

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 10/7/09 5:04 PM EDT

PHOTOGRAPH

Roman Polanski look at camera. [sic]
Roman Polanski was arrested late last month by Swiss authorities. | AP

Roman Polanski backers gave $34K to Barack Obama, DNC

Movie industry types calling for the release of director Roman Polanski last year gave $34,000 to Obama’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party, FEC records show.

Polanski’s arrest late last month by Swiss authorities in connection with a three-decade-old California underage sex case has sparked a vigorous national debate about sex, justice and extradition that – thus far – has yet to draw in the Obama administration.

But the most generous Democratic donor of the vocal pro-Polanski contingent, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, in an open letter called on “every US filmmaker to lobby against any move to bring Polanski back to the US, where he could face life in jail.”

Weinstein last year gave $28,500 to the DNC and its White House Victory Fund, though he didn’t contribute directly to Obama. In fact, he has been a big supporter of Obama’s presidential rival-turned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose campaigns and committees have received $88,000 from Weinstein over the years.

Meanwhile, among the signatories of a movie-industry petition calling for “the immediate release of Roman Polanski,” were a half-dozen Obama supporters who gave $15,500 to his presidential campaign:

Ariel Dorfman: $4,100

Martin Scorsese: $3,300

Larry Levine: $2,500

Darren Aronofsky: $2,300

Brett Ratner: $2,300

Richard Pena: $1,000

The petition, circulated by a French film group, isn’t explicitly addressed to the U.S. government, but it does single out a function for “French artists and intellectuals” at the U.S. Embassy in France at which an embassy official spoke “in perfect French” about “the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.”

“If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski,” the petition reads.

Seriously.

I mean this is some kind of crazy soup, utilizing, as it does, the transitive function of the bat shit crazy form of logickifyication.

“See? It doesn’t leave a mark! I’ll show you again!”

Here’s a much more plausible formulation: 92% of all hospital patients die within hours of eating some form of hospital food.

Or, perhaps this one: both horses and horse flies come from the horse latitudes.

Or, I don’t know, Richard Nixon raped Shirley Temple while Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson held her down.

That last one is not only absurd, but it’s vicious.

And I retract the sentiment, but hope that you “got” the algebra of the example.  It’s that favorite of Smearland, the Sillygism. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore, all men are Socrates.

So ham-handed a smear that I would only ask you to note that the amounts listed, in all instances, are trifling in a modern presidential campaign. It is only because “all men are Socrates” that somehow Obama equals Roman Polanski in this weird, ought-to-be-award-winning tale from Vogel, who must have wanted to please his masters terribly, and, rather terribly pleased his masters.

But, we always have the lackluster prose of the left to smite and shame the hapless Vogel. Alas.

The Plum LineGreg Sargent’s blog
DNC Rips Politico Story Tying Polanski To Obama: “Silly,” “Amateur Hour”

In another sign of the Obama operation’s zeal for playing rough with the media, the Democratic National Committee is taking an unusually hard shot at Politico for posting a much-criticized story today linking Roman Polanski with Obama and the DNC.

“This story is just lowbrow, and it’s amateur hour,” DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse told me. “It’s one of the silliest stories that I’ve ever seen.”

The story, titled “Roman Polanski backers Gave $34K To Barack Obama, DNC,” reported that Hollywood types urging Polanski’s release shelled out that amount to the DNC and to Obama’s presidential campaign. It took a beating in the blogosphere for concocting a link between Polanski and Dems that seemed almost comically tenuous.

I’d heard people at the DNC were mightily ticked by the story. When I checked in, Woodhouse uncorked an unusually harsh tirade — the sort the DNC normally reserves for unabashedly ideological right wing outlets.

“You could find a certain number of [our donors] who believe in Scientology,” Woodhouse fumed. “You could find a certain number who are even Redskins fans.”

The rest of the responses just seem so damned, well, EARNEST.

But you don’t carefully deconstruct a moose shit soufflé. You FLING it artfully into the nearest trash receptacle in which its foul stench won’t waft about and alarm the neighbors.

Whatever happened to the adults?

Wherever did they go?

Courage.

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UPDATE: Gee, I wonder what Vogel is going to do with Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize?

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