The Battle of Big Bird, Week 1

Red and blue they clashed into the wee hours of the night: the Big Bird Kerfluffers, kerfuffling the kerfumble.

And it shows no sign of abating. Arrogant boob Dana Milbank confirms the importance of the Big Bird Debate with his typical cluelessness (if Milbank says it’s not important, it’s important, and vice versa; there’s a predictability to arrogance that has a definite ‘weather vane’ quality: whichever way Milbank is pointing, head in the opposite direction, like the old riddle about the liar and truth-teller at the crossroads):

Obama is making a mistake in allowing the discussion to be about Big Bird, which he continued to do on Monday, telling supporters that “Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban” (apparently a botched reference to O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco). His new campaign ad, likewise, has a cute punch line: “Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies, no matter where they nest.”

This cluelessness of the “media elite” continues to baffle me. When you say that something is trivial and a distraction for a week and it keeps going, you are probably full of shit.

Not that anyone has accused our pundit class of the converse, of course. The litany of their willful ignorance and self-blinding is too long to recite here. Suffice it to say that they’ve been — as a class — consistently wrong about the country, the issues and our own history for years. The only reason that they all still hold jobs, that I can surmise, is that each has secured his or her own sinecure with photographs or recordings of their bosses in sexually compromising situations.

Milbank’s conceit is revealed in his headline:

Forget Big Bird. What about the Snuffleupagus in the room?
By Dana Milbank
Published: October 9
The Washington Post

The Obama campaign’s new ad ruffles my feathers.

It’s not the message per se. The Big Bird spot fairly points out that Mitt Romney seems more interested in cracking down on “Sesame Street” than on Wall Street. The problem is President Obama has, to mix animal metaphors, taken the bait — and he’s pursuing a red herring…

It’s one thing to engage in clever word play — I would be the last to decry said practice, obviously — but it’s quite another to be “clever.”

Bein’ smart iz hard!

And that’s what the pundit class has been missing all along: Big Bird is a visceral symbol of what’s wrong with Romney.

But Milbank is so busily working within the confines of his Machiavellian world view that he’s overgaming the issue.

Trust me: I’ve been on these 501(c)4 manipulators and political money launderers demonstrably since 2006, and one vital understanding has emerged: it is INTENTIONALLY complicated, because, if worse comes to worse, and the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard with his buttons and levers, there is so much raw frippery and smoke and mirrors that no electronic media reporters can really tell the tale — BECAUSE IT’S COMPLICATED. And very few print reporters can seem to do it, either. There’s so much “the reader rolls his eyes” stuff that few editors will touch it, and few writers are up to the task of boiling it down to easy to those digest, bite-sized morsels that have supplanted actual thoughtful discourse in the body politic. Tribbles and Bytes.

Breakfast of Chumps

But what Milbank wants to tell us — picking the most impossible word IN Sesame Street to spell, if not intentionally, then reflexively in a most telling manner — is that Obama needs to get FURTHER into the weeds and discard this effective visceral symbol of Big Bird, and spend our time trying to teach the Great Masses how to spell

“Aloysius Snuffleupagus, more commonly known as Mr. Snuffleupagus or Snuffy” ~ Wikipedia

Good luck with that.

Trying to define Mitt Romney is like trying to nail jello to a wall, like trying to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, like misunderestimating George W. Bush, like trying to teach calculus to a baboon or like trying to screw fog. Pick your preferred colloquialism, whichever one you think is slicker than owl shit (or its variant, slicker than snot on a door knob).

But don’t sit on Pundit Mountain, view the valley, and sniff that :

The threat presented by Romney’s budget is not in the few cuts he has specified but in the vastly larger amount of unseen cuts he has yet to identify.

At the Denver debate, Romney said he would eliminate Obamacare (doing so would actually increase the budget deficit, because of related tax hikes) and the public-broadcasting subsidy, which is $445 million a year — or little more than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of federal spending. But Romney proposes to cut federal spending by trillions of dollars — more than $5 trillion over the next decade, assuming he follows the sort of blueprint laid out by his running mate, Paul Ryan. That threatens much more than Muppets and monsters. Human lives are at stake.

Oh, we’re too fucking TRIVIAL for you, Dana? You’re the adult and WE’RE the children?

Give it a fucking break, snob.

the sleep of reason breeds monsters – goya

When you begin an compound argumentative sentence that ends with “or little more than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of federal spending,” you’ve most assuredly lost most readers long before “percent.” The arguments are no longer rational. The GOP is unleashing a Pavlovian advertising attack, and you can pound your calculator all you want, but numbers aren’t going to change the dynamic of the debate.

Big Bird will, and already has.

To dismiss that as childish merely reveals the dismissive party as hebephrenic. (Or, more likely, solipsistic.)

You want to decry “childish”? Here’s some stuff from today to decry, Dana, old top.

The Wall Street Urinal leads the “A” team attack on Big Bird today (while simultaneously pushing the Jack Welch conspiracy theory that the jobs numbers were cooked to make Obama look good). Darryl Issa flies back from campaigning in San Diego to hold a “hearing” on the deaths of a U.S. Ambassador and support personnel in Benghazi, Libya, as naked a corpse-fucking of the recently dead as Vince Foster ever was.

I know you mentioned the Issa schtick (although nobody remembers that Issa was part of the cabal, with Howard Kaloogian and Sal Russo*, that got Gray Davis recalled and Issa was gonna take his place, but Schwarzenegger saw his chance, and grabbed it. Issa is now head of the House Government Services Committee, which pretty much gives him carte blanche to call a HEARING AT ANY TIME OVER ANYTHING WHATSOEVER). And I know that you sniffed that it was bad or something, and it was ALL calculator talk. You know: spelling ‘Snuffleupagus.’

[* Kaloogian and Russo now run the "Tea Party Express."]

used cannon fodder

Or was Mitt Romney’s story about a Navy Seal killed in the same attack, until his outraged mother made him decide to publicly retire the story he was using to bash President Obama with. But he hasn’t stopped his “humanizing” story about the dead kid with cancer that he was so self-describedly wonderful to. Was he? The kid’s long dead, so he can’t talk.

Or cry out, as Mitt molests his memory in the shower stall.

Ta Ta For Now. TTFN as you say, Mr. Milbank.

The Battle of Big Bird still rages across the nation, moving into its eighth day of fighting.