Nothing Funny About Obama, and Yet Even Maureen Dowd is Goofing on Teleprompter Jesus

I'm linking Dowd mostly as an excuse to run that awesome p-shop.

Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.

And that's about it. More worthy your time is Tucker Carlson's beat-down of one of the men claiming there's nothing at all funny about Obama, Jon Stewart.

No one this earnest can remain an effective satirist, and at times Stewart seems like less a comedian than a courtier to the establishment. In August 2004, a week before the Republican convention, Stewart got an interview with then-candidate John Kerry. At the time, reporters covering Kerry couldn’t get closer than the rope line, so the interview qualified as a booking coup.

Stewart squandered it embarrassingly. His first question (after, “How are you holding up?”) was: “Is it a difficult thing not to take it personally” when your opponents are mean?

“You know what it is, Jon?” Kerry replied. “It’s disappointing.”

Four years later, Stewart had become, if anything, even softer. Over the course of a reverential eight-and-a-half minute interview with Barack Obama six days before the election, Stewart failed to ask a single substantive question, much less venture into policy (though, as with Kerry, he did open with, “How are you holding up?”). Instead, like the cable-news morons that he often criticizes, Stewart stuck strictly to the horserace, at one point even resorting to a sports metaphor.

And he sucked up, hard. “So much of this has been about fear of you,” Stewart empathized. “Has any of this fear stuff stuck with the electorate?”

Facing puffballs like this, Obama coasted through with snippets from his stump speech. The result wasn’t simply uninformative, it was boring. Obama didn’t say a single interesting thing, and Stewart wasn’t funny.

If you didn’t actually see the show, you wouldn’t know any of this, since there is a virtual ban on critical stories about Jon Stewart in the press. Nobody in memory has received a longer free ride. (CNBC stands in such awe of Stewart, the network hasn’t even tried to defend itself, even against his claim that its programming might be criminal.)

The relationship between Stewart and the media is a marriage of the self-loathing and the self-loving: He insists their real news is fake, they insist his fake news is real. He doesn't take them seriously at all. They take him way too seriously. But nobody takes anybody as seriously as Jon Stewart takes himself.

Regarding the photoshop: Slublog provided the skillz, but it was DrewM.'s idea. Coolest thing is that the words on the TelePromptHead can be changed with little difficulty.

Links via Hot Air's headlines.

Another Teleprompter Gaffe: This one started first as Irish PM Cowen's gaffe, so I don't think we can nail Obama too hard on it. Except that his technical guys screwed up and gave Cowen the wrong teleprompter script.

But oh, Obama's might teleprompter-related gaffes are coming, as sure as the sun will rise and the moon will fatten.

Actually... This account makes it more embarrassing for Obama.

After only a few short weeks, the use of the Obama teleprompter is beginning to expose Obama's incapacity to function properly without one.

Just yesterday, during a St. Patrick's Day event with the Irish prime minister, Obama's guest accidentally repeated teleprompter remarks that Obama had just delivered.

Next, trying to regain control of the situation, Obama interjected - but referred to the teleprompter for his lines. By this point the words on the teleprompter were those meant to be delivered by the Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, and as a result, President Barack Obama thanked himself for inviting everyone to the party.

posted by Ace at 12:57 PM

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