Oliver points out some real stupidity from Howard Fineman:
I realize it’s Super Bowl weekend and Fineman’s looking for a hook. But this one trying to put President Obama and Steelers coach Mike Tomlin in the same boat is ridiculous. God bless Mike Tomlin’s accomplishments on the football field, but he’s the head coach of a football team. He’s part of the entertainment industry.
Barack Obama is president of the United States. It’s not an entertainment job. Yeah, they’re both black. But then so are a lot of people in America.
At any rate, as a sign of how much things have changed, Tomlin last night was asked after the game what it meant that reporters all week had been making a big deal about his age, never mentioned that he was African-American (and I paraphrase):
“That is good, because I’ll keep getting older, but I’ll always be black.”
And, if history is any indication, he will be coach of the Steelers until he no longer wants the job.
Josh Hueco
So how long before the first wingtard claims the officials gave it to the Steelers out of affirmative action/deference to President ‘The One’ Obama?
Conservatively Liberal
@Josh Hueco:
You know it has already happened, we just have to find who posted it first…lol ;)
Ugh
That game was awesome. I just wish Warner had gotten the ball out to see if Fitzgerald could out-jump 8 guys for the win.
headpan
Good lord, we are going to have to listen to this garbage for the next 4 years? Every little frikkin thing is going to be some kind of statement about race because we have a president who just so happens to be half-black?
(head / desk / pound)
How about drawing some Obama comparisons to white people some time, considering he is half white?
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Josh Hueco: That reminds me, I meant to use the Search Wingnuttia function last night. Cover me, I’m goin’ in!
lilly Von Schtupp
I do not follow football, except on the day of the Super Bowl and when my home team (Seattle) is in any big game, but I was amazed at his age. That’s young, no? And to win a Super Bowl no less!
My husband, who is from Cleve-Land, had a hard time last night. He just could not believe the last minutes of the game. Great game!
kommrade reproductive vigor
Hmm. I made it to the second page of results before my HazMat suit started to melt but so far nothin’. Stalkin’ Malkin and some assorted asshats are whingeing because Obama dared to have a Super Bowl party while KY is under a layer of ice. (Go ahead fuckers, equate this with Katrina, I dare you.)
But I did come across this on AT:
Mine is, everything you say and think is bassakwards.
Napoleon
Fineman’s comments would be stupid even if Tomlin was the first winning black Super Bowl coach, but he is not even that.
I do find in interesting that he is actually younger then some of the players though.
colleeniem
I couldn’t get over the fact last night (since I didn’t have much of a dog in the fight) that the (winning!) head coach of a superbowl team was/is younger than the opposing quarterback. Of course that is the story.
Unreal.
Josh Hueco
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Yeah, some asshat troll said something to that effect during the open game thread last night ("Obama doze, people froze").
One of the most disingenuous and dumbest wingtard talking points (something that got put on Drudge) during Katrina was that there were empty school buses that could have been used to evacuate people from New Orleans but weren’t, and therefore it’s the fault of Democraps like Landrieu and Nagin that the city drowned, instead of the negligence of the Bush admin (think the levies and FEMA).
Somehow, when it comes to ice storms in Kentucky, I don’t think we’ll hear from our friends across the aisle about how local peoples should take care of themselves during a disaster instead of looking for help from the feds.
Napoleon
@Josh Hueco:
And are the two events even remotely comparable? We had a storm like that in Cleveland maybe 10ish years ago with some people not having power for 3 or more days and it never occured to me that it was the type of thing that was two big for the locals to handle.
kid bitzer
“That is good, because I’ll keep getting older, but I’ll always be black.”
that’s some funny shit, and good for him for saying it.
Conservatively Liberal
OT: Wall Street dick licker Chucky Gasparino (CNBC) was on Washington Journal a few ago. The last caller ripped into his ass with Chucky trying to cut the guy off to rebut him. After the guy hung up, the WJ host asked Chucky for any final comments.
From my memory but pretty damn accurate, using these words, Chucky said: "People are upset about executive pay but they need to suck it up. Populism only gets you so far."
Talk about out of touch with reality. Fuck Wall Street and their cronies.
TheFountainHead
My boss just brought a dutch oven full of cornbread and a Fatty he made yesterday…some days, it’s hard not to love my job…
Mazacote Yorquest
Anybody else think it was weird how Rooney didn’t mention the Cardinals at all? Couldn’t help but wonder if there was some bad blood there.
As for affirmative action, the wingnuts are right: the end zone was painted with a special curve so that Holmes could get his feet down. No white Christian would have been allowed to catch that pass.
Laura W
Shallow Thought:
Debates, Primaries, Election Day, Inauguration Day, Super Bowl Sunday have all come and gone.
What is going to be the new juicy carrot that will inspire this collective to plod on into future days? (Besides the Top Chef Finale.)
(Please don’t answer "Hating on the Republicans".)
cleek
i kept wondering how the guy from House finds time to re-do the same show every week, while coaching a football team.
Josh Hueco
@cleek:
Or be on Top Chef. :)
@Laura W:
Clamoring for photos of Tunch for proof that John’s been putting him on a diet?
Laura W
@Josh Hueco: I love it when I LOL before 10am EST.
Twice, even!
Good show.
Original Lee
About executive bonuses:
I was going to ask if it was true that the number being booted around for bonuses paid was for all bonuses or only executive bonuses, but then I realized that this was the MSM we were talking about, so of course they grabbed the biggest number they could find, regardless of relevance.
Thing is, my retired-stockbroker grandmother told me that most of the lower-level employees at places like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros. get paid a base salary of around $80K and the rest is "bonuses," for making a certain number of sales, for meeting quota, etc. etc. If you do the bare minimum part of your job, you therefore earn $80K, but the more you hustle, the more you make. So she thinks it’s OK that the peons got their bonuses. She just wants to make sure that management and executives do not get their bonuses, because they are the ones who made the bad decisions that tanked the economy.
Is Grandma right?
Dave
@Laura W:
Easy. Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training this weekend.
SGEW
Actually, I was thinking about this on "Super Duper Ultra Mega Tuesday"*: would (googles for the name) Tony Dungy’s success help Obama’s candidacy? In that Dungy’s success may have helped acclimate certain voters** to the idea of a dark skinned man in a position of great power, obviously qualified for the job, who even racists had to wind up supporting (sports exuberance > racial animosity)***.
So, yeah. I understand where Fineman is trying to go with his premise . . . he’s just really, really stretching this one. There isn’t a real equivalence between a football coach (or a television personality or a musician or an athlete or an actor or ad nauseum) and the god damned President of the United States, of course. But there may be a great deal of resonance in the (inferred) minds of (hypothetical) "average" voters.
(Or this may just be my egregious elitism talking again. I dunno.)
Also:
Populism can get your back up against the wall, motherfucker, staring down the barrel of a gun. That’s how far it can get him, and he knows it.
*Wow that feels like a long time ago.
**I.e., "Hard working white Americans." See, also, "bitters."
***Robinson and all the other groundbreakers too, of course, but they were the athletes (with a "noble athleticism" (gag)), and not the men in charge of the team.
SGEW
@Josh Hueco: I only come here for the latest Tunch gossip anyway.
DougJ
I didn’t read what Willis said about this yet, but it does seem to me that what’s important about Obama or Tomlin of Dungy from a racial perspective is not about what either has accomplished (are we really to believe that black people just weren’t accomplishing anything til recently?) but about how it affects the way that African-Americans are viewed in our society. And in that way the effect of Tomlin and Dungy is, while nowhere near as important as the effect of Obama, not completely negligible.
That said, it’s pretty dumb to directly compare Tomlin to Obama, as Fineman did.
DrDave
Dan Rooney, like his father before him, is a class act, and a dying breed among the NFL "Old Guard." If I wasn’t a Giants fan (the Mara’s are in the same category of owner as the Rooney’s, IMHO), I would be a Steelers fan.
Congratulations John and enjoy it. It was another great SB, even if it did take years off your life. (We watched the Giants’ last drive during the immediate post game commercials; I still have it on my DVR. The Jints did the same thing to me last year.)
norbizness
Were Bill Cowher’s and Sergeant Slaughter’s chins separated at birth?
Laura W
@Dave:
You know, I was going to throw that in, actually, but I have a vague (mis?)memory of John indicating ambivalence toward baseball.
If this is the case, you will need to flood his email inbox with A LOT of spam, clamoring for your open thread.
Good luck with that.
4tehlulz
HAHA Suck on this Jim DeMint
demimondian
@Original Lee: Well, Grandma is somewhat right. Yes, sales ‘incentives’ play an important part of ‘brokers’ salaries. Yes, that’s just a nice words for bonus. Yes, that’s essential — brokers are payed to sell things, not to provide customers with the services that they actually need.
That said, (a) $80K/year for a job which takes no special skills is pretty good pay, and (b) it’s a sign of the broken structure of brokerages that selling financial instruments to retail customers is what the business is based on. Do you think that the clowns who fill the boiler rooms actually tell people about the risks they’re taking? Yeah, me neither.
demimondian
@Laura W: For some reason, I imagine that a discussion about ptichers and catchers here on BJ might not cover baseball…
Reverend Dennis
Peons make only $80K? They should become public school teachers. That’s where the real money is.
Zifnab
God bless America, where it matters less whether you are black or white, young or old, male or female and matters much more whether you can win.
headpan
Congrats, John. Here’s something for ya. I think I see a Guesly in there – love the way he takes off with the ref in the end.
Napoleon
@SGEW:
Actually I think there is much to what you say, but I would take it back much farther, maybe all the way to the Teuskeee Airman and continuing through many other people over the years. Take me for example, when I was young (under 10) one of my favorate TV shows was Julia, with Diahann Carroll, partly because her son on the show was about my age, and I was curious about other families with kids like me. And I thought Diahann was pretty.
But that is only one of many positive examples of black people that you really didn’t see until the 60’s that I think slowly but certainly had an impact, whether Brian Song, Glory, Hank Arons, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, etc.
Someone 20 years older then me (in there mid to later 60’s) would have lived their first 20 years with little in the way of positive examples of black people, unless it was from their own lives.
Did I vote for Obama because I watched Julia, of course not, that is silly. Was I open to viewing black people as just people because of it, unlike an earlier generation who maybe were never given such examples? Maybe, and I think when you look at the break down of what age groups were less likely to vote for Obama his biggest problems start with those a little older then me.
Skullduggery
@Original Lee: I’m not sure how compensation works for lower level employees, but Sen. McCaskill’s proposal that John posted about recently deals with bonuses for executives.
Laura W
@demimondian: Had I read this when you posted it, I could claim 3 LOLs before 10am EST.
Heck – I’m still counting it. Bodes well for my day in general when I start out laughing instead of swearing at cable bobble heads and stepping in cat yak.
Chinn Romney
I thought the Lord was on Kurt Warner’s side? Why did he suddenly dump Kurt and dispense his favors on this Santonio Holmes person? Very fickle. Worse, very suspicious. It’s almost as if the Good Lord had a wager on the game or something. He was certainly pushing those pawns in pinstripes around with reckless abandon.
Original Lee
@SkulLduggery:
That’s what I get for not reading the Saturday threads first.
Shorter executive pay thread: If your company tanked and took TARP money, nobody should bet a bonus. (Which is actually my opinion, but Grandma has all the stockbrokerage experience, not me.)
Dave
@Laura W:
I think John’s ambivalence has a lot to do with the fact that the Pirates are a lousy baseball team…
Nikki
Wow…black men as President of the US, Chairman of the RNC, winning coach of the Super Bowl…isn’t this a sign of the apocalypse?
Bubblegum Tate
I’m wondering if/when wingnuts are gonna whine about "Dan Rooney politicized the Super Bowl!" because Rooney mentioned Obama in his post-game interview.
SGEW
Yeah, but the thing is: all these cats were not in charge. Ok, maybe Bill on his tv show (but it was a tv show, natch), but the rest of them were either in positions of subordination (I mean, Glory fer cryin’ out loud) or, at best, parity with their white counterparts. Never the boss, dig?
A Super Bowl winning coach, on the other hand, is definitely a guy who’s in charge, who can legitimately order other guys around, and who has to be given deference due to his qualifications and achievements.
. . .
Now if only we could get these guys to accept a woman in a position of power . . . then we could really get some progress goin’ on in here.
Z
As long as the Obama/Tomlin linkage gave rise to this T-shirt, it’s cool with me: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/08351/935360-66.stm
R-Jud
@SGEW:
I heard that he is dating one of the Olsen twins. ZOMG.
Jay
Yeah, Tomlin is amazing. How he finds time to head coach an NFL team and act on that show House I’ll never know.
headpan
Laura W: Welcome to my world!
headpan
John, I started putting my 3 on a Nutro "Lite" — next time they went to the vet, they averaged a loss of 2 lbs. per cat! I loves me some fat cat, don’t get me wrong, but my girls were getting older so I started to get a little concerned about the weight thing. They’re saggy, but healthier.
jerry 101
This morning the talking heads couldn’t wait to talk about how historic it was that Tomlin was the Second Black coach to win the Super Bowl.
What?
Since when is being second all that historical? Tomlin’s historical achievement was winning a Super Bowl. Not being the second black guy to win a Super Bowl.
God, the network talking heads are such douchebags.
As far as Obama vs. Tomlin and entertainment, haven’t you paid attention to the Villagers?
The Presidency and national politics ARE entertainment to them. They could give a flying fuck about the results, they’re just in it for the entertainment value.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
On a related note:
Senator Franco? (if this is true, get ready for lots of "Immaculate Election" comments)
Ed Drone
Well, since there are people in this world who claim that Obama is "insufficiently" black, and thus "chose to be black," the old standby "one drop of negro blood" measure is now moot.
It used to be that American racists insisted that anyone with "one drop" of African blood was a "black" (pronounced, "nigger"). But now, unless you can show a preponderance of African blood, you’re not "really" black.
Thus, Obama is NOT the first black president, and Tomlin himself may no longer be sufficiently black, and instead is simply one in a long line of outstanding NFL coaches.
Welcome to "post-racial" America!
Ed
SGEW
"My president is black, in fact he’s half-white
So even in a racist mind, he’s half right."
– Jay-Z
Bubblegum Tate
Big Hollywood is on the case:
L. Ron Obama
@R-Jud:
FIXT
Blogging in the Wind
That’s what Mike Shannahan and Denver fans thought!
Thoughtcrime
There was another come from behind Steele( R ) victory this last week by someone who is an entertainer, and will always be black (sort of). I don’t think the GOP will let him head the RNC as long as he wants it though.