Over at Washington Monthly, Elon Green finds Maureen Dowd going on about the Obama-Brewer supposed confrontation, warning:
The problem is, by Thursday this narrative was already shaky. Mayor Scott Smith, who accompanied Brewer on the tarmac, told Nick Martin that contra Brewer, Obama “simply began talking to the other two elected officials who were there to greet him.”
Then on Friday, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton (who was also on the tarmac) confirmed Smith’s story. Obama not only wasn’t “bristly”, per Dowd, “[h]e wasn’t tense at all.”
Why do I bother pointing this out? Particularly during Presidential campaigns, this nonsense so easily metastasizes into a factoid, Norman Mailer’s term for “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.”
Al Gore is a notorious cautionary tale.
You know I’m with Bob Somerby on the role of the press in the 2000 election. Leaving that aside, though, what’s different here is that this incident/myth clearly helps Obama politically (to the extent that it makes any difference at all). The voters who care about this at all are mostly voters who care a lot about immigration policy. And those voters are mostly immigrants and family of immigrants who like the idea of Obama sticking it to Brewer.
This whole thing is stupid, but I don’t understand why the right wants to play up a mythical event that hurts their own cause. For Obama, it’s better than a “dog whistle” to Latino immigrants that anti-immigrant types can’t hear, because he didn’t even have
to blow a whistle at all. It’s strange that the right likes this story so much.
Update.
Is this about Obama being uppity or about Brewer putting him in his place? I thought it was the former — that Obama was a dick, here, to use Halperin’s terms — but a lot of people seem to think the idea is that Brewer smacked him down.
NobodySpecial
They think Angry Black Person trumps Disrespectful Woman Parts.
rob!
They want to show the n**ger up SO BAD that they celebrate any moment one of their team does it, even if it kills them politically. That’s why so many of them want Newt–because of his perceived ability to stick it to Obama in the debates, even though that’s fantasy as well.
Villago Delenda Est
The only thing the wingtards saw was a little old lady from Rock Ridge telling the Sheriff “up yours, ni*CLANG*!”
How this is seen by others is of no concern. The uppity Mooslim got told off, all that’s important.
On edit: Looks like I owe rob! a refreshing fizzy beverage!
jl
Read the immediate link. Not going to use up a NYT pageview for a Dowd column. But maybe Dowd will try writing columns that are somewhat related to real world and that ‘reality thing’, as opposed to to deranged Village fantasies and gossip. Here’s hoping.
Hill Dweller
They love it because in their minds she humiliated the negro.
I wish Michelle had been there when it went down. Although I suspect Brewer wouldn’t have opened her mouth if the First Lady had accompanied him.
cokane
sweet lord dowd is such a freaking hackjob. the liberal david brooks in terms of work ethic
Zifnab
@NobodySpecial: What gets me is that “Angry” always becomes a negative when labeled on a Democrat, but has proven to be an impeccable virtue when embraced by a Republican.
At this point, are there any Democrats (or Independents for that matter) familiar with Brewer’s Arizona antics that really wouldn’t want to see Obama chew her out? Please. Liberals are as eager for a fight as conservatives, at this point. If Obama had swatted Brewer on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, it would have hit the front page of DKos to the sound of cheers and war whoops.
srv
I don’t understand
Approaching the Wingularity is like approaching the singularity of a black hole. All aspects of time and space make no sense at all.
suzanne
I think they like the idea of someone directly telling him off, to his face, even of (hell, especially if) it’s rude. I mean, they haven’t been allowed to put gun sight symbols on Democrats for A WHOLE YEAR. I mean, whaddya do for fun without that? Govern?!
General Stuck
@rob!:
I was about to say the same thing. The 27 percenters only have one cause right now, and that is stick it to the uppity Kenyan Usurper. They may or may not care about the greater right wing cause, but a white wingnut woman wagging her finger at the first black POTUS, is about as close as they can come to see Obama ordered to the back of the bus by his white massers. Red meat times ten.
And Dowd has become a nattering dingbat gas bag with some deep daddy issuers.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Hill Dweller:
How did she humiliate him though? The pictures all have him shaking his finger at her.
I think it’s about uppity negroes. But why can’t they find an anti-uppity negro story that is less hurtful to their own cause?
Linda Featheringill
Actually, MoDo’s column is interesting and includes this line:
Frankensteinbeck
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
In their fantasy world, all you have to do is stand up to a negro to put them in their place. An inferior race can’t fight back against the white’s natural pride.
It’s more or less like that. Bullies don’t care if their mean jokes are any good. Aggression makes them feel superior.
Kathy in St. Louis
The right plays it up because they hate the guy and HOPE that it makes him look bad. The right played up the First Lady’s wanting us to get our overweight kids off their butts and asking us to stop feeding them junk all day as if she had tried to open a street walker’s school for the our daughters. Why? Because they hate the Obamas. It’s really pretty simple. That’s why it makes so little sense. The right sees everything that Obama does through the prism of race. Therefore, it’s all wrong because, and I think this is a direct quote from Hannity and Gingrich the other day, Obama is uppity. And you know how bad it is when those nigras git uppity.
JGabriel
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
Because a majority now recognize “uppity negro” stories as racist bullshit. There’s no way to orchestrate one or tell it without hurting your own cause when a majority can see you frantically blowing the dog whistle.
.
suzanne
@Kathy in St. Louis:
I’m not sure about that. I think they’d hate him just as much if he was John Edwards or Hillary Clinton or anyone else. They are hyper-competitive to the point of collective insanity. Remember, they hated Bill this much, too.
Linda Featheringill
I think that the Republicans as a whole don’t think it will be necessary to court the Hispanic vote this year. Some of them may realize that at some time in the future it will be needed but think they can safely forget about that in 2012.
Therefore, events that make Obama look good to the Hispanic community are of no consequence.
Arundel
I am with Somerby too, and I am seriously impressed at how he is going about describing and depicting in detail how the viperish media Beltway crowd utterly destroyed Al Gore’s candidacy, based on lies, lies, and more lies. That they treated as truths, and Maureen Dowd is villainess Number One in that fiasco that gave us the GW Bush presidency. Unbelievably catty, silly, trivial shit -“earth tones”- pinned on Gore, his depiction as a serial liar when in fact, he never was.
The press really destroyed Gore out of sheer venal malice, by a thousand cuts. W’s scandals- like the FACT that NO ONE ever saw him SHOW UP for duty during Vietnam, fucking triplicate information that he just skipped out- well, they were glossed over and they roasted Dan Rather on a spit. Never mind that no one has any memory of W showing up for service, the secretary-lady on 60 Minutes said the information on the “forged” documents that destroyed Rather was all basically true. W never showed up for service during Vietnam, even easy peasy domestic National Guard service.
Gore (who I think would’ve made an excellent President) was smeared. With endless lies. And Dowd was Mean Girl In Charge of the smear campaign. I’m far beyond finding her amusing anymore. She feminizes and castrates male Democratic politicians always, in her vapid columns. By comparison, Republicans are the real manly men to her, even if she vaguely criticizes them too. She’s a harpie and kind of a bitch, sorry, and Dowd really can go fuck herself.
Hill Dweller
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: I haven’t seen the pics of Obama wagging his finger at Brewer.
Kathy in St. Louis
@suzanne: I don’t know. I still think that they hate Obama more. Granted the variable in all of this is that the right has gotten a whole lot crazier and a whole lot more vocal since the Clinton era, but when a party is willing to destroy the country in order to destroy a presidency, I’d say that the hate is deeper. But, as I say, it’s kind of hard to tell since they are all certifiable on so many levels.
cmorenc
@General Stuck:
Gail Collins is not just vastly better grounded in facts (instead of village innuendo) than Dowd, but Collins has vastly better wit and humor. Collins is in the same league as Steven Colbert, except she writes straight-forward satire without using the persona of a faux right-wing blowhard to deliver it.
I cannot figure out why the NYT keeps Maureen Dowd around. But neither can I figure out why the Atlantic keeps Mcardle around either. Both publications should be embarrassed to keep such shallow bloviators around on their regular staff.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Frankensteinbeck:
That is a very smart comment.
FlipYrWhig
I thought the point of the story, from a Republican point of view, was that it showed Obama to be (1) “thin-skinned” and (2) bullying but that (3) Brewer wouldn’t take it and sassed him right back.
IOW, “he tried to shut me up, but I wouldn’t take that, so I stood my ground, and then he walked away like a sissy.”
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Hill Dweller:
Yeah, you’re right, I had it wrong in my head.
But he’s not taking her shit in the picture.
eemom
Good Lord, do you seriously fucking LIVE for every word every brain-dead emmessemmbot says about ANYTHING…..no matter how patently petty or ridiculous??
News-fucking-flash: NOBODY besides you is pondering the weighty significance of The Tarmac Incident at this moment, including and especially MoDoTwat herself. She forgot about it long before today’s drekulous column hit the presses.
It’s none of my business, of course, but there is something profoundly fucked up about the importance you ascribe to these people, even as you mock them.
Gust Avrakotos
Yawn, another ridiculous blog post drawing attention to the fact something stupid is getting too much attention and therefore, drawing more attention to it.
Seriously, are you people that dumb not to see you are part of the stupidity, not some detached observer.
Not that I think BJ has any influence whatsoever mind you. Not Republican Cole can’t even figure out how to make this website work properly half the time.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@eemom:
My guess all along was that this would have gotten a lot of play in Spanish-language media, and it appears that it did. I don’t think anyone would have ever heard of it at all if not for establishment/right media picking up on it.
Immigrant basher number one fighting the president is not a nothing thing in an election that will probably be decided by overwhelming Latino support for Obama.
Hill Dweller
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: I don’t think she humiliated the President, but the wingers seem to think so. They think he is too uppity, and needs to be knocked down a notch or two.
To me–and the two mayors seemed to back it up–the President looked sort of bemused, until finally greeting the rest of the party.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Gust Avrakotos:
But I want it to get more attention.
cmorenc
@Arundel:
It’s extremely likely that Karl Rove’s ultimate dirty ratfuck political trick was deviously baiting Rather into pursuing the story of Bush’s National Guard records with convincing-looking false documents and a couple of purportedly willing key witnesses, until Rather had committed to publishing the story beyond the point of no return. When the genuineness of the documents eroded, and the witnesses backed out of supporting the story, it effectively intimidated the media from ever seriously pursuing the story of Bush’s national guard bona fides again. Rather’s head was hoisted on a pike by Rove in a very public place for everyone to see as a warning. Much of the general public was also conditioned to see further pursuit of the matter as more of a partisan witch-hunt than relevant inquiry from that point on.
bemused senior
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: @DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
He has an expression on his face of a dad listening to a spoiled brat, and restraining an impulse to pop the brat on the rear end.
maus
@JGabriel:
Unbelievable. Dogwhistles aren’t just as likely to get published as ever?
Pope Ratzy
As I stated in the comments over there, Dowd, however you may dislike her, didn’t write what Elon claims. She wrote it was bristly and then goes on to gore Brewer.
It isn’t rocket science:
The episode was most assuredly bristly.
Brewer was bristly.
Obama was not.
Dowd was accurate, wtf is the issue?
SRW1
Didn’t the Brewer lady imply she felt threatened? Hardly how you smack somebody down, is it?
Violet
According to the wingnut talk radio guy I heard last night, it’s about her putting him in his place with a hint of poor, scared white lady and big scary black man.
FlipYrWhig
@SRW1: She didn’t smack him down, she bravely fended off his attempt to smack her down, or so the story goes.
chrome agnomen
@Arundel:
amen to every word.
chrome agnomen
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
damn, man, and i thought it was just snark!
Arundel
@eemom, I really like you, I think you’re smart and funny. Here’s what I don’t get: every time someone like Sully says something fucked up and wrong in the MSM, you inevitably show up to moan about why we’re talking about Sully again.
Uh, well maybe it’s because he’s on Press The Meat, on all the Sunday talk shows, on Bill Maher, everywhere, spreading his wrong-ass gospel. This is actually worthy of derision and discussion. (And he apparently told working class Americans to stfu and deal with globalization and the extinction of their jobs and livelihoods on Tweety’s show today. Not kidding, check Crooks & Liars from today.)
We need to talk about pernicious liars like Sullivan, Dowd, and Brooks and Douthat, because they have platforms to set the tones of discussion on a staggering scale. Tens of millions of people, not a blogger’s 400 people. If they’re successsful bloggers. It matters. And these people need to be taken down, criticized, exposed as the propagandists they are, at every opportunity.
If Andrew Sullivan actually goes on Chris Matthews’ show and tells the former American middle and working classes to go fuck themselves and get over it, I want to hear about it. And I want Sullivan deported , but that’s another thing. I’m just saying I don’t know why you don’t think these people are worthy of talking about, scornfully. They are the ones setting the agenda, and your moaning constantly -constantly! about these people makes me wonder if you’re some sort of ostrich, like ignoring pernicious liars and propagandists in the media will make them go away.
We talk about these people because they are representing the forces that have frankly declared war on the rest of us. Unless you’re a millionaire, it’s good to know that their messenger-boy Sullivan is delivering the message that we’re fucked, and too bad. That they don’t care. Stop bitching that people analyze this, Eemom.
patrick II
For repubs this is a two-fer. Someone telling a black person off to their face (like Newt did to Juan Williams and threated to do to the NAACP)just works for repubs. PC frustrates them so. It won Newt SC.
Also, for older repubs getting that picture of the pointed finger echoed Richard Nixon pointing his finger at Kruschev. It got tricky Dick points for standing up to the russians, and now another true american stands up to a socialist.
Simple, crude appeals to the trogs.
Linkmeister
@jl: Evidently you haven’t heard of “NYClean,” a script which allows you to bypass the paywall. You can find a bookmarklet for it here. Drag that to your toolbar and when you need to read an NYT article and it fades to gray, click the bookmarklet. Clears right up.
JordanRules
@suzanne: I don’t think their hate towards a white “D” could ever compare. There just isn’t the weight of that peculiarly American Institution that fed America as an economic empire behind it. I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel the same to me for a number of reasons. Some personal, sure.
Arundel
@cmorenc: It’s extremely likely that Karl Rove’s ultimate dirty ratfuck political trick was deviously baiting Rather into pursuing the story of Bush’s National Guard records with convincing-looking false documents and a couple of purportedly willing key witnesses, until Rather had committed to publishing the story beyond the point of no return. When the genuineness of the documents eroded, and the witnesses backed out of supporting the story, it effectively intimidated the media from ever seriously pursuing the story of Bush’s national guard bona fides again. Rather’s head was hoisted on a pike by Rove in a very public place for everyone to see as a warning. Much of the general public was also conditioned to see further pursuit of the matter as more of a partisan witch-hunt than relevant inquiry from that point on.
Exactly. And instantly and simultaneously as Rather’s report aired, the prepared denunciations went out. (Yes, the Internet existed in 1999/2000).
Like, that Bush’s papers were from a dot-matrix printer that didn’t exist or some shit. Hence, instantly discredited! But in that 60 Minutes report, as I said, that lady secretary said it was all true. She remembered because Bush was a VIP, and his NOT SHOWING UP was memorable. And we can leave it at this: all the Bush team ever had to do was produce a single person saying Bush served in the NG with them. They fucking couldn’t. Because he didn’t. He shirked it, he shirked NGuard, he shirked Vietnam. Unbelievable that a weasel about that war got to be President, the fucker. Yep, it was an utterly Rovian ratfuck to destroy this bit of information about the character and cowardice of this spoiled son of a bitch. Eliminating Dan Rather in the process as a warning. But the truth remains: that fuck never served, never showed up for NG duty, and merely finding a single person who remembered him showing up for duty would be easier. But they couldn’t. Hence, sheer Rovian lies and destruction. Oh, and that’s not even mentioning what came after inauguration. God.
suzanne
@JordanRules:
Really? Because the thing that always sets me back on my heels is how much they hate each other. What Rove did to McCain in 2000 was absolutely fucking sickening, and those people are supposed to be on the same team.
While they appeal to racists (and sexists and homophobes, etc) in order to achieve their goals, I really think that what these people hate most is LOSING. They want to win so badly that they hate whomever is (un)lucky enough to oppose them. I have every confidence that they hate Obama for being smarter, more capable, more popular, and a better person in every way.
Anya
@suzanne: You might be right about why they hate Pres. Obama, but you’re underplaying the way they use racism to foment hatred against him. Yes, many of the wingers will hate any Democratic president. They would have called a white Dem president, abortionist and all the other vile stuff they call the President, but they use a potent extra ingredient — racism, that they cannot use against a white president, against President Obama.
Anne Laurie
@cmorenc:
Dowd and McArdle are the female version of Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain. The white guys paying their salaries use them as tokens to prove that (a) they are so absolutely not sexist, despite all evidence; and (b) since these are “the best” they could find, obviously those people aren’t really ready for the same rights as white men. Dual duty, very efficient!
ruemara
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: I have no idea what pictures you are talking about. The pictures all show the reverse.
AxelFoley
@Arundel:
Maybe if she did, she’d be a lot less catty. I really do think she needs some dick in her, and I don’t care if it sounds crude. Fuck her (somebody needs to).
Keith G
Sorry Dude, this story has no shelf life. It only traveled as far as it did due to the visual. In my experience, the fear of “uppity” is more of an issue with some Obama supporters than it is an opinion of the Republicans with whom I debate.
kay
I think it’s about Obama attacking the political media, actually.
The last column of hers that I read was about Obama and Gingrich attacking the political media, in other words, the column was about Maureen Dowd.
That’s why he’s “thin skinned”. He attacks political media.
The best way to approach this, IMO, is to remember most of these columns are “about” the people that write them.
They talk about themselves constantly. I think it’s such a bad idea, because it’s a closed circle, but I guess there’s an “insider” appeal there, so maybe that’s why people continue to value them.
brantl
They can’t help a knee-jerk reaction, Doug, they just can’t. And in the Republican party now, the dogs are running the hunt. The only way to steer them is with dog-whistles.
gVOR08
Doesn’t matter if people saw a Brewer win. No minds were changed. The people who think Brewer “smacked down” the President, and that that would be either possible or a good thing, were always going to vote for the Republican nominee. Unless Paul or Gingrich go third party, please, please, please.
rikryah
I wish an old, racist White woman would put her finger in my face.
She’d be lucky to have her hand afterwards.
28 Percent
Brewer and her readers began by interpreting (and/or believing the interpretation) that Obama brought her to the White House to lecture and condescend because the President doesn’t have enough on his plate what with health care and the economy and killing Bin Ladin and all, he has time to bring her to the WH to give the all-important Jan Brewer unasked for political advice (and the courtesy photo-op was just like, her due or something).
So no, this has nothing to do with Obama “being uppity” except that, for someone whose expectations of life were formed before school bussing, every breath he takes as a liberal president is by definition an uppity one. This is about truly insignificant people who have lost the entitled white-men-only ground they used to hold, demonstrating that they still have the power to make themselves look like idiots.
Bobby Thomson
@dougj: All the photos I’ve seen are the exact opposite. This is just like Nixon managing to get a photo op pointing his finger in Kruschev’s face. That was the whole point. Full stop. Politics is primarily a visual art, and what was actually said really doesn’t matter.
Kids today.
http://www.historyinanhour.com/2010/07/24/the-kitchen-debate-cold-war-hot-kitchen/
Tonybrown74
Both, sprinkled liberally with emasculation.
White woman puts uppity black man in his place.
ChrisNYC
It was about putting him in his place and about his being uppity. Two sides same coin.
Having spent way too much time on the red blogs in the last 4 months, there is a funny thing peaking through the sentiment that Obama must be humiliated. It’s not just a pasttime. And it has almost nothing to do with Obama himself, of course. They NEED it. They need pictures like the one Brewer engineered. They NEED to see Gingrich kick O’s ass in a debate (ha!). If they get that, they can believe that the order of the world is restored.
I think this sentiment exists in large measure outside the blogosphere crazies, too. Halperin, the repulsive Morning Joe crew. I’d bet money that they become subtly more relaxed, subtly more content, subtly more optimistic and less furrowed-browed on January 20 2017 when the proper order is restored and the guy in the Oval Office is not black. When things return to how these people think things should be. (It’ll be the same for the first woman pres, the first Latino, etc etc etc. btw.)
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@ChrisNYC:
That’s interesting, thanks for the insight.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Bobby Thomson: @ruemara:
Yeah, I remembered it wrong.
ABL
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: IMO, it’s both. She’s playing the “scary negro” card, and also the “i’m a white damsel in distress” card and the “he’s so sensitive” card.
it’s three whistles for the price of one.
sherparick
@ABL: There is also a 4th whistle, that is “Buy My Book” so I can make a lot of cash. The grift is always part of the agenda for the John and Jane Galt sociopaths of the right. They cackle all the way to the bank.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/01/jan-brewers-book-sales-are-13-million-percent-war-horse-gets-spielberg-bump/47974/
ellennelle
it was both; she smacked him down because he was uppity.
but, in truth (giggle), what she really did was sell a lot of her books.
seems to be the latest rightwingnut rage; make an ass of yourself in the national news to rake in publishing profits.