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You are here: Home / Sometimes I fold my arms, I say hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm

Sometimes I fold my arms, I say hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm

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Had to interrupt my blogging vacay to vent about this (via):

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” (Romney surrogate) Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

What the fuck? There is nothing I am more proud of, as an American, than the music of Al Green.

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  6. 6.

    Punchy

    Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama

    I smell an out-of-context-but-who-gives-a-fuck Obama team commercial soundbyte. ONe of those, “Even Romney’s supporters like Barack! Listen to Mrs. Welch!” drops.

  7. 7.

    Martin

    Negro music.

    Personally, I care more about results. Romney is a terrible singer. Kudos for getting up and doing it, but work harder please.

  8. 8.

    Hunter Gathers

    There are two Americas, Mrs. Welch. You just happen to be from the one that sucks.

  10. 10.

    Face

    I’m not sure Welchy wants to discuss songs. Wasn’t it Romney who thought Nugent or ELO or some such dumbfuckery was responsible for “Sweet Home Alabama” during a primary rally?

  11. 11.

    BGinCHI

    They’re such a musical people, but they aren’t real Americans.

    After all, we had to make them come here!

  12. 12.

    Lurking Canadian

    Not hard to figure out what she thinks is “other” about Al Green and Barack Obama.

  13. 13.

    El Cid

    Clearly, they’d all love to gather ’round to hear Obama sing Hank Williams Jr’s greatest hits.

  15. 15.

    Mike E

    She’s a martini away from winning the NiCLANG pool for some lucky devil…what’s it up to now?

  17. 17.

    Lyrebird

    @Todd: Well I dunno if she needed any supernatural help or not, but that’s sure what it sounds like to me!

    [sarcasm]
    How dare that Black President sing SOUL music by someone BLACK!
    [/sarcasm]

    It’s a sad day when you long for the return of republicans like, I dunno, Bob Dole or something. This stuff is just slimy!

  19. 19.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    Yes, two different Americas: The one for those who believe that your patriotism can be summed up in which song you sing, how you say the pledge of allegiance, and whether you wear a flag pin or not, and the America for the rest of us.

  20. 20.

    Redshift

    @Martin:

    Personally, I care more about results. Romney is a terrible singer. Kudos for getting up and doing it, but work harder please.

    I actually saw that clip more as evidence of what a terrible politician Romney is. Yeah, his singing wasn’t great, but the really awful quality was because he was leading a song for everyone to sing along with, and didn’t seem to understand how that would go when he had a microphone and they didn’t.

    How is it possible to be in politics as long as Romney has been and not know that?

  21. 21.

    JenJen

    Ahhh, yes. The scandalous Suzy Welch, noted homewrecker and adultress, lecturing the rest of us on American “values.”

    Screw her for maligning the great Al Green, especially. Why didn’t she just come right out with it and scream BLACKITY BLACK BLACK BLACK?

  22. 22.

    MikeBoyScout

    <emThat is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?

    No, it is not.

    Please, Mrs. Welch, explain yourself.

  24. 24.

    The Moar You Know

    That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?

    Sure is, thanks for expressing that so well for me. Which America is Mitt running for the presidency of? Obviously not mine.

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    Because I’m sure that Obama never sings patriotic songs, ever, and patriotic songs are the only ones Mitt even knows. Yeah, right. The only thing the contrast shows is the points the two campaigns are trying to make.

    Obama: Mitt is a fake patriot who brags about America while shipping jobs overseas.

    Romney: Barack is one of those other people.

  26. 26.

    BGinCHI

    Jack Welch’s wife.

    Fuck them.

    Goes to show how racism lurks even at the highest levels of society. I guess Harvard doesn’t really do much for the hard bigotry of class snobbery.

  27. 27.

    Spaghetti Lee

    ONLY PATRIOTIC SONGS ARE ACCEPTABLE MATERIAL, COMRADE! ALL DECADENT BOURGEOIS ART MUST BE SHUNNED! SONGS EXTOLLING THE GLORY OF THE FATHERLAND ARE BY DEFINITION SUPERIOR!

    For a bunch of commie-haters, they sure do act like commies.

  28. 28.

    Randy P

    This is idiotic on so many levels but just on the surface one, the one where we’re talking elementary logic, no. It is not two different countries. Two different people can sing different songs in THE VERY SAME COUNTRY. Try a radio. You might even hear more than two songs.

  33. 33.

    Redshift

    I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it.

    “I like Romney. His songs are just the right length.”

  34. 34.

    aimai

    I have the President singing Al Green as my husband’s ringtone so when my husband calls me I hear a burst of applause and then the smooth stylings of the President. People all around me love it when the phone goes off in my pocket in the grocery store.
    There are indeed two Americas: an America of normal people who heard the president singing a love song and an America of crazy people who hear a man screetching “Ooga Booga.”

    aimai

  39. 39.

    Tony J

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    ONLY PATRIOTIC SONGS ARE ACCEPTABLE MATERIAL, COMRADE! ALL DECADENT BOURGEOIS ART MUST BE SHUNNED! SONGS EXTOLLING THE GLORY OF THE FATHERLAND MOTHERLAND ARE BY DEFINITION SUPERIOR!

    Unless you cribbed that from Jonah the Whale’s dime-store classic, in which case sorry, and please carry on.

  40. 40.

    pseudonymous in nc

    There’s a long history of Those Musicians being declared the other, which is why African-American artists often preferred the unsegregated venues of Europe.

  42. 42.

    EconWatcher

    By the way, my wife and I just saw Obama’s ad “The Firms” here in Virginia on TV (the one with Romney singing “God Bless America” while the text describes offshoring, Swiss accounts, etc.)

    My wife’s reaction worried me a bit. An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, she doesn’t pay much attention to politics. She favors the Dems mainly because she thinks the other side is crazy and stupid; her views on policy are a very mixed bag.

    Anyway, after she saw the ad, she said, “I thought Obama was supposed to be a nice guy. Maybe he has to do that, but it’s not very nice.”

    One thing in the ad that’s too subtle and might be backfiring a little: The purpose of the soundtrack with Romney singing “God Bless America” is of course to make him look hypocritical, but it comes off as embarrassing him because he’s such a bad singer. And someone who can’t sing trying his best to belt out a patriotic song engenders some sympathy.

  44. 44.

    Bobby D

    Jeez, dog whistle much Ms. Welch?

    Just need to point out to R-Money’s surrogate…that’s the REVEREND Al Green, lady. You (and Mittens) got something against Christians ya momo cult freaks?

  45. 45.

    japa21

    @Roger Moore:

    Obama: Mitt is a fake patriot who brags about America while shipping jobs overseas.

    Romney: Barack is one of those other people.

    But she is too dumb to realize it. The whole point of the Obama campaign’s ad was to juxtapose Romney singing a patriotic song while his actions represent an anti-American sentiment.

  46. 46.

    Martin

    @EconWatcher:

    One thing in the ad that’s too subtle and might be backfiring a little: The purpose of the soundtrack with Romney singing “God Bless America” is to make him look hypocritical, but it comes off as embarrassing him because he’s such a bad singer. And someone who can’t sing trying is best to sing a patriotic song engenders some sympathy.

    Believe it or not, they actually cleaned up the singing so that it sounds better. It was actually worse than that.

  47. 47.

    Hill Dweller

    @EconWatcher: If this is a competition for who is nicer, Obama wins in a landslide.

    Willard is slimier than any Presidential candidate I’ve ever seen. Obama has to make that apparent, and sometimes that means stepping on a few toes.

  48. 48.

    Brachiator

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    OT – Holmes told the police he was “The Joker” he had painted his hair and beard red.

    So, does Holmes suffer from color blindness? Or maybe he’s just babbling stuff to get a reaction. The Joker’s hair ain’t red.

    That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

    Faux patriotic America vs honest America? Stiff Mormon pants white guy America vs cool America?

    I’m not so much getting dog whistles here as stupidity and desperation.

    And also remember that when Romney blows a dog whistle, the response you get is the hapless howls of a dog strapped to the top of the Mittbot’s car.

  49. 49.

    Tony J

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    Holmes told the police he was “The Joker” he had painted his hair and beard red.

    Because The Joker, as we all know, absolutely, positively, does not have bright green hair.

  51. 51.

    Jewish Steel

    That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?

    You’re goddamn right it is. I know which one I want to live in.

  54. 54.

    Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)

    You said, it Ms. Welch! Since when did we allow those negroes to sing anything other than harmless spirituals and field-work songs? What’s this country coming to? Now you’ve got the Kenyan in Chief singing love songs to our white women!!

  55. 55.

    Rafer Janders

    I have to say, she’s right. It IS two different Americas.

    But I know which one I want to be part of.

  56. 56.

    Tonal Crow

    Yes, the very cool black metrosexual Abraham Lincoln Obama deftly sang a bar of Al Green. Sounds good (in all senses) to me.

  57. 57.

    xochi

    How awesome would it be if this election were actually about a referendum on who thinks the music of Al Green sucks?

  59. 59.

    TooManyJens

    In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”.

    I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that whichever CNN talking head it was did not ask Mrs. Welch to clarify her remark.

  63. 63.

    kc

    @EconWatcher:

    As someone who can’t sing a lick, even I felt sympathy for Romney. I love the text in the ad, but overlaying Romney’s painfully off-key singing does seem a little mean. Funny, but mean.

  65. 65.

    tones

    On the one side we have the very cool President Obama…on the other…
    the opposite.

  67. 67.

    a dood

    as we all know, the most patriotic thing a person can do is hide their money in off shore bank accounts to skirt obligations as an American citizen.

  71. 71.

    TooManyJens

    @Kerry Reid: Is there a word for laughing so you don’t cry? Because I’m picturing what would happen if the Right found out that Obama had sung “a song written by a socialist sympathizer,” and whatever that word is, I’m doing it.

  72. 72.

    Mnemosyne

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    As other people said, one wonders if he’s colorblind since the Joker has (and has always had) green hair.

    Though, if true, it also makes me think that this guy probably was influenced by right-wing memes and rhetoric since they’ve been doing Obama = the Joker comparisons for at least a couple of years now.

  73. 73.

    Barbara

    That’s Reverend Al Green to you Ms. Welch, because you know, he might not be too approving of you either:

    Jane — the current Mrs. Jack Welch — was none too pleased that her husband was doing more than being interviewed by Suzy Wetlaufer. She reached Suzy at home in Lexington, Massachusetts. A high-powered lawyer who gave up her career at Jack’s insistence when she married him thirteen years ago, she wanted to know: Wasn’t Suzy at all worried about compromising her journalistic integrity by sleeping with her husband?

  76. 76.

    honus

    @Jewish Steel: Exactly. I’d rather listen to Al Green than the hell I imagine when I think of Condi Rice playing piano while John Ashcroft sings “As the Eagle Flies.”

  77. 77.

    Kerry Reid

    @TooManyJens: Me too. Then again — nobody made hay out of TAHD Palin belonging to a secessionist party started by a guy who made Jeremiah Wright’s rhetoric sound like a Rod McKuen poem. So much for “palling around with terrorists.”

    Full disclosure: the author of the Bloomberg piece is an old pal of mine. I’m looking forward to reading his book when he finishes it.

  79. 79.

    AxelFoley

    “Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

    Translation: Obama and Green are blackity blackity black black. And near.

  81. 81.

    polyorchnid octopunch

    @Spaghetti Lee: You need to check your references. It wasn’t the communists that referred to the fatherland… not to mention the alliance of corporate and state power.

  82. 82.

    mai naem

    I am stealing a comment from the NYTimes comments – “There’s two Americas – one with soul and one with no soul”

    Jack and Suzy Welch come on Morning Ho every so often. Can’t stand either one of them. Jack thinks the Mittster’s not being nasty enough. Suzy comes across as one of a HS mean girl. And Jack, well, Jack joins the Republican Club of Turtle Look-Alikes. Also too, Suzy is just jealous that her husband looks like a 97 year old old fart with old stretchy patchy dry skin with old googly eyes and Obama, well, Obama looks a lot younger than Suzy, forget Jack, and Barry’s about the same age as Suzy.
    One last thing, Suzy, that’s Reverend Al Green to you.

  84. 84.

    AxelFoley

    @Johnny Gentle (famous crooner):

    You said, it Ms. Welch! Since when did we allow those negroes to sing anything other than harmless spirituals and field-work songs? What’s this country coming to? Now you’ve got the Kenyan in Chief singing love songs to our white women!!

    ROFL! Well played, sir.

  86. 86.

    Heliopause

    Good god, what demographic does she think she’s speaking to? The people who were worried about “negro rhythms” back in 1955? Are any of them still alive?

  88. 88.

    Patricia Kayden

    @MikeBoyScout: Could someone please ask Mrs. Welch what the hell she meant by “two different Americas”?!!!!

    Inquiring minds want to know.

    I thought this country was “one nation indivisible under God” or something like that.

  91. 91.

    El Cid

    @freelancer: The asshole whose awesome reforms to GE generally involved offshoring and the firing of middle management who later had to be rehired, but fortunately at much lower pay and benefits.

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