Actual line from a story about Jeb Bush and weight loss:
The rigid abstemiousness runs the risk of putting him at a dietary distance from an American electorate that still binges on carbohydrates and, after eight years of a tea-sipping president, craves a relatable eater-in-chief.
Just come out and call Obama a pussy, you jackass. If anyone knows what middle America craves, it’s someone who casually uses the word abstemiousness.
I feel like the Times is actively trying to get me to cancel my subscription.
Baud
I recently thought about making a better effort to read the NYT, but I think I’ll wait until after the 2016 election.
chopper
you know who sipped tea? sun tzu. a dude who literally wrote the book on kicking men’s asses.
Rex Tremendae
The article also mentions (a) a young boy whose favorite pizza is Little Caesar’s and (b) that Paleo diet people don’t drink wine. The child has plenty of years to learn to love good pizza, but the Paleos sound hopeless.
chopper
I’m sure El Jebe’s domestic and foreign policy can also be described as ‘paleo’. at least he’s consistent.
Roger Moore
@chopper:
Also, too, Winston Churchill, who the Republicans apparently worship almost as much as Reagan.
You know who there’s no particular evidence of being a tea sipper? Barack Obama. This isn’t meant as any kind of defense of Obama’s drinking habits as much as a criticism of the author’s (and NYT’s) fact checking.[Edit: retracted]fledermaus
It always amazes me how much the political pundits believe most voters decide based on what sort of food the candidate eats. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone real even mention it.
FlipYrWhig
Remember how much the NYT loved the paunchy physique and other indulgences of Bill Clinton? “Quite relatable,” they consistently said. And oh, how they lit into the exercise obsessions of George Dubya Bush, an affectation to which the Common Man simply could not relate. Right, remember that?
balconesfault
Barbaro is truly gifted. From his piece on Romney’s farewell speech to his campaign staff after the 2012 election:
He marveled at the president’s ability to turn out voters, at times by using strategies that had maligned him.
This written without a trace of irony.
chopper
I wonder if Obama drives a Volvo? somebody needs to check on this.
Hal
Ugh. Paleo dieters. Does this mean 18 months of Jeb talking about cross fit?
Pogonip
@chopper: Also Miyamoto Musashi, who wrote another such book.
donovong
i cancelled my subscription today and let them know it was because of their new swift boating campaign against Hillary. Fuckers.
jl
I dunno. Maybe the NYT is indicating that its hard hitting real important facty reporting will head in the direction of dithering over whether Jeb! is really in the Mainstream of America, fress-wise.
They are in the tank for Christie? No, can’t be that: Christie had belly band surgery, though on the other hand, his first glance ‘gestalt’ still fits into mainstream perfectly.
Walker gobble down junk food?
In conclusion, our miserably failed corporate media experiment is reaching new lows as the citizens read about weirdo back room deals between big news organizations and sketchy right wing BS artists, and read this blather, and they have to practice Kremlinology on their own national affairs press.
The likes of Dowd and Brooks are probably delighted by it all, though.
Roger Moore
@fledermaus:
It’s not exactly about their food choices. It’s about whether they’re elitists or ordinary people, and a disturbing number of people actually do care about that. If the candidate is actually a member of the elite, they can try to portray themselves as being an ordinary person by doing things ordinary people imagine themselves doing: eating burgers, watching football, mowing the lawn, etc. And if they’re not a member of the elite, they can be portrayed as being one by showing them doing something that seems kind of elitist: eating weird food (or not getting “ordinary people” food), participating in weird sports, not knowing about everyday things, etc.
Major Major Major Major
At least it’s not a latte.
Baud
@donovong: Good for you.
chopper
looking at pictures of Jeb!, I’d assume his wife has been sneaking gobs of cookie dough into his steaks.
jl
OK, i looked at the story. It has all the breathless teen crush excitement of a tweener gazing in rapture at new candid Justin Bieber (or whoever it is now) pics.
Definitely pro-Bush. We are lucky they don’t have better material.
Pogonip
We had my mom’s memorial service today. Now we’re home and thus exposed to Fox. I thought i would check in quickly to let you know that the Republicans are very, very worried about the peasantry waking up and realizing they’re being screwed. On a show called “The Five,” a title which seemed to refer to the collective IQ of the panelists, they spent nearly the entire show indignantly refuting the very idea of inequality. The trump argument was that a 50-inch plasma TV used to cost 20K and now cost 1K and therefore there’s no inequality. That was the best the Five could do.
Now, if more Democrats will stop whoring for Wall Street, they can jump on this awakening-peasant bandwagon and maybe we can see some changes made. The Republicans are going with ” Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” so the Democrats have a golden opportunity.
srv
When is he going to have a bender with Noonan?
the Conster
@jl:
you should see his twitter feed. It’s embarrassing how middle school it is.
ETA: apologies to middle schoolers.
Emma
People still have subscriptions to the New York Times?
May I suggest, for straight news, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/nation-news/
For not-insane conservatives, http://www.ft.com/home/uk
For liberal to the point of making me reach for a sharp object, http://www.ft.com/home/uk
For good Middle East coverage,plus other good stuff, http://www.aljazeera.com/
Most big national papers now have at least an English page. If you want to practice your half-forgotten foreign language of choice, have at it.
I’m sure many of you have other suggestions. Why bother with the paper of record for the 1%?
Emma
Moderation? For some links to news sites?
Redshift
Obviously, Americans don’t “crave” a president they elected twice by large margins. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, pundit knows best.
Mike Furlan
By now no one should be reading the Times for anything other than entertainment purposes, recipes, coverage of the arts, and real estate porn. They will be wrong on every substantive issue, if they don’t fail to cover it.
WereBear
Ladies and gentlemen: our Paper of Record.
So we’ve devolved from “have a beer with the guy” to “you could gorge on doughnuts with him.”
JMG
Almost all politicians are “normal” in their cultural preferences to begin with. They all like sports, middlebrow music of various genres, will go see “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” etc. It’s sort of a natural selection process. If you’re too different from most folks, the idea of going out and seeking their approval every few years doesn’t seem like much fun.
Times sure have changed though. Look at JFK, and how a big part of his highly favorable public image was that he had serious egghead tendencies (he didn’t). He gave a famous White House dinner for all American Nobel laureates. Imagine the reaction if Obama did that. Maureen Dowd would write about it twice a week forever.
WereBear
Aaaaaand they’ve got their facts wrong.
Germy Shoemangler
I don’t care if the NYTimes writes about Jeb’s diet. What got my goat was the crack about the electorate craving a more relatable president. The reporter’s brains are clearly popcorn soaked in urine.
As I said in an earlier thread, I visited the twitter page of the reporter, and saw that he retweeted a rather brilliant condemnation of his prose:
https://twitter.com/BostonSnob/status/591629015372406784
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. I even remember a SNL skit with Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton loading up on junk food.
So,does all this mean that the NYT is ready to throw its support behind Chris Christie?
Emma
@WereBear: Some of their recipes are pretty good, though.Doesn’t keep me off my wine, but hey.
Mike J
@Emma:
Three links, including any @reply, is the limit.
Aleta
Such a weird week. Frat boys insulting wounded vets, and now Marines are vowing to give them a pounding. A herd of buffalo escape in NYS and get gunned down by hired hunters. And some of the same Georgia conservatives who believe Georgia law now allows gun carry at technical schools and colleges are cheering on a ‘manhunt’ for a black college student for having a gun in his backpack, after he gave an interview during a demonstration against racism. The buffalo slaughter seems like a bad bad omen. I mean, if you were Hunter S. Thompson. Which I wish someone was right now.
Turgidson
@Germy Shoemangler:
i like this @BostonSnob fellow already.
trollhattan
@Hal: If he starts pushing a road-grader tire up a hill I’m personally kicking him the balls, no matter what.
Southern Beale
Media narratives WILL NOT DIE.
Meanwhile, we’ve got THIS shit going on.
Violet
Did Obama’s “mom jeans” make the article as well?
Jeb Bush looks unhealthy to me. Weight loss or not, he doesn’t look well.
RaflW
If it weren’t for Krugman, I’d have cancelled already. Hanging on by a thread. I also do think that the more we abandon subscribing to papers like the Times, the worse our overall journalism will get. Quitting the Times won’t actually teach them anything, and no other traditional media outlet is interested in bettering itself.
We’re kinda screwed. But then, that is not a news flash.
the Conster
@Turgidson:
His twitter handle quote is great: “I laugh at rubes and want the South to secede”.
He goes after fucktards but good, too, and 140 characters is his best and highest use. my kinda people.
Emma
@Mike J: Crud. Thanks for letting me know. It was just links to McClatchy, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera.
Betty Cracker
@Pogonip: Condolences on the loss of your mom.
Regarding the awakening peasantry, HRC’s recent campaign trail utterances seem to indicate she’s seen that memo. We can argue all night whether or not she’s the ideal vessel to make the wealth inequality case, but it’s encouraging that she seems to know that’s issue #1, as does Mr. O’Malley.
RSA
I’ll bet more people know “abstemious” for having all the vowels in alphabetical order than know what it means.
Zinsky
We should be more concerned about handing over the reins of power to another member of the most corrupt, seditious family in American political history than what the fat fuck eats. A grandfather that worked secretly to overthrow a sitting President, a father who secretly sold stolen arms to Iran and worked to have Americans held captive longer than they needed to be held to get elected and a brother who started a war under false pretenses should disqualify this piece of human filth from ever holding elected office. Not to mention the fact this fat fuck helped overthrew the will of the people to get his idiot brother elected, who clearly lost the presidential election.
Benw
Cancelled my subscription years ago; I hoard my 10 free articles per month to read Krugman and occasionally Chuck Blow or Collins; no regrets.
Howard Beale IV
@Roger Moore: And let’s not forget that Churchill was a noted cigar smoker-so much so that a an entire class of cigar was named after him (7″ long with a 47-49 ring)
bobbo
Obama’s not a pussy, he’s a starlet. You need to keep your MoDo thesaurus handy.
Turgidson
@Zinsky:
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter!
gogol's wife
I was behind in my reading of the NYT, so didn’t know what you all were talking about with the Hillary Clinton stuff, and just now I turned to the continuation of the article from the front page, and I couldn’t believe the overkill! Two full pages on the inside! They are really trying to smother her campaign in the cradle. It’s so blatant as almost to be amusing.
Mike in NC
Wasn’t aware that JEB! was dieting, because recent (?) photos made him pretty hard to distinguish from Chris Christie. The big money boys in the GOP are going to back either Walker or Bush; everything else is just 24/7 media masturbation over a lame roster of vanity campaigns.
Aleta
That is such deceptive hyperbole. It’s a cunning trick to help Jeb carry CA, MA, CT and NY.
Mandalay
From the author’s NYT bio:
A bio to die for, but not in a good way.
Cacti
You mean people still actually pay for the New York Times?
Huh.
Mike J
@Benw:
Tell your browser to a) not accept cookies[1] and b) not run javascript[2]. Read the Times as much as you can stomach.
[1] The cookie monster add on for firefox lets you allow cookies for the few sites that need it that you want to allow, while silently blocking them for everything else.
[2] noscript add on for firtefox lets you allow javascript for the few sites that need it that you want to allow, while silently blocking it for everything else.
Mandalay
@gogol’s wife:
The very first sentence in the very first entry in NYT’s pick of the reader comments:
It’s certainly blatant, but I’m not sure it’s amusing.
Just One More Canuck
@trollhattan: I would drive to wherever you are just to watch that in person
Violet
@Mike in NC:
I think you haven’t seen really recently photos then. He’s definitely lost weight. He looks kind of unhealthy. It’s obvious he’s thinner but it doesn’t look like a healthy thinner.
Violet
From the article:
Thirty pounds since December? No wonder he looks kind of gray. That kind of rapid weight loss isn’t always healthy.
SiubhanDuinne
@chopper:
He also had a favorite chicken.
@Mike Furlan:
I still read their obituaries. They write good obits.
Karen
I didn’t know that the GOP owned the NY Times. I guess the Washington Times, Daily News, NY Post and WSJ wasn’t enough for them.
Does anyone but me find it amusing that these millionaires are trying to show they’re just like regular folk when the money backing them are from billionaires who want them in office to benefit only billionaires and strip funding from those “regular folks?” And those regular folks would offer these millionaires the moon if it meant that a brown person wouldn’t live next door to them.
Ruckus
@Violet:
Jeb doesn’t look well to me either. Oh you meant physically well. Come to think of it either way works.
jl
@Mandalay:
” It’s certainly blatant, but I’m not sure it’s amusing. ”
I think it is a mildly amusing self-parody.
Though The Onion would have thought up some novelty to make it better, probably.
SiubhanDuinne
@JMG:
If I remember rightly, he said the gathering was something like (paraphrasing) “the greatest collection of brainpower in this building since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
/heading off to find the real quote and see how close I came
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Possibly the only reason to read the Daily Telegraph.
Seanly
I consider myself fairly well educated and am the product of two English professors & I have no idea WTF “abstemiousness” means. I do know that the sentence is one of the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Found it. It was almost exactly 53 years ago (April 29, 1962) and the line was: think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, I don’t check the Telegraph all that often, but when I do it’s usually because some British notoriety has died and I can count on a well-written obit. They have great cryptic crossword puzzles, too, I’ll give them that.
muddy
@Mike J: You can always access the articles through Google. Start the search string with “nytimes” and then a couple of words from the headline. Clickety-do-dah, no need for add-ons.
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale:
Is there anything, anything, that these people won’t monetize? I don’t even know what emotions to have any more: anger, disgust, sadness don’t begin to approach the way these … I can’t say “people” again … make me feel.
Pisses me off when I discover I don’t even have a vocabulary available to comment on these … whateverthefucktheyare.
debbie
@Mike J:
You also can just delete all nytimes cookies and start over.
muddy
@jl:
For how long it has been he doesn’t seem to have lost that much weight.
@Violet: As to JEB, he looks like his mean mother, so no amount of dieting is going to fix that.
SiubhanDuinne
@RSA:
As does “facetious.” I believe that’s the only other English word that does. If you want the “and sometimes Y” in there, you have “abstemiously” and “facetiously.”
John Revolta
Wasn’t everybody ragging on Obama last year for eating cheeseburgers?
What kind of tea do they serve at the Shake Shack?
WereBear
@Pogonip: I’m so sorry for your loss.
debbie
@srv:
And when she’s cradling his shoe, will it be a slip-on?
Mike Furlan
@SiubhanDuinne: Good point.
Mike Furlan
@Cacti: I have the weekend dead tree version delivered.
Turgidson
@John Revolta:
Yes. The unreformed junior high clique we refer to as the Village, perpetually furious at being scorned by Obama long ago, rags on him over anything, even if it directly contradicts the thing they ragged on him for the previous day.
catclub
Like Mormons who drink neither alcoholic nor caffeinated beverages? They brought that up ALL THE TIME with Romney.
catclub
@SiubhanDuinne: facetious ..ly.
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne:
For fun I read the personal ads in the London Review of Books.
WaterGirl
@Pogonip: So sorry to hear about your mom, Pogonip.
Omnes Omnibus
@Pogonip: My condolences.
Cain
I’m pretty sure that Obama can drink JBush under the table. Probably had a lot more practice drinking over the past 7 years.
Pogonip
Thanks for the condolences, folks. She actually died the day after Thanksgiving, but since most of the mourners were over 70 we held the memorial service in the spring so they wouldn’t have to contend with winter.
WaterGirl
@Pogonip: It was kind of you guys to have the service nearly 5 months later to accommodate the older folks. I hope that didn’t make it too tough on you.
Pogonip
@WaterGirl: No, not at all; she had requested cremation, so there was no hurry.
WaterGirl
@Pogonip: I was thinking more of the emotional side of things than the practical side. In any case, glad to know it wasn’t as tough as I feared it might have been for you.
Pogonip
@WaterGirl: Thank you! She’d been failing for a long time so we were well prepared.
PaulW
Go ahead and cancel your subscription to the Times. They’re not worth it.
HinTN
“Cancel my subscription to the resurrection,
Send my credentials to the house of detention…”
NotoriousJRT
I crave a political scene with no Bushes in power or seeking power or even thinking about seeking power.
jonas
@Violet:
Once you’re over 45 or so and lose a significant amount of weight, it really shows — your skin’s not as elastic as it used to be and it just ages you. I remember being shocked at seeing Drew Carey a few years ago after he shed 50-60 lbs. and it aged him 10 years easy.
ETA — I don’t mean of course that people aren’t better off losing weight if it’s a problem. But beyond a certain age, it’s just going to show more in your face and elsewhere.
Cervantes
How can you tell it’s a casual use in this case?
shortstop
This is one of those perfectly crafted little Cole posts that just makes my day.
shortstop
@Violet: In general, two pounds a week is considered safe and healthy. Beyond that you’re in danger of losing muscle.
fuckwit
That paper sucks balls.
Also, “tea sipping” is stupid and incorrect. They don’t even fact check their snark anymore?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Honey_Ale
For the fucking fuck of fuck’s sake. God damn. Obama brews his own fucking beer, like a proper microbrew beer geek, and the goddamned New York Times calls him a tea-totaler.
blueskies
Wait — what? You subscribe?
I didn’t know people still did that.