The very serious John Harris, who co-runs the Politico with his lover, Pulitzer committe member Jim VandeHei is now writing 1200 word pieces about what Obama staffers wear (Instaputz):
When two White House aides last weekend stripped off their shirts for an afternoon of drinking with friends at a Georgetown bar, there was widespread agreement that it exposed something — beyond the pectorals of speechwriter Jon Favreau and press aide Tommy Vietor — about Washington in the age of Barack Obama.
There was no agreement about what that something was.
Conservative critics said it showed the young Obama crowd needs to get a clue. By these lights, the bare-chested drinking showed the aides acting like — and, thanks to a photo posted on the Web, looking like — frat boys in the midst of two wars and the Gulf oil spill.
[snip]
Erick Erickson on conservative RedState.com complained of a double standard, claiming that a similar picture of Bush White House aides would have sparked a huge uproar.
How many MoDo columns is this story good for?
The Grand Panjandrum
Maybe they should show pics of similar aged US troops blowing off steam. A wild guess tells me you see a lot of bare chested guys acting like frat boys. Imagine that, a bunch of 20-somethings acting like … 20-somethings! Holy shit! Call out the fucking cultural warriors and the 101st Chairborne twelve donut eating fat asses like Son of Erick.
Pete
Seven. Seven MoDo columns
And about two months of conniptions from Greenwald.
El Cid
Their town has been turned upside down. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president. He came in here and he trashed the place… and it’s not his place.
The Grand Panjandrum
@El Cid: Kinda like Bill Clinton did. Wasn’t that his real offense? At least in the eyes of the Villagers?
Maude
Thank heavens Rush doesn’t participate in this.
El Cid
@The Grand Panjandrum: It was a direct quote from Sally Quinn’s infamous column, the last sentence being a direct quote from centrist fetishist David Broder.
cleek
get ready for a lot more of this. picking on a weakened administration is what the gossip girls of the imperial court love the most.
Keith G
Are VandeHei and Harris actually gay?
Cuz if they are, I am tearing up my membership card and demanding a refund.
El Cid
Michael Smerconish, in a column for the Washington Post, in an attempt to talk about how left & right talk radio & TV are cutting out the ‘middle’, gives some interesting insight into how major TV discussion shows totally don’t attempt to shape the national discourse, because that would be weirdo conspiracy theory.
Unfortunately he accepted Campbell Brown’s argument that she left CNN because she focused on ‘real’ news and CNN is now doing more politically motivated discussion than ‘real’ news, when the reality is few watched her show and it was filled with the same exact monotonous repetition of establishment talking points as is the so-called “real” news on CNN.
ts
hmmmm. That instaputz link has a balloon juiceian quality to it!
Nick
@El Cid: Smerconish just confirmed something I’ve been saying here for over a year.
Ash Can
Hey, this stuff is very important. Just ask Sally Quinn.
El Cid
@Nick: No he didn’t. That’s a conspiracy theory. You’re a fringe nut. Discussion programs just reflect what their viewers want to hear, which is confirmed by the fact that their viewers see what the producers give them as discussions. I know this because this is what TV and radio and newspaper companies say. And of course they’re the ones who know and their opinions are correct.
Xero
and buried on the third page:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So now–now? after ten. fucking. years?– we’re going to start talking addressing the question of young politicos (no pun intended) going to war? Now that Patrick McHenry and the Romney boys are too old to serve? And I guess John Favreau has the secret technology to clean up the spill?
ruemara
So they should have stood around in soaked shirts?
…
Can’t this publication die already?
Violet
@Xero:
And imagine if one of them had been female and had got caught in the rainstorm. In a bar…wet t-shirt… I’m sure all those very well behaved Villagers would keep their gutter-brained thoughts to themselves.
Cat Lady
Of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to Nitwit Erickson to direct criticism at the fucking Politico for RUNNING AN IDIOTIC STORY ABOUT 20-SOMETHINGS WITH THEIR SHIRTS OFF WHO AREN’T RESPONSIBLE FOR DOING ANYTHING ABOUT two wars and an oil spill.
They’re all cheap whores in a circle jerk. All of them.
Scott
Another time, a Fox News producer invited me to appear on a program to discuss then-candidate Barack Obama. I was told they were “looking for someone who would say he’s cocky and that his cockiness will hurt him, if not in the primary, definitely in the general election against McCain.” I declined. A few hours later, the same producer made a new pitch: “What about a debate off the top of the show on whether or not Hillary is trustworthy? We have someone who says she is and we’re looking for someone who says she isn’t.”
Surely I’m not the only person who’d tell them, “Yeah, I’ll say Obama’s cocky,” then turn around and say the opposite once the cameras were on, right? I mean, regardless of political affiliation, when someone’s pushing a crazy narrative that hard, I don’t think I’d be able to resist trying to make ’em look like idiots…
IndieTarheel
@El Cid: Good that Smerconish admitted what most people with IQs above room temperature have known for a while now. Would have been better if he had admitted it WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING instead of three years on.
__
And not holding Mrs. Senor’s departure up as an example of what it was – a failure of the Fox-lite formula among those who weren’t remotely interested in it – took away from the article as well.
jurassicpork
How soon they forget those embarrassing pictures of drunken frat boys at the College Republicans convention…
cincyanon
Those shirtless guys aren’t sacrificing anything for the wars and oil leak. Bush sacrificed candy!* And Laura told him he was sacrificing sex too. Those guys are walking around like they’re off work on a regular Friday. There will never be a regular Friday again! Can’t those guys buy a clue?
*at least he claimed he did despite evidence otherwise.
Daddy-O
Shirtless…? Why didn’t they get kicked out, a la “No shoes, no shirt, no service”?
I mean…every point you’ve made in this post is a good one, DougJ, but the fact remains that if Obama’s speechwriters are drinking in bars with no shirts on their torsos, THAT is newsworthy.
Whether what Politico had to say about it is worth reading is another issue entirely. But they should have at least reported it; it’s just plain WEIRD, bottom line. Who do they think they are–Beowulf?
zmulls
Smerconish has been talking about this for quite some time, both on his radio show and in a recent book. It’s getting attention now because he was invited by the Washington Post to opine on the subject. He’s not a Johnny-come-lately to the point.
Daddy-O
I can see I’m alone in here. Lotta locksteppin’ goin’ on.
I don’t care if they got caught in a rainstorm. Taking off your shirt in public, in a bar, while you’re drinking is not normal, for a White House staffer OR a frat boy 20-something with pecs worth ogling. It ain’t RedState panic time, either, but it’s worth mentioning in ANY news outlet, if it’s discovered.
It’s WEIRD. Yes, if David Frum and Karl Rove did it, I’d want to know about it. Maybe your point is Politico’s asinine coverage of it, but a lot of comments in here are reflexively “What would they say if this happened to BUSH?” and just don’t hold water for me.
Hmph.
noncarborundum
OT, but I notice one of the rotating taglines says “I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.”
Shouldn’t that be “I squirted with Rahm . . . “?
Emma
Daddy-O: I invite you to any bar on a Florida beach OR any bar in Europe/Latin America during World Cup. And yes, I know it’s not the same.
What bothers me is that they’re trying to make these guys sound like a reflection of the whole Administration. Which would be fine by me IF they had held other administrations to the same standards. But they never have and never will. Morals, ethics, and propriety are only lacking in Democratic administrations, don’t you know?
Politico and The Huffington Post are two online magazines that came out of nowhere, well-funded, and pretending to “fair and balanced,” but always manage to stick the knife in the ribs of Democrats when it counts. Strange, that. And yes, I know Ariana is a Democrat and she’s on teevee and everything speaking against Republican blah blah blah. I still reach for the saltshaker if I’m reading The Huffington Post.
Elisabeth
@Emma:
Except this administration should know by now that they are held to a higher standard. I think, personally, that it’s tacky to remove a shirt in a bar in DC (but I”m old and a bit prudish, I guess). If their shirts were soaked perhaps they should have changed their plans or thought abut stopping off to get replacements.
Jon Favreau’s already been in the news for pulling a stupid stunt. He’s 27+ not 17; he and Vietor should have known better.
Bill Section 147
This kind of crap is just another view into the game plan of the folks who consider themselves the ruling class. Currently they own the Republican Team. It is evident the narrative the traditional or entrenched media and the power it supports are at this point in our history Republicans with just a slight nod to Democrats who actually have power. There is no longer a conservative, middle, liberal matrix on the Republican side. They are no longer a political group in the sense that politics is compromise. The metric they use is war. They do not want any philosophy or value outside of their team winning. And their team is now made of the players on top and their toadies and cronies. Over the last thirty years they have crushed any meaningful discourse in their own party.
This is just part of their shitstorm approach to war. Throw anything and everything at the wall as fast and as hard as you can. Something sticks and the longer it sticks the more you direct at the sticky spot. The actual event is meaningless. Whether it is salad, mustard or shirts, it is just poo to fling.
The Republicans also know that their ass is covered. They know there are enough megaphones who will push what they are saying today and ignore anything they said yesterday or any action they have taken over the last thirty years if it is inconvenient to today’s narrative. Sometimes it isn’t even as long as today. John Boehner says tax payers will bail out BP but that sounds too close to what he actually meant so it gets rewritten and re-said as something which will be palatable. Then the media, which enables the narrative change, accuses itself of liberal gotcha politics. Oh and look! Shirtless men.
Hal
But in all seriousness, this is the best criticism they can come up with? It makes conservatives seem more unhinged than normal. When the vast majority of people give a great, big collective “meh” to the job offer non-story, somehow I don’t see them going cuckoo over a bunch of 20 somethings in a bar with their shirts off.
kay
@Cat Lady:
Exactly. I can say this about the media, right? They’re covering people who take their shirts off ?
In the middle of two wars and an oil spill?
I continue to insist they are rigidly conventional people, media. It must be valued above all else in that profession. They have no tolerance for any kind of deviation from some imagined “norm”. It’s why they freak out completely at “gaffes” and insist that any unplanned utterance will have huge and damning consequences.
The members of my small town Rotary Club would laugh at this, if it was mentioned at all. Media are more rigid and stodgy than the “middle Americans” they claim to represent. It has to be self-selecting. There’s no other explanation for how consistent it is.
cleek
@Daddy-O:
i’m with ya.
it is weird, and stupid.
it’s also weird and stupid to try to read any larger political message into it. but it’s just impossible to deny that it’s weird and stupid for people with that kind of professional stature to act like like that. no matter how wet they are.
liberty60
Yes, of course the breathless story here is that staffers goofed around like 20-somethings.
NOT that leading political reporters goofed around like giddy schoolchildren with same staffers, fawning over access to the levers of power.
Uh-uh. Not at all. Lets not peek behind THAT curtain.
kay
They liked Bush because they knew his daddy. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.
Clinton went through this same bizarre hazing process. They simply don’t have much use for outsiders.
Which is hysterical, because they all pretend to be Middle Americans. God forbid a middle American should actually try to mix with them. That’s a “gaffe” all by itself.
moe99
@El Cid:
This goes all the way back to the Carter administration when something untoward was done by one of Carter’s top two administrative aides at a bar. I think it was Hamiltron Jordan but don’t have the time to google and find it out. Jody Powell was a bit more straight laced.
Emma
Elizabeth: Perhaps. And perhaps he knew he would be crucified no matter what he did so he decided to hell with it.
My problem with all of this is that we are ourselves giving the tut-tutters power over us. “He should know better” translates into “live your life in such a way that the Republicans have no reason to complain about you” while all the time knowing that they will complain anyway about everything. So where do you stop? Which part of your life won’t you let them regulate, just in case they bitch in print to some compliant “media personality”?
Sorry for the rant, but I am so tired of Democrats just allowing Republicans to set our standards for us. It’s the abused spouse theory of politics: just don’t give them a reason and they’ll stop. HAH!
I dream of the day some Democrat stands up to these idiots.
Elisabeth
@Emma:
I agree with the larger point but :)
No one would think twice if they’d gone into a bar and had a couple of beers ~ something I’m guessing they’ve done without incident in the past. But, come on, drinking in a bar in DC without a shirt on is, as cleek said above, weird and stupid. Standing up to Republicans over the “shirtsleeves in the Oval Office” or FLOTUS wearing shorts to visit the Grand Canyon or going sleeveless to the not-really-a-SOTU makes much more sense.
The Left’s problem is we don’t see anything wrong with these things so we don’t generally make a stink about it. The Right looks for reasons to be pissed off.
Emma
Elizabeth: You’re right, of course. But :)
The Left’s real problem is that too many of us buy into their anger because we try to assume they mean what they say. We think old fashioned fuddy duddy instead of rat-effin’ son of Atwater. The Left’s default position should be since I know you have something to gain from this, so I’m going to ignore your rant, and by the way, here’s your head on a pike.
There is, somewhere, an honest Republican left, weeping into his whiskey-and-soda. Washington is not the place to look for him. The rank-and-file seems so terrified of the changes happening around them that they cling to what they think the Republican party stands for. And the politicians are power-mad. All they want is to play out their psychosis on the international stage.
Scott Supak
Fun with shirtless Republican Presidents: GHWB, Reagan. Scary, kids.
Daddy-O
@Scott Supak: There’s a picture of Gerald Ford in his swimming trunks swimming around the Internets Tubes someplace, too.
I agree that the important issue here is that GOP is trying to make an issue out of this incredibly stupid story, and to smear the entire White House with it. But it needed to see the light of day, in a way, and whatever the GOP does with it, if they don’t have a REAL issue, they’ll make one up. Paging Karl Rove…
And I consider Arianna’s run for the Governor’s race in CA a stab in the back. She helped kill California with the Terminator, in her own little way. She’s done a lot of good, but I give debits where debit is due, as well as the other way around.
Dr. Squid
So lemme get this straight…
Shirtless staffers raise a huge uproar among conservatives. Bacon-neck Erickson then snivels that there would be a huge uproar if the staffers were Bush staffers, creating a double standard.
I was not aware that similar conditions producing similar responses was a double standard. Someone needs to get a dictionary and read it some time.
However being a conservative, Bacon-neck won’t read it, because reading is for liberals. He’d prefer to be too stupid to breathe. Either that or he’s a raging hypocrite who believes that it’s evil to hold his boys to any standard at all, while the rest of the world has to live with the standards he imposes.
Yep, that’s it. Usually when given the choice between stupid and evil, I go with stupid. But Erick Erickson? He’s just evil.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Daddy-O:
I agree. Taking one’s shirt off in a bar should reflect badly on one.
Um. Did you notice the referent there? If a person takes his (or her) shirt off in a bar, it should reflect badly on him (or her). Not on his (or her) boss.
Now, if, next week, those same staffers were shirtless in a bar again, and then, the same staffers (or, hell, *other* staffers) were shirtless in a bar, *that* would reflect badly on the boss. Because sometimes, appearances do matter, once tongues start wagging.
As for Mr. Erickson, the should-be-brown-eyed, Bush was able to schlep protesters off to designated free-speech zones. If an uproar occurs in a forest where no one hears it, does anyone give a damn?
Bill Arnold
The first thing that came to mind when reading this was the episode where Dick Cheney and buddies had some drinks and then went out to shoot game on a game farm and Dick Cheney had an oops…
Somehow this was OK, since the friend who owned the face that was mistaken for a bird apologized to Dick Cheney.
(That was the story at the time, which I assume was roughly true and in any event was what the media was describing, though drinking part has been denied.)
I think it was fear – the press was afraid of the GWBush administration.
scarshapedstar
Yeah, but then Bush would have given them Presidential Medals of Freedom and/or appointed them as US Attorneys.
PLEASURIN’ THE PRESIDENT!
JL
Harris is a schmuck, with the asshole mentality of the nitwits who criticized Obama for removing his jacket and working in shirt sleeves while in the Oval Office. Remember that one?
asiangrrlMN
@Bill Arnold: I like your comparison. Yes, it’s weird to remove your shirt in a bar for whatever reason, but I don’t give a shit. If the bar didn’t have problems with it, then who cares? Shooting one’s friend in the face, on the other hand, that’s just plain gauche.
Allison W.
This whole issue is stupid. I don’t care whether these guys are Dems or Repubs – I. Don’t. Care. The rest of America doesn’t care. Political bloggers, readers, DC, and the media seem to be trapped in a bubble where things like are bigger than they appear.
This crap is not important, not even in the slightest.
Allison W.
And removing your shirt in a bar is not weird. bars are where people let loose. What bars do you guys go to?
Cat Lady
@Allison W.:
Srsly. Old Glory, the Very Serious Bar subject of the fauxrage, is a BBQ rib place for GW and Georgetown kids. It’s not the fucking Oak Room.
TuiMel
@kay: