The Old Eighteen

Separated at birth?

One of the individuals pictured above is a foul, hideous monster with no soul, and the other one is the Cryptkeeper.  Can you guess which is which?  Hint: the Cryptkeeper is not the one who got caught stealing Percocet and Vicodin from her own charity.

Laura Bush may have her flaws, but she at least has the decency not to participate in the right-wing attempts at sliming Michelle Obama.  Don't fuck with Michelle, Cindy.

Fox News, the Der Stürmer of American media

During their latest two-minute hate against Michelle Obama yesterday, Fox News reached a new low even by their own degraded standards, crossing over the line into overt racism and sexism:

Leave it to Fox to resurrect the ugly spectre of sexism just as it was fading from view. Via Salon, this evening, Fox ran a segment to remind its viewers why they should hate Michelle Obama. But they apparently weren't satisfied with the usual batch of distortions and lies, so they decided to unload a blatantly racist and sexist slur on the wife of the Democratic nominee. As Michelle Malkin and Fox anchor Megyn Kelley cordially ranted, a graphic was displayed at the bottom of the screen referring to Senator Obama's wife as his "Baby Mama."

Being someone's "Baby Mama" is slang for being the mother of a man's illegitimate child. According to Urban Dictionary, informal definitions include:

"The mother of a man's child when the parents are not married"

"The mother of one's child. The connotation is that mother and father do not and never did have any relationship beyond being sex partners. Contrast: ex-wife, ex-girlfriend."

"The mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved."

"A term used to define an unmarried young woman (but can be a woman of any age) who has had a child. As mentioned before in another definition, most of the time it is used for when it was simply a sexual relationship, compared to ex-wife or girlfriend. Usually this has a negative connotation, a lot of baby mamas are seen as desperate, gold digging, emotionally starved, shady women who had a baby out of spite or to keep a man. Sometimes they may act like this because of missed child support payments, unfulfilled promises by the father, or convenient sex by the father."

This is about one step away from calling her a 'ho.' It is nothing less than sexist slander, and the connotation, in my opinion, is clearly racist. I would say Fox News should be ashamed, but of course, we all know these people have no shame. Worse yet, I fear this is only the opening salvo of yet another effort to mercilessly smear and slander the wife of a Democratic nominee. We saw it with Theresa Heinz, we saw it with Hillary Clinton, and we saw it with Kitty Dukakis. Yet, year after year, our media allows it to happen. The only question is: how low will they go this time? We now have the beginning of an answer.

If Fox News had been around in the 1930's, they would have been publishing pictures of Jewish people with hooked noses and black sambos with bugged-out eyes and big lips, just like their ideological predecessors at Der Stürmer.  But they can't get away with being that overt these days, so instead they use code words.  Folks, this is going to be a long, ugly election season - we need to be prepared for stuff like this, and have no qualms whatsoever about being as dirty as we need to be in fighting back against it.

Michelle Obama on the Colbert Report

Good stuff.  Barack Obama should reconsider his decision not to appear on the Colbert Report; Michelle looked great the whole time, and I think he would too: