Whatever It Is, Blame Obama

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The recent spate of stories coming out of the NFL regarding domestic violence, child abuse and other nastiness on the home front has led to a great deal of soul-searching and debate across this country.

What is the cause of all of this? Does our culture’s adoration of professional athletes lead them to believe they can get away with anything? Is it a symptom of some deeper societal problem?

To the right wing, however, the answer is clear, as it always is when the question “Who or what should we be angry at for this?” is raised. That answer is: President Barack Obama.

Fox News-harpy Andrea Tantaros, for example, leapt right to the attack after the now-infamous tape surfaced showing Ray Rice punching his then-fiancee’s lights out.

“I wanna know, where is the president on this one?” fumed Tantaros from inside the cloud of peevishness that enshrouds her at all times. “My question is, and not to bring it back to politics, but this is a White House that seems to bring up a ‘war on women’ every other week.”

Yeah, Andrea. We certainly wouldn’t want to bring it back to politics.

Meanwhile, washed-up actor Kevin Sorbo (of “Hercules” and “Andromeda” fame) tried to kick-start his new career as a right-wing wacko celeb (a la Ted Nugent, Adam Baldwin and Kirk Cameron) by going on Fox and parroting the same line.

“There’s no accountability in the White House with Benghazi, the IRS and all that kind of stuff,” he explained. “How do we expect to have accountability with something like a professional football team?”

The National Review’s Jim Geraghty went even further. He blamed not only the NFL’s failure to act promptly on the Rice scandal, but a laundry list of other bad things, on “The Obama Era of American Leadership.”

Those bad things ranged from GM’s recall of 2.6 million cars with defective ignition switches, to the chemical spill in West Virginia that poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 people, to NBC’s decision to hire Chelsea Clinton for “$600,000 a year for three years.” (I’m still scratching my head over why he’s so cheesed off about that last one.)

As I’ve pointed out before in this column, the right has even found ways to blame Barack Obama for the failed response to Hurricane Katrina (which occurred three years before Obama’s first election win); the recession that began the year before he took office; and high oil prices before the 2008 election.

Back in March of this year, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (who used to seem like a pretty smart lady) blamed Obama for “dictators like Bashar al-Assad in Syria (who came to power in 2000) and Vladimir Putin in Russia (who first became president of that country in 1999).”

It’s a time-honored technique. Make your gripes about “leadership” or “tone-setting” broad enough, and you can blame the president for just about everything:

“I’m sorry, ma’am, we know you came in for a tonsillectomy, but we, um, amputated your left leg. We blame Obama’s lack of leadership. Gee, thanks, Obama!”

“Yeah, Your Honor, I beat up an elderly African-American storekeeper and robbed his cash register. If Obama hadn’t inflamed racial tensions by commenting on the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, I wouldn’t have been so angry. Gee, thanks, Obama!”

“Yeah, I showed up three hours late for work, I smell like a distillery, and there’s an unconscious stripper in the back seat of my car in the parking lot. I’ve just been really depressed lately over Obama’s lack of accountability. Oh, I’m fired? Gee, thanks, Obama!”

And so on.

Sadly, it’s not just the right-wingers who blame Obama for everything. Far too many on the left are prone to what blogger Oliver Willis has dubbed “Green Lantern Liberalism”: the idea that, like the nearly omnipotent comic book character, the president could create all the things they want — single-payer health care, banking reform, minimum wage increases — through the sheer force of his will if he just wanted it enough.

Thankfully, the president isn’t omnipotent. He can’t travel through time. He’s not responsible for domestic violence, chemical spills, the fact that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are brutal thugs, or the fact that the Middle East is the same tangled mess it’s been for more than 2,000 years.

He’s not responsible for Republican obstructionism or the weak-kneed Democrats who fear it. That’s just the hand he was dealt, and he’s playing it pretty well, despite the silliness of the far right and their lapdog news network.

Is Hillary Clinton a Replicant? Some Say Yes, Some Say No...

You know, if I was to tell you in these pages that a Republican politician was contesting his loss in a primary election on the grounds that his victorious opponent was, in fact, dead and being impersonated by a synthetic body double, you’d probably roll your eyes and go “he’s gone too far this time. That doesn’t even work as satire.” 

Well, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s actually true. In Oklahoma’s 3d District, Timothy Ray Murray, whose website [now taken down] describes him as a “human, born in Oklahoma,” got himself roundly shellacked in the primary by the incumbent, Rep Frank Lucas, with Murray taking a mere 5.2% of the vote to Lucas’ 82.8%. You’d think this would be a knockout blow to Murray’s campaign “to help bring House leadership back to traditional values.” But wait, Murray says, not so fast. “It is widely known,” Murray asserts in a press release addressed to “News Person”, that “Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed [sic] by a look alike.” Poor Frank met his end, it seems, on a “white stage” in Southern Ukraine, where he and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members” were executed by hanging at the hands of (of course) The World Court. This rendered Lucas ineligible to serve on account of being, as noted above, dead.  

This is not the sort of thing a “traditional values” guy like Murray is going to take lying down. “I will NEVER,” he promises, “use Artificial Intelligence look alike [sic] to voice what The Representative’s Office is not doing nor own a robot look alike.” Well, I know I’m reassured. 

In truth, Timothy Ray Murray may have done a huge favor for the Raving Nutter Wing of the Republican Party (aka “the base”). Now that birtherism has been thoroughly discredited except in the heads of a few sad dead-enders and the grifters who prey on them, maybe the GOP can embrace “make the Democratic candidate prove she’s not a replicant” as their pet lunacy for the next couple of years. 

It can start, as such madness often does, on the Internet. A few well-placed posts on a few fringe cites claiming that, say, Hillary Clinton’s “fall in the shower” in December 2012 was actually fatal and that she’s been replaced by a vat-grown flesh-droid with the personalities of Saul Alinsky, Huey P. Newton, and Bill Ayers (preserved on floppy disk by Steve Jobs in 1995) downloaded into its blank consciousness. Gradually, the idea will percolate upwards to the slightly less nutty environs of the right-wing blogosphere, like National Review Online, where someone will observe “of course, Hillary Clinton could just dispel the rumors by providing a DNA sample.” 

After that, it’ll snowball. Fox News will soon be running show after show, with the usual endless parade of outrage-mongers looking into the camera with brows furrowed and demanding “Where’s the DNA?” 

Finally, Clinton will make the mistake of knuckling under and actually providing a sample. Then the blood, so to speak, will really be in the water. Overnight a few dozen self-appointed DNA experts will flood the Internet, insisting that the test is a fake, because, I don’t know, the streaks on the test card are the wrong shade of gray on their computer monitors or something. Nothing will do to prove Clinton’s humanity, the GOP will say, but full genome sequencing. “I’m not saying that Mrs. Clinton is really a replicant,” they’ll say piously, “but I’d like to see the sequencing of all of her chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria.” It won’t matter that that’s something that none of them will have never heard of before the brouhaha. Angry Tea Partiers (as if there are any other kind) will show up at Town Hall meetings with an American flag in one hand and a bag of disreputable looking goo in the other, raging at insufficiently crazy public officials:  "I have a DNA sample here that says I’m human! Why are you people ignoring the chromosomal DNA!?” before they drown out the response by singing “God Bless America.” Finally, Clinton will grit her teeth and undergo the procedure—the results of which will also be denounced as fake by “DNA experts” who failed high school chemistry. And the beat will go on…

Too crazy, you say? Could never happen, you say? I would have said that about birtherism, until it described pretty much the same arc I’ve laid out above. If there’s one thing researching this column has taught me, it’s that there is literally no theory too outlandish for wingnuts and their captive media to promote from fringe to mainstream and no evidence that they’ll accept to refute it. It could happen here…

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. 

Sluice Tundra, Private Eye In: The Bubble People

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I stood in the window of my office, looking down on a street that was as dark as my mood and as empty as my bank account. From somewhere far off, I heard the sound of a lonely saxophone. I felt a rush of melancholy before I realized it was my ringtone.

I fumbled the cheap cellphone out of my pocket. “Sluice Tundra, private eye,” I said.

“Mr. Tundra?” a female voice said.

“That’s what my mom calls me,” I replied.

The woman sounded confused. “She calls you ‘Mr. Tundra?’”

“We’re not a close family,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, Mr. Tundra, please come quickly,” she said.

“What seems to be the matter, Miss …”

“Winger,” she said. “And it’s ‘Mrs.’ It’s about my husband. But I can’t talk about it over the phone.” She gave me an address in a neighborhood that was so upscale that even the trash collectors wore Dolce & Gabbana.

When I got there, she was waiting at the door, dressed in a low-cut dress that was as flimsy as the rationale for restrictive voter ID laws. She led me into a luxurious living room.

The guy seated on the couch looked to be in his early 60s. He was a big man, with a disgruntled expression on a red face that looked as though it had never been gruntled. But that wasn’t the strangest thing about him.

“Mrs. Winger,” I said, “does your husband have some sort of immune disorder?” She just shook her head, so I added, “Then maybe you can explain why he’s inside a bubble.”

“I don’t know!” she cried. “It started last summer. And it’s getting worse.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong guy, sister,” I said. “I’m a private eye, not a doctor. I’m not sure what I can do to help.”

“I talked to several doctors. They don’t know what’s wrong. I just need to know who did this to him.”

I tapped on the bubble. It was hard, like plastic. I leaned over. “Can you hear me in there?” I shouted. It was then I spotted the “Romney 2012” pin on his lapel. I had a feeling I knew what this was about. “Mr. Winger,” I yelled. “You know that Romney lost, right?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his face getting even redder. “But only because the takers outnumber the makers! Obama voters just want people to give them stuff!”

“How do you feel about the liberals opposing the president’s proposed intervention in Syria?”

“What opposition? The left are a bunch of hypocrites for being silent about it! Those dirty leftists won’t say anything bad about Obama! Ever!”

“Hmmm,” I said. I turned to his wife. “What does your husband watch on TV?”

“Why, Fox News, of course,” she replied. “Like everyone else. We have it on all the time.”

“And does he listen to the radio?”

“Only conservative talk radio,” she said proudly, adding, “like everyone else.”

I straightened up. “Mrs. Winger, your husband is trapped in the Conservative Bubble. He only watches or listens to things that confirm what he already believes, even if those beliefs have squat-all to do with reality. Like this idea that leftists aren’t speaking up against war in Syria. A lot of them are. Michael Moore, Juan Cole, Markos Moulitsas …”

“Who?”

“See, that’s a sign of being a Bubble Person,” I said. “You complain a lot about what ‘leftists’ say or do, but you really don’t know of any. If you did, you’d know that there’s a lot of arguing on the left about Syria, and a lot of the people arguing oppose intervention.”

“Well, why aren’t the liberal media reporting that, then?” she demanded. “And why are Barack Obama and John Kerry for war in Syria?”

“Maybe because the media aren’t really liberal,” I said. “They never saw a Middle East war they didn’t cheerlead. At least until it goes bad, which it usually does. As for Secretary Kerry and President Obama? On their most ‘leftist’ day, they’re moderates. But you won’t hear that inside the Fox News/talk radio bubble.”

“Well,” she said, her own face beginning to take on the same red shade as her husband’s. “I can see you’re just another one of those people who’ve drunk the Obama Kool-Aid.” As she spoke, the air around her began to shimmer. She was developing a bubble of her own.

“Sorry, lady,” I said. “You asked who did this to him? He did. And now you’re doing it to yourself. There’s nothing I can do for you. I’ll send you a bill for my time.”

I left, headed back to the mean streets, knowing I had as much chance of getting paid as a North Carolina teacher has of getting a pay raise. Some people you just can’t reach.

White Crime: Where's the Celebrity Outrage?

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George Zimmerman was acquitted of the charge of murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by a jury of his peers. You would think that, for at least a little while, that verdict might calm the resentment and incessant claims of victimhood by some of my fellow white Americans.

You’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

Certain members of the most privileged race in the most privileged society on this planet just don’t seem to be happy unless they’re pretending to be members of an oppressed class.

The most recent and most noxious manifestation of this is the way they’ve begun treating every crime involving an African-American or Latino. “Why doesn’t President Obama (or Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson) comment on (insert name of crime here)?” they grouse. “He talked about the Trayvon Martin case!” — as if the fact that the president commented on one case that had an emotional effect on him now requires him, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to form a Special Black Flying Squad to jet to the scene of literally every murder in the country and deplore it.

Take, for instance, the tragic case of Chris Lane, the college student and baseball star from Australia who was gunned down Aug. 16 by three teenagers in Oklahoma. This was a horrific and senseless act, made even more so by one of the shooters’ flippant “explanation” that they did it because they were “bored” and “didn’t have anything to do.”

Sadly, just as they did with the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, the American right wing didn’t even wait till the body was cold before they began making hay of the tragedy for political points.

“Where is Obama’s statement about Chris Lane?” asked an Aug. 26 front page article on the conservative website Real Clear Politics. Also on Aug. 26, both Sean Hannity and Fox News hostess Martha MacCallum of “America’s Newsroom” questioned why Obama had “failed to speak out” and accused him of a “double standard” since he’d dared to comment on the Martin case. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said on “Fox News Sunday” that it would be a “nice gesture” if Obama would express condolences.

Well, as it turned out, he already had. “As the president has expressed on too many tragic occasions,” an official White House statement released Aug. 24 said, “there is an extra measure of evil in an act of violence that cuts a young life short. The president and first lady’s thoughts and prayers are with Chris Lane’s family and friends in these trying times.”

Not that you saw or heard that on Faux News. Nor is there any chance that such a statement, even with its mention of an “extra level of evil,” will placate the haters. Nothing will. The president could dress in sackcloth, sit in the ashes, and renounce his status as an African-American, and it still wouldn’t be enough self-abasement to satisfy those suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome.

It’s not that they’re racist, you see; it’s just that the fact that the president once mentioned that he’s a black man, too, causes them to lose their freaking minds whenever they think about it.

By the way, I’m sure Chris Lane’s family is deeply moved by the right’s heartfelt concern for them, expressed as it was in their immediate use of their family member as the poster child for white butthurt.

Later, it turned out that one of the three teenagers charged in the killing is white, which raises the question: Which white celebrity is responsible for speaking out against whites killing people? After all, if black politicians and celebrities are required to comment on every murder involving a black suspect, shouldn’t the same apply to white suspects? Who is responsible for deploring them?

I nominate washed-up rocker Ted Nugent. Since Mitt Romney avidly courted the support of the talent who gave us such musical gems as “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and “Yank Me Crank Me,” and since the Nuge has announced that he himself has considered running for the GOP presidential nomination, I think only he has the gravitas and the Republican street cred to be called upon to weigh in every time a white person is involved in a crime.

After all, like the president, he did comment extensively on the Trayvon Martin case, calling Martin a “gangsta wannabe” who “got justice.”

That’s the criteria, right? Comment on the Martin case, and you become responsible for commenting on every crime committed that involves a member of your race from then on. So c’mon, Nuge. Speak up about the white guy. I mean, fair’s fair. Right?

Benghazi: No Magic Bullet

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You know, there are a lot of legitimate concerns that could be raised about what happened on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, when our popular ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans were killed by a group that attacked and sacked the U.S. consulate there.

Was it a mistake to have so much of the consulate's security provided by local forces and a nearby group of CIA employees, rather than, say, the U.S. Marines? Should we have had a military response force located close enough to get there more quickly?

Republicans, however, seem to be determined to ignore these very real questions. This may be because "since gaining the majority in 2011, House Republicans have voted to reduce embassy security funding by approximately half a billion dollars below the amounts requested by the Obama administration."

That language comes from a report issued by the very committee investigating the attacks and the U.S. response to them. "You have to prioritize things," shrugged Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, one of the lawmakers who voted to cut funds for embassy security - and who's now helping to lead the committee.

Well, that's true, and it's become crystal clear what the Republican priorities are: not getting at the truth, but desperately trying to find their "magic bullet," the scandal that will bring down the man they love to hate.

All of their previous attempts - Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the DOJ's settlement of a Bush-era civil action against the New Black Panther Party - none of these have managed to gain any traction. But this! This, they thought, was going to be the one.

Mitt Romney got the ball rolling. Before the bodies were cold, he was releasing critical statements in the mendacious and fact-free style that characterized the entire campaign. He accused Obama of expressing "sympathy" for the attackers and for responding to the attacks by "apologizing for our values." The fact that the president had done no such thing didn't matter to Lord Romney, whose disdain for the President was only exceeded by his disdain for the truth.

In the days leading up to the election, Benghazi became the right-wing obsession. Mention anything, anything at all, and they'd start yelling at the top of their lungs that "Obama lied about Benghazi."

"Obama is leading in the swing states ..."

"HE'S LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI!"

"The heads of the car companies say Romney's lying about moving auto jobs to China ..."

"THAT'S NOT AS BAD AS OBAMA LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI!"

"Would you like another piece of toast?"

"I BET OUR AMBASSADOR IN BENGHAZI WOULD HAVE LIKED TOAST, BUT OBAMA MURDERED HIM, THEN LIED TO COVER IT UP!"

And so on.

But as hearings ramped up and people who actually knew things began to speak, it became more and more obvious that there really was no scandal there. No one, as the conspiracy theorists claimed at first, had told U.S. forces to "stand down" rather than help the beleaguered ambassador. President Obama had immediately referred to the attacks as an act of terror, despite Romney's brazen attempt to lie about it at the second debate.

Then things just got silly. Sen. John McCain skipped a closed-door briefing about Benghazi to hold a press conference demanding more information about Benghazi. He threatened to hold up a hypothetical nomination for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, because, he said, Rice "lied" about the motives behind the attack.

As it turns out, however, the "lies" Ambassador Rice were supposedly telling were actually information given to her by the CIA and vetted by "seven, eight, nine different agencies" before being approved in final form, again by the CIA. At least that's what Rep. Peter King described as the testimony from scandal-plagued former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.

This led to some rumblings that Petraeus' recent sex scandal arose out of some attempt by the administration to blackmail him. That line of attack went nowhere, probably because it made no sense. Then there was a claim that the White House had changed the ambassador's "talking points" to take out references to al-Qaida and make themselves look better.

This was immediately shot down by the office of the director of national intelligence in an interview with CNN, leaving poor Honorable John nothing left to gripe about but the fact that he had to see his hoped-for scandal shot to pieces on CNN.

As this scandal-that-isn't fades away, to become just another one of the Zombie Lies the right trots out again and again no matter how many times it's debunked, what's next?

Will President Obama be blamed for the death of the Twinkie? Will some small detail of the White House Christmas tree lead to outraged calls for his impeachment?

Stay tuned.

Insanity Is The Most GENEROUS Explanation

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Thirty-three times in 18 months.

 That’s how many times the Republican-controlled House has voted to repeal all or part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they call “Obama-care”), even though they know that such a measure is doomed to fail in the Senate.

Even if such a bill through some miracle managed to somehow survive the Senate, it would certainly be vetoed by President Barack Obama. The most recent vote came this past Wednesday.

I’ve often said that a key quirk in the wingnut psyche is the absolutely unshakeable conviction that if something fails repeatedly, it’s because they just didn’t ram their heads against the wall hard enough. “The economy crashed despite big tax cuts? That just means we need more tax cuts to grow the economy!” And so on.

There’s a fine line between perseverance and insanity, and Cryin’ John Boehner and his merry band of fools crossed that line so long ago that they can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on the part of the Prince of Orange and his crew. There are some cynics who say that the Republican leadership knew the measure, like the 32 before it, was doomed to fail. There are some who even say that the whole thing was a political stunt.

They say the whole thing’s a ploy to get House members staked out on their positions on the health care reform bill so that those votes could be used against them in the upcoming election, when those impressive voiceover announcers who only seem to surface at election time will be intoning “Congressman Schmendrick voted with Obama” with the type of voice-of-doom gravitas that suggests that they equate that voting record with unqualified support for child molestation.

But that’s hard to believe, don’t you think? I mean, that would make the Republican leadership seem like a bunch of completely politicized hacks who would take one of the 42 remaining days they’ve allotted themselves until the end of the year to address the people’s business and use it for the sole purpose of creating sound bites.

That would be a crassly cynical act by a party that’s decided to abandon the idea of addressing any real progress on jobs, immigration, national security, energy independence or any substantive issue at all, a party whose one and only priority is not governing, but winning.

That can’t really be it, can it? I mean, I know that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said was his party’s “No. 1 priority” a while back, but he was joking, right? Because that would make them seem pretty useless to the average American.

No, I’ve got to go with insanity here. Another indicator that the Republicans are suffering from some sort of mental breakdown is the things they say about the ACA that are completely divorced from the reality of the actual bill.

Quotes like Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Obamacare puts the government between you and your doctor.” Or his claim that “Obamacare means 20 million American will lose the health insurance they have and want to keep.”

Or the oft-repeated claim, most recently seen in an ad from one of those shadowy anonymous SuperPACs attacking Florida Sen. Ben Nelson, that the health care law’s cost will be $2 trillion, “double what we were promised.” Or the claim from Florida Gov. Rick Scott that a company with 20 employees “could go out of business” because of the law’s requirement to buy insurance (even though companies with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from that requirement).

All of these assertions have been rated “false” by the nonpartisan fact-checking site Politifact. The “business with 20 employees” canard from Scott was given the lowest rating for truthfulness: “Pants on Fire.” And yet Republicans keep repeating these and other proven falsehoods over and over and over again.

Now, some people would insist that that means they’re all a pack of liars who have such complete contempt for the American voter that they think you’ll believe anything.

To believe they’re not seriously delusional would mean that they believe, as Adolf Hitler stated in “Mein Kampf,” that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world.”

And that can’t be right. They can’t really think that way. Can they?

It Won't Make Any Difference to the Zombie Liars

Slashdot Science Story | Climategate's Final Days

"Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."

Not that this will stop the climate change deniers from bringing up "Climategate" as "proof" that global climate change is a "fraud." Just like the alleged ACORN "pimp videos" are still being trotted out as "evidence" that the organization is up to some ill-defined, but nefarious plotting at the behest of George Soros, or Nancy Pelosi, or someone, even though not one but two investigations found that the videos had been "heavily edited" and that the organization, while having some flaws in its management, had done nothing wrong.

We live in the age of the Zombie Lie, where misinformation never dies.

You, Too Can Be a Right-Wing Pundit!

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Hey there, loyal readers! Out of work? Retirement fund tanking? Worried about your future?

Well, have I got a job for you! The people who brought you the Dusty Rhoades Serious Professional Journalists School are back, bringing you the Dusty Rhoades School for Right-Wing Punditry! Take your place alongside the true giants of wingnut commentary, people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, or even Papa Bear himself, Bill O'Reilly!

Just follow a couple of simple steps and you, too can be one of the Professionally Outraged!

Step One: Find something, anything, that President Obama or some other prominent alleged "liberal" does. It doesn't matter if it's something that every other president in recent memory has done.

Take, for instance the fact that, at recent events, President Barack Obama has used a teleprompter for some of his prepared remarks. It doesn't matter that George Dubbya Bush used a teleprompter (his even had to have some words spelled out phonetically so he could pronounce them, according to a story by Reuters News agency). Bush's daddy used a teleprompter, as did Bill Clinton. Even Ronald Reagan, who was known as The Great Communicator, used a teleprompter.

But if you're going to be a successful right-wing pundit, none of this matters. You can't let facts get in the way of...

Step Two: OUTRAGE! Whatever factoid you've picked, no matter how silly or trivial it is, has to be (1) Proof Positive That Barack Obama is the Antichrist, (2) A Sign of the Imminent Fall of Western Civilization to Hordes of Scary Brown People, or (3) Yet Another Sign That the Liberal Media Are In the Tank For Obama.

It's that simple!

Here's a helpful hint: It's always good if you can work in the phrase "change we can believe in" in a sarcastic manner. You don't even have to be clever or witty. All you have to do, really, is repeat the phrase. Example: "President Obama uses a teleprompter. Change we can believe in."

See how easy that is? It gives the illusion of wit, but requires no thought at all! Don't forget to sneer!

Unfortunately for you, the "Obama is a bad speaker! He's the only president who's had to use a teleprompter!" story is already taken. It's about run its course on the way to becoming another tool in the wingnut commentator's toolbox: The Zombie Lie. It's great for recycling old material.

A Zombie Lie is something that's been refuted over and over. Don't let that worry you! You can raise the lie again and again! That's why it's called a Zombie Lie! You deploy the ZL by reducing it to a one-liner or a stupid nickname that you then drop randomly into other discussions.

Example: In any discussion of former Vice President Al Gore, or of global warming, be sure to mention (with a sneer, of course) that "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet." It's been repeatedly shown that he never said that. But that's the beauty of the Zombie Lie: Truth can't kill it. So a year from now, you can call Obama "President Teleprompter" and the Zombie Lie will live again.

For the aspiring wingnut pundit, material is everywhere. Suggested topics: Barack Obama claims to be a man of the people, but lives in a very large house with a cook and a security staff; Obama has demanded an airplane for his personal use; or Obama's dog is some kind of "exotic" breed, not a good American dog at all.

Of course, these are just the basics. To learn more, you'll have to take our eight-week program, where you'll learn such techniques as: responding to even the mildest criticism by freaking out and crying that your free speech rights are being threatened; brushing aside inconvenient facts by irrelevant and insulting references to Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, and Sean Penn; and, of course, blaming Bill Clinton for everything that happened from the dawn of history up until January 20, 2009, and blaming Barack Obama for everything that's happened after that date.

You also get free brain surgery at graduation to remove every memory of the past eight years. That way, you can squeal with indignation at "hateful liberal name-calling," blissfully ignorant that you sat on your butt and did nothing while people who dared disagree with the government spent that entire time being reviled as "traitors" and "anti-American."

Sign up today! Call 1-800-WINGNUT. Operators are standing by!