Let the whining begin

If you're anything like me, you might be wondering what the first round of "the Liberal Media is shilling for Obama" was going to be. (First after the inauguration, I mean - I know they've never really shut up about how the media was in the tank for him throughout the campaign either.)

I just found out. Perhaps not surprisingly, it came from one of that odd breed of wingnuts who think Bush's only problem was that he was too liberal. In any case, the issue at hand was Obama's line in his inaugural speech about being the 44th person to take the oath of office. He's really only the 43rd (Grover Cleveland was only one person, after all), and well, if Sarah Palin had said that, why, The Liberal Media would be all over her for how stupid she is!!

For what it's worth, I have always believed we should stop counting Cleveland twice. But right or wrong, that's how it's been done throughout my life and for quite some time before, quite possibly since 1893. I don't recall anybody making an issue of the frequent references to Obama's indisputably stupid predecessor as "Bush 43," or his indisputably arrogant father calling him just "43". (He also reportedly sometimes called him "Quincy," which is at least a bit more clever, but also disrespectful to the best ex-president we ever had, who really does not deserve to be compared to Mr. I-Don't-Recall-Any-Heaviness-Ruining-My-Time-At-Yale. But I digress.) If this is the best the right wing s**t machine can do against Obama, the next four years ought to be a lot of fun. It'll be interesting to see if anybody takes this the least bit seriously. Sad to say, I wouldn't be too surprised if some people do - what else do they have to work with at this point?

My comeback to the above, by the way, was to suggest that Sarah Palin probaby doesn't have the foggiest idea how many presidents there have been. It almost makes you wish someone would ask her..."Oh, well, y'know, I know about the presidents. All of them. I think it was Ronald Reagan who said 'give me liberty or give me death,' you know, and up here in Alaska we take that serious and we take our presidents serious, you know? By golly, I don't care how many presidents there were, I'm runnin' for the future and my children's future!"

By the way, Cleveland's service as president was interrupted in the first place because of a dirty trick that could have taught Karl Rove everything he knows. Somebody duped the British ambassador into endorsing him, which cost him the usually-Democratic Irish American vote in New York, and he won the popular vote but lost the eletoral vote. Lest anybody think the right wing s**t machine and its love for exploiting ethnic tension is a modern-day phenomenon...