“Bill, I know football, man”

I spent the hours before the Super Bowl stuffing wings in my mouth as fast as I could, so I missed this Fox News interview with Barack Obama conducted by Bill O’Reilly. That’s probably just as well, since the sight of me sputtering wing bits onto the screen was best left for, um, the first interception.* A lot of people are afraid to interrupt the President of the United States so they can finish his sentence, but O’Reilly is not a lot of people. He is one irritatingly smug person, who responds to an invitation to the White House by saying “I don’t want to ruin the party for you guys” and routinely follows the President’s opinion by offering his own. After Obama finishes explaining his position on the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in a representative Egyptian government, O’Reilly adds, “Those are some bad boys. I wouldn’t want those guys anywhere near the government.” Somehow, the President manages not to say, “Maybe that’s why no one ever elected you to do anything, you jackanapes.” The whole interview is a study in restraint, except for one moment near the end. After he has been accused of socialism—after he has been told that his close friends think his personality has changed and asked if it bothers him that people hate him—the President loses his composure when O’Reilly suggests that he doesn’t understand football.

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Friday links! Multimedia edition

At the risk of using my blog to tell people about other people who looked at my work, thereby causing the entire narcissism manifold to collapse upon itself, our stupid zombie video has more than a quarter million views since Monday. That officially makes it the most popular thing I have ever written.* It also makes me think this internet video thing might be catching on. As a producer and consumer of web bullshit, I tend inordinately toward text for one simple reason: working in a medium that 98% of the population considers important only to schoolchildren obviates the question of whether you’re doing a good job. You can write anything after the first 200 words, because by then the only people reading are those who identify with the act of reading itself and therefore like whatever. It’s like dating a drama girl. Anywhom, this week’s link roundup is chock full of videos, self-portraits, candid recordings and other proof that words are lame. It also contains the word “faggot” like fifty times. It’s Friday!

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

Before you get too excited, Michele Bachmann does not figure directly in the content of this post. Today’s post is about a poll, which subject poses a perennial problem in choosing a snappy header image. Polls look boring. This picture of Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, looks the opposite of boring, in that the longer you look at it the more hilarious it becomes. Try it. Are you imagining circus noises? A steadily growing pile of peanut shells? I have decided to make today’s poll part of an ongoing series, in which we examine visually uninteresting clues as to what we can know about being Michele Bachmann. I call it Meanwhile, Inside Michele Bachmann’s Head, and it’s happening now so you tacitly accept it.

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What is Sarah Palin now?

She’s not a politician, exactly—she quit her job as governix of Alaska, and that whole second-in-line-for-the-presidency thing mercifully remained conjecture—yet all she talks about is politics. Normally that would make her a commentator, but her public statements are not really, um,  up to the standards of the field. Palin’s pronouncements combine brevity and vagueness in a manner that suggests she’s not trying to convert us to her position so much as convert us to her. When she says that health care policy must strengthen American values, it’s not an argument so much as an answer. So far, Palin’s priority as a commentator seems to be to make her own position clear in relation to everybody else’s, albeit in the most infuriatingly abstract way possible. That agenda seems doubly odd, since we already know what she thinks before she says it: Sarah Palin agrees with the Republican Party. Still, she seems aligned with but not quite of the GOP, perhaps because the bulk of her rhetoric is not for anything; she’s just against President Obama. Consider her most recent piece in the National Review, in which she argues that the President’s recent support for expanded oil and gas drilling is just a trick. When one of her stated nemeses agrees with her, she refines her position in order to renew the dichotomy. In the past, we’ve criticized her for not having any ideas, but that isn’t really fair. In her present incarnation, Sarah Palin doesn’t need ideas, because the idea is herself. As David Carr suggests in today’s Times, Sarah Palin is a brand.

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Feldblum “story” captures the transcendent genius of Fox News

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appointee Chai Feldblum, who got her Gmail address without having to add any numbers or anything.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last week, completely cut off from television, the internet, talk radio, newspapers, Twitter, coffee shop conversation and the mumblings of homeless people now, you’ve probably heard about Chai Feldblum. No? Obama’s controversial recess appointment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission whose support for gay rights makes her a terrifying mystery to mainstream America? Ring a bell? Anything? That’s weird, because according to Fox News, the Obama Labor Pick’s Support For Gay Rights Worries Conservatives. Props to Ben “Yes, Folds—I Am Telling You an Anecdote That Rests On My Being Friends With Ben Folds” Fowlkes for the link. Just who these conservatives are or how Fox News became aware of the story that is their worry remains unclear, but that sort of vague sourcing is Fox’s modus operandi. It’s also the secret to the network’s genius fusion of editorial and news.

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