Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Julia”

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Of all the creepy things this administration has done, this may be the creepiest.

Here’s the Twitter commentary.

[Afternoon update]

The life of Julia, under Obama and Romney.

[Update a few minutes later]

More milestones from Julia’s “life”:

21 years: After barely completing her high-school degree in her god-awful school, Julia goes looking for a job. There aren’t many, especially for people without college degrees. Julia kicks around the food-service and hospitality industries for a while, and ends up getting a job as a bartender. Even at her relatively low level of income, she pays a host of direct and indirect taxes to help subsidize Obama donors and supporters at politically connected businesses. She can’t quite figure out why President Obama’s pet millionaires and billionaires need her money more than she does.

22 years: After working in the bar for a while, Julia decides she likes it and wants to open her own place. But she’ll need capital to get that done. Under Obama, there is little or no credit available to small entrepreneurs, because we never got around to fixing the problems in the banking system, instead choosing to futz around with things like the disclosures on credit-card offers and micromanaging swipe fees and grandstanding about bonuses. Julia does not open her new business, and she doesn’t hire any other Julias to build, decorate, supply, or staff it.

23 years: Being a bartender, Julia works late at night. Under Obama, the federal government supports laws that make it difficult or impossible for a private citizen to own a gun in many places. Leaving her bar one night, the defenseless Julia is killed in the street. Ironically, the gun used to kill her was sold to a Mexican drug cartel under a program run by President Obama’s Department of Justice.

And of course, President Obama is president for life.

What a huge juicy target for parody.

[Update a while later]

That only took a few hours: the inevitable I Am Julia parody Twitter account.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Yuval Levin:

It’s not just that each of its elements can be easily parodied, it’s that every single one of them is a perfectly common feature of contemporary satire, and the whole thing — right down to the fact that it is a web slideshow that can be very easily aped by countless clever and tech-savvy smart-alecks sitting underemployed in front of computers right now — feels like a joke and yet isn’t.

It’s going to be very very difficult for the purveyors of knowing sarcasm in the hipster-industrial complex to resist this provocation, even though openly mocking Barack Obama will feel uneasy and unnatural at first. And that’s what could make this a genuine misstep for the Obama campaign: Obama’s 2008 campaign was very careful to keep itself on the side of the culture of cool, so that the agents of that culture would turn their guns against John McCain but mostly lay off Obama, even as he offered up embarrassingly vapid nonsense about turning back the oceans. If they begin to make the culture of cool uneasy about Obama, and increasingly comfortable treating him (as it is inclined to treat everyone) as a self-important windbag, they could do serious damage to his standing with precisely the intended audience of the Life of Julia: young liberals, who must turn out in uncharacteristically large numbers if Obama is to have a decent chance of re-election. If those young liberals come to see the president not as a cool modern idealist in on the joke but as a bloviating panderer who buys his own shtick, he’s in big trouble. If you puncture Obama’s balloon, there is not much left of him, and he seems to be running the risk of puncturing that balloon himself.

One can only hope.

[Update a few minutes later]

We learned from the dog dust up that no one in the campaign had actually read Obama’s book (I’m guessing the first time that Obama read it himself was when he did the audio version). Now you have to wonder if any of them read 1984? Or if they read at all?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire, War Commentary

President Roosevelt Takes Credit For Terrorist Assassination

61 Comments

April 19th, 1944

WASHINGTON (Routers) President Roosevelt celebrated the first anniversary of the death of Isoroku Yamamoto with a national radio address on Tuesday, declaring the war essentially won as a result, despite the fact that Congress approved the extension of the Lend-Lease Act for another year today.

Yamamoto was the mastermind of the terrorist attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i two-and-a-half years ago, that killed both civilian and military personnel. His air transport was supposedly shot down last April 18th by several “Allied” P-38 “Lightning” fighters after the Army received intelligence of his whereabouts on the island of Rabaul in the southern Pacific Ocean. Some are skeptical of his death, however, because the War Department has never released photos of the dead commander, despite rumors that they exist in Japanese hands.

Many view it as a controversial action, because the intelligence that allowed the Lightnings to surprise the aerial armada was obtained through the cracking of Japanese codes [Full disclosure: this news agency was the only one brave enough to report this]. However, the administration continues to defend such practices, and has expressed outrage at publication of the fact that they have done so, claiming that it would somehow compromise the war effort. Skeptics, however, have complained that such behavior is a violation of the rules of war. They say that the enemy deserves to be treated with respect and honesty, and that the nation loses its moral standing in the world with such tactics.

In his speech, the president also said that the terror leader would still be alive had someone else been in the White House at the time. Referring to Governor Thomas Dewey, the presumptive Republican nominee in the coming fall election, he said that “…the little man on the wedding cake wouldn’t have had the guts to order that mission, as I did. He won’t even debate on foreign policy.” Many say that the president has a point, given that Dewey only wants to discuss domestic policy and the possibility of communists in key posts in the Roosevelt administration.

Republicans, however, say that the president’s speech is unseemly and un-presidential. “Certainly the president deserves credit for the death of Yamamoto, but the notion that Governor Dewey wouldn’t have done the same thing is ludicrous,” said a campaign staffer. “He can’t possibly know that, and any president, even Woodrow “League of Nations” Wilson would have done so. This is nothing but politics in an election year where the president feels vulnerable.”

An unnamed senior official at the War Department followed up with the president’s speech, stating on background that, “…the ‘War on Aircraft Carriers’ is over.” He went on, “”Now that we have killed tens of thousands of Japanese troops with the president’s brutal island-hopping strategy, and destroyed their morale with the death of their leader, the Japanese people have come to see the potential for legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into the Japanese Imperial Forces now see an opportunity for a legitimate Shintoism.”

Administration critics scoff at the notion. “Yes, I suppose you could say ‘the War on Aircraft Carriers is over’ if you ignore the fact that the Japanese still have fifteen of them, and continue to commission new ones almost every month,” said one Republican Senate staffer. “We’re slowly taking back the Pacific, island by island, but it’s a long bloody mess ahead, and the Nazis still control the continent of Europe. If this is a war that’s ‘over,’ I’d hate to see one that was raging.”

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