Obama and Biden go to a local burger place and get burgers. Obama gets a burger with Dijon mustard. I learn this from a “oh-christ-what-is-the-Right-complaining-about-now”-style post on C&L. This leads me to a Media Matters post about Hannity, Ingraham, and Mark Steyn going on about his choice of condiment. I mean, given, it’s generally tongue in cheek, but in some sense you get the impression it’s actually a problem for them. (Like the standard tough guy real man Republican thing, illustrated with Ingraham’s comment: “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup but Dijon mustard?” Obama’s just a faggy arugula-loving liberal, clearly.)

It further leads me to a blog called Legal Insurrection by William A. Jacobson, with a post called MSNBC Hides Obama’s Dijon Mustard (aka Dijongate). (incidentally, this page drags down my firefox something awful, for some reason.) The dude goes on with several breathless updates about the Dijongate situation. I start going about the business of writing my own chirst-are-you-kidding-me blog post in my head, but then further reading reveals he was joking. His point was that MSNBC had dutifully reported it as a character piece exactly how the White House wanted them to cover it:

Again, not sure why MSNBC had to cover it, but they did, on live TV with Andrea Mitchell at the news desk and Kelly O’Donnell on scene. The dialogue between the two harped on how the trip had a “real guy kind of quality.”

And that was the story line. Two regular guys out for a guy kind of meal. A script written in the White House and read by MSNBC.

For my money, as lifestyle fluff photo ops about the president go, it’s a lot more believable than goin’ t’the back forty ‘n clearin’ some brush at a ranch bought in 1999 and ditched in 2009 in favor of a 8,500 sq. ft. home in the Dallas suburbs specifically turned into a gated community by and for their newest residents. In contrast, I’m guessing that in 2013, 2017, and beyond, that Obama will still be eating burgers.

But whatever. Jacobson kept updating the original post as he got more reactions, which then prompted him to update more. In his “ha fooledja” post, he says:

Check out the links to the original post, and you will see that many of the high profile nutroots blogs have linked. If you check out the links and comments, you will see that the full foul-mouthed, abusive intellect of the nutroots has been brought to bear.

So I kept updating the story, with further links to Obama’s choice of condiment, in part as a reaction to the reaction. Which has driven some people even crazier. Now the story has gone national, being picked up by the Washington Post blog.

What gives here? Why the out-sized reaction? If this is a non-story, why is the left obsessed with it?

He then goes on to explain how it’s the Left’s insecurity that drove the interest, in that Obama’s rise is fleeting and “whether we elected a blank slate who makes it up as he goes”. I am fascinated that his conclusions fully fit into his own personal experience and entirely miss the more likely truths as to why he got more attention for this post than he is used to seeing.

One: They thought he was serious. Why not? Would it surprise me if some conservative thought Obama’s mustard choice was further proof he is un-American? (see also: birth certificate, shaking Chavez’s hand, arugula.) I had the luxury of seeing his further posts after he said he was joking, otherwise I would’ve had a long and incredulous post, myself.

Two: After a few prominent liberal blogs took him seriously, some news blogs posted about it, and then it seemed really ridiculous. Not only does it seem like the Right is griping about this, but it seems like the media’s starting to report on it, making it look even bigger. And Hannity’s segment also pushed this along. All of this was frustrating and aggravating to Left-leaning readers. Taken by itself, the reactions to this one goofy post could be out of proportion; but in the context of all the stupid attacks we’d seen from the elections and since, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

This is not so much his fault as the media’s, and some bloggers, and my own for not looking closely enough. C&L linked to gawker.com and I think somewhere in there he linked to a digg.com link, but in some sense nearly all of them lead to Jacobsen. Still, in “our” defense, there was the Hannity bit, which made it feel like there was an actual talking point forming.

Three: Christ dude, you were the one pushing the non-story. Admittedly it’s weird that it was mostly one guy with a blog that wound up driving something like this, but at the base of it, it’s like yelling “FIRE” and laughing at people for running like idiots.

To his credit, all comments have to be approved and he’s letting non-complimentary comments through (even though he says so we can all see how “unhinged” the Left is, though looking through the first post, it seems like most negative comments are about how the whole thing’s pretty dumbass). But what really amazes me about the posts, and his interpretation of them, is the teflon insulation he’s put around his viewpoint. “you agree with me? yes, the Left is really unhinged.” “you disagree with me? ah yes, this proves how the Left is unhinged.” It’s that quality of “the more you disagree, the more you prove yourself wrong” that I’ve never been able to master, that I find so aggravating.

As I said in a comment in his last post (italicized bit is a quote from him):

It is beyond me how anyone could have thought I really cared that Obama used Dijon mustard in his Tuna Salad recipe, or that he had a Dijon mustard addiction. Did people really think I believed there was a “conspiracy of silence on Obama’s allegience to Dijon Mustard”? I have said before, and repeat, that the first victims of liberalism are satire and irony.

Honestly? Have you already forgotten:

* All the times “arugula” was mentioned as if it mattered? (I mean, you reference it several times in your post, you must know.)
* How many times the press mentioned his crappy bowling form?
* The number of time three frames of one his many speeches was played back, Zapruder-like, to divine whether he was giving someone the middle finger?
* The “terrorist fist-jab”?

And these are just a few of the nonsensical details I can recall were pulled, exaggerated, and talked about over and over by conservatives as if it meant much of anything. Hell, even a prominent conservative talk show (Hannity) spent two minues on exactly the topic of the Dijon mustard, which is already funny because it’s made by Kraft and about as foreign as the burger it was on.

So, yeah, it shouldn’t be beyond you, because the body of work available shows that conservatives making a big goddamn deal out of nothing is entirely believable.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Political Blather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.