A Children's Treasury Of Inauguration-Day Stupids

 
 So we hear that there was some sort of widely-watched eventtoday that did not involve sports! Above, we have Tweetosphere messages from three people who seem not to understand that everyone can see them saying stuff, and that retweets can be directed to @SecretService(as all of these were, for whatever good it does). Or maybe we could talk about the professional trolls at Fox & Friends, who discovered that today, the third Monday in January, is thought by some to be "the most depressing day of the year," a story that we are certain has absolutely nothing to do with it also being Barack Obama's second Inaugural. Really, they don't say there's a connection! It istoo a legitimate news story, so they brought on a motivational speaker to help Fox viewers cheer the fuck up:

As one or two news sources have noted, today is also the Martin Luther King Day holiday, which a number of astute Tweetospherians noted is the source of great irony, since MLK was a Republican who would have just hated the socialist policies of the tyrannical dictator being sworn in today. They are unanimous in their certainty that the assassinated civil rights leader's corpse expressed its disapproval of B. Hussein Obama with a gymnastics routine. Because really, who understands King's legacy better than a bunch of white people on the Internet?

Now, to be fair, these complaints are not solely from teahadis who think that MLK believed in the equality of all persons, be they black, white, or corporate -- a number of these tweeterers believed that King would be outraged by the President's use of death-robots to pursue war, so there is that. And for that matter, heartbroken former friend-of-Barry Cornel West took issue with the use of MLK's Bible as a swearing-in prop, because Mr. Obama is no liberal, but merely "a Rockefeller Republican in blackface" who has failed to be the real progressive we dreamed of. This is where we exhale uncomfortably and mumble something about the perfect being the enemy of the good, or some other maybe-comforting cliché.

And then we move on to a real uniter, Idiot Joe Scarborough, who decided to have a righteous snit about Obama's outrageously egocentric behavior at Sunday's swearing-in ceremony. You see, Obama joked to his daughter Sasha, "I did it!" which Scarborough thought was just incredibly wrong: You know what?” Scarborough said, “It was jarring to me. It was jarring to me because it’s not about I. It’s about we.” As Mediaite's Tommy Christopher patiently explains, Mourning Joe managed to take a kind of sweet joke and turn it into an Offense To America:

Seconds after being sworn in, President Obama hugged First Lady Michelle Obama (who said “Congratulations,” to which he replied, “Thank you, Sweetie.”), [then] as he hugged the First Daughters, Sasha said “Good job, Daddy.”

“I did it,” the First Dad replied.

“You didn’t mess it up!” Sasha said.

The obvious subtext there was that Sasha had needled him about the flub prior to the swearing-in, and completed the good-natured ribbing following it. To the ears of a conservative, bathed in the “NOBAMA The Usurper” narrative of the most deranged quarters of his political side, it certainly must have carried a Pavlovian kick, and as the Morning Joe panel began to explain the joke to Scarborough, there was a great opportunity for self-reflection and growth.

But, nahh, Obama's just a narcissist. Really, though, our favorite part of the article is the footnote at the end, where Christopher explains a reference to a hypothetical liberal unfairly castigating a hypothetical President Mitt Romney by noting "Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president in 2012." Who?

And finally, something that is Not At All Dumb, but really pretty damn sweet: Actress and TV person Holly Robinson Peete tweeted this awesome photo, explaining "My mom set up the ancestors section to watch the inauguration." Enjoy a nice teary-eyed smile at this family shrine:

[ Mediaite  (twice!) / NYmag / NewsOne / Twitter ]

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