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Friday, May 17, 2013

Going Bulworth


For those of us lucky and blessed enough to still have weekends away from our primary employment, Fridays are almost always a good day to let things get a little bit loose, and even daydream a little bit about how we wish things were, instead of how they really are.

After all, it's been a long week filled with crazy controversies and fake scandals. When the week began, the right-wing tea partiers were insisting President Obama might be impeached "for real" this time. By the end of the week, the scandals were falling apart, evaporating, and even beginning to hurt Republicans, as the dueling schizophrenic right-wing Obama-hate narratives cancelled each other out.

It's enough stress to make any sane person want to "go Bulworth" - or at least fantasize about doing so, as the New York Times' Peter Baker revealed President Obama does from time to time.

"Going Bulworth," as Wonkblog's Ezra Klein revealed to the uninitiated, is "a reference to the 1998 movie in which Sen. Jay Bulworth, played by Warren Beatty, drops all pretense and begins saying exactly what he thinks" - and we think that's just the prescription for levity we could all use on a Friday.

After all, there's not much more we'd love to see than if some of the paranoid fears of the tea party fools really did come to life. The extremist nuts would get chased down the street by the IRS, the DOJ, the legal authorities, and maybe even the hand of God. We get it, wingnuts - you hate Obama because he's black, and because he undeniably beat your ignorant asses in back-to-back presidential elections. That said? He's the President, you lost, get over it. We survived eight years of George W. Bush, you'll survive eight years of Obama.

To the hacks in the media who think that Obama is somehow both a "power hungry leader" and a "weak onlooker"? You people are idiots, as Steve Benen, Greg Sargent, and Jonathan Chait all pointed out - though they generally used more civil language to label you than we just did.

We're still not as bad as the moron restaurant owners Samy and Amy Bouzaglo of Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Bouzaglos made their fame this week by also "going Bulworth" - on their customers, both in person and online. We don't think it's going too far when we say it's likely that whatever goodwill and business the Bouzaglo's had left after an ugly national TV appearance was destroyed when they got on Facebook, Yelp, and Reddit, and began telling their customers and anyone else exactly what they thought of them IN ALL CAPS - and with expletives. To make things worse, the couple lied about their heinous actions later, blaming their behavior on a random computer hacker.

Next Monday, when we all get back to work for one more full week - before a glorious Memorial Day weekend - we fully expect to be addressing real and serious topics like the sexual assault crisis in the U.S. military, immigration reform, and the always important fact that while the economy is better, millions of Americans still need a job, five years after the great recession.

For now, in a way President Obama can only dream of, we may just keep up our Bulworth-ing this weekend - at least until our spouses decide they've had enough of our attitudes.