Malia ought to take Obama to Jerry Springer over this tall tale:
“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ ”
Oh yeah. The question every child would ask in the bathroom.
Imagine if GWBush had come up a fib like that one, involving his own child.
Of course, David Broder says that this little anecdote adds a personal touch to the oil crisis:
What he says next is so simple and personal that its authenticity cannot be doubted
Yeah, right.
Play me the world’s smallest violin, David, and we’ll listen while we sit here relishing the personal authenticity.
Doug at Balloon Juice pokes fun at Broder:
You make a grown man cry
No, there is no way that a president could fabricate a story about something a family member told him. It simply is not possible. It can’t be done. When a president mention some silly thing his daughter supposedly said to him, we must take him at his word. It is that simple.
And all that mumbo jumbo about how many gallons of oil, and how the spill might be stopped, and what the damage to the environment might be, it’s all just academic mumbo jumbo. What matters is whether you cry about it and what cute things your children say to you about it.
I’m an Obot, so I’m glad that at least one Villager liked the story Obama told about his daughter. But all of this takes place in a fantasy world, one where Obama might be able to make it all right with his eleven-dimensional executive powers or by pounding his desk and saying “stop the damn oil spill”.
I just don’t see how we can have an effective political system when teardrops and children’s stories matter more than years of mismanagement at the Minerals Management Service.
Neither do I.
