Cuppacafe

Remember back in the golden age of American politics, when Jed Bartlet was president? Yeah, me too. There are few TV shows that I enjoyed a much as The West Wing. Thankfully, I still get to watch it every morning for a couple of hours on Bravo.

Still, I'm left wanting. That's why this article of an imagined meeting between former President Bartlet and Barack Obama was so, well, entertaining.

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

The rest can be read here.

Still, the best part of the exchange is here:

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

Ah, for the good old days that never were.

The Perfessor

So, if you happened to be driving down Interstate 35, near the town of Wyoming, Minnesota, you'll see a billboard bearing the smiling image of George W. Bush accompanied by the question "Miss me yet?" The online rumors were confirmed by this image:

Many initially thought the picture was a hoax created through Photoshop. But now multiple people have confirmed its existence. The mystery surrounding the billboard quickly morphed from a "Fact or Fiction?" story into a genuine "Whodunit?" Who paid for the ad, and what was their motivation? Are they Obama supporters sarcastically hoping to remind disgruntled liberals about how things were under Bush, or are they Bush supporters sincerely hoping to remind voters of the past administration?

Well, according to Yahoo News "The ad was purchased by a group of small business owners who wish to remain anonymous," McNamara said. However, McNamara did offer this political bombshell: "Some of the people in the group who paid for this were Obama supporters.", however others are not so sure. Cindy Erickson, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Chicago County, where the billboard is located, suspects the folks who funded the ad are actually conservative activists who are simply posing as supporters of President Obama.

In either case we can't help but to think on Lord Acton, and state "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Perfessor

Yeah, ya gotta just love it when the Prez bitch-slaps the GOP:

Man, do I love this guy!

The Perfessor

So President Obama spoke the other night and we all sat and watched his first State of the Union Address (except Walt), and for some of us, we remembered why we liked him (Obama, not Walt) in the first place. Still the most fun you get out of political events like this is not so much watching the event itself,but the political pundits yack it up after that is a sort of a post-modern, politically-charged version of Can you top that?

My personal favorite is Jon Stewart’s take on Chris Matthews particular brand of buffoonery, when Stewart refers to Matthews as being “...one Scotch Away From Being Ron Burgundy”, when Matthews makes one of the more patently retarded comments in the history of TV punditry when Matthews stated that Barack Obama’s speech made Matthews forget the President was Black.

Seriously, what an ass!

The Perfessor

We all know that one of the tried and true ways of selling your product is to get it endorsed by a big name celebrity. Everyone does it, and (I’m reasonably certain) that it works; or — to be more specific — it seems to work well enough for ad agencies to keep doing it.

Still, there is something to be said for when a cultural event occurs that causes registered on our collective psyche and we (lemmings that we are), gravitate in a particular direction because of what we have witnessed. Some examples of this include when Kirk Douglas appeared on-screen without a T-shirt and men stopped wearing T-shirts; When President Kennedy appeared in public without a hat, sales of men’s hats disappeared overnight.

While both of those were the results of unintended consequences. That is to say, no one necessarily really wanted those results, they just happened. Whereas, Ray-Ban got their Wayfarer sunglasses placed on Tom Cruises’ (very pretty) mug in Risky Business, and every male that saw that film went out to buy a pair so he could be that cool.

Well, Weatherproof was hoping to capture similar lightning in a bottle when they erected a billboard in Times Square of President Obama wearing one of their coats and the tag-line “A Leader in Style.”

...Wednesday, the pictured billboard in New York’s Times Square went up, showing a picture of President Obama wearing a Weatherproof coat during a recent trip to China. The picture had been licensed from the Associated Press. The ad didn’t say anything indicating that Obama endorsed the product; It carried only a tagline reading “A Leader in Style.”

But the billboard clearly got the attention of those at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Various outlets reported that the White House called Weatherproof to ask that they take the billboard down.

“The White House has a longstanding policy disapproving of the use of the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes,” said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt in a written statement.

Weatherproof pulled the ad down on request from the White House, but one has to ask, who was right, and did Weatherproof have to do that, well, this clip comes from the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog, and they did inquire about the legalities of the issue from a lawyer, (William Coats, a partner in White & Case’s IP department out in Palo Alto) who (as lawyers are wont to do) argued both sides of the issue before finally stating that while Weatherproof pulled the ad, it certainly got a lot of mileage out of it. “If you’d asked me 24 hours ago who Weatherproof was, I’d have had no idea,” he said. “Now, here we are talking about it.”

Apparently it IS all about the buzz

The Perfessor

I know that Lost fans are fairly rabid folk, but when it was announced that this season’s premiere was about to be preempted by President Obama’s initial State of the Union Address; well you can imagine how far over the top they went.

Lost fans, fear not. The important premiere of the final season of your show will not be affected by the President of the United States’ obviously less important (first) State of the Union.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs assuaged the concerns of millions today during the briefing.

“I will say this on behalf of ABC radio,” said Gibbs. “I don’t foresee a scenario in which the millions of people who hope to finally get some conclusion in Lost are preempted by the President.”

Now I like my entertainment too (nearly got the DTs when no comics were delivered the week between Christmas & New Years, but that’s an entirely different story), but seriously, these folks need to get a tighter grip on their horses.

The Perfessor