Weird Republican Outrage Watch

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Andrew Sullivan just put up a post that happens to include a video of Marco Rubio making a joke a couple of years ago about a blizzard-induced power outage in Washington DC: “The president,” he said, “couldn’t find anywhere to set up a teleprompter to announce new taxes.” It got big yuks from the CPAC crowd.

Anyway, this reminded me of something: Republicans sure have a lot of bizarrely puerile criticisms of President Obama, don’t they? I don’t mean big policy stuff. I’m not talking about death panels or EPA regulations or Dodd-Frank or any of that. I’m talking about things like this:

  • The endless outrage over his return of a Winston Churchill bust that the British government had loaned to George W. Bush.
  • The never-gets-old tittering over his use of a teleprompter.
  • The talk-radio jihad against the Chevy Volt.
  • The indignation over Michelle Obama’s effort to get kids to eat better.

This stuff is just weird. I guess there must have been similarly juvenile stuff that animated liberals back when Bush was president, but what? Pretzel jokes?

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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