Prompter Discourteous

I don't write about politics quite as much as I used to, and with good reason: There's so much outright insanity coming from the far-right these days that if I let it get to me and chose to rail against it, I'd never get anything else done.

Case in point, the latest "scandal" cooked up and milked dry by the relatively small but painfully loud contingent of Fox-fed crazies: the fact that Barack Obama uses a teleprompter.

To call this supposed controversy a non-story would be an insult to water-skiing squirrels. I'd get into exactly why it's so thoroughly ridiculous -- such a desperate and laughable grasp at straws from a Republican party looking for anything to hang around the neck of a popular opposition president -- but Bob Cesca hit all the notes on this subject perfectly in his latest piece for the Huffington Post.

The fact is that reading a prepared statement from a teleprompter is no different than reading from notes written on a couple of sheets of paper sitting atop a podium -- each being something that president after president has done for years. And yet, in a move that's mind-boggling in its ironic absurdity, given that they spent eight years making excuses for the most ineloquent and incurious president in modern history and four months supporting a moron from Alaska who could barely string a coherent sentence together, there are people out there claiming that Obama's use of a prompter somehow proves he's a Stepford-esque blank slate.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you paranoid psychopath Glenn Beck:

"So I mean, it really bothers me, this teleprompter. It bothers me that this man doesn’t -- this man is always on prompter. You want to talk about a Manchurian candidate -- that’s it! Who’s writing every word for this man? Is it bothering anyone else but me? We have a fraud in office, at least that’s the way it feels to me."

Aside from the fact that Glenn's been forgetting to take his meds again, what this hysterical statement proves is that the extremists on the right aren't just out of ideas for the country -- they can't even come up with a respectable point of contention in the face of their adversaries. Really? The use of the mysterious alien technology known as a "teleprompter" makes Obama a threat to our American way of life? That's all you've got?

You know what's really funny?

Ten bucks says Beck read this nonsense off -- you guessed it -- a prompter.

Please folks, come up with something decent to rally around -- something besides teleprompters, "Going Galt" and that idiotic "Tea Bag Revolution." Otherwise, shut the fuck up and let the rest of us get back to our lives of trying to feed our families while paying to bail out the companies whose unregulated, Bush-era greed sunk this country.

(h/t Cesca)