Um, Jay, who exactly lost money in WHICH Obama economic plan?

Who wouldn't like to see Jay Leno someday introduce occasional touches of "humor" to his jokes? But it's more important that he try to cut back on the lies.

"The Center for Responsive Politics reports that President Obama has become the first politician in history to raise $1 billion in his political career. Imagine how much more he could have raised if people had't lost it all in his economic plan."

-- a Jay Leno "joke" on The Tonight Show

by Ken

It's something right-wingers never understand. Or, to be fair, a certain number of non-right-wingers either. What I have in mind is people who are officially Democrats, including many who aren't necessarily not-right-wingers. But even many Democrats who insist that they're committed progressives believe it's impermissible to make fun of people they support -- such as, to pick a wild example, the president -- no matter how ridiculously they may behave.

In case it isn't obvious from the preceding, what I mean by the "it" that right-wingers never understand is the principle that pols of all persuasions are fair game for earned ridicule -- that in fact it's important to the health of the republic to call ridiculousness to account in our public servants. Okay, it's true that, as this presidential primary season demonstrated, right-wingers have lost their former compunctions about savaging doctrinally diverse wingnuts, but does anyone expect that to carry over into an inter-party race, let alone a Republican-controlled federal government?

These are, after all, people from whom hardly a peep was heard during the reign of terrifying insanity and ineptitude that constituted the Bush regime, those eight unimaginable years during which the office of president of the United States was misappropriated by a shell of a humanoid creature without even minimal qualifications for any known category of non-figurehead employment except perhaps "boozing gladhander." And for a good part of that same period both houses of Congress were controlled by sociopaths who again would have deserved to be the butt of daily scorched-earth ridicule if their actions hadn't been so singlemindedly aimed at turning the country into a festering doodyhole for everyone except the rich and their fellating stooges. (Many of them, it's true, also earned decades-long prison sentences that they didn't get, a closely related story but not the one we're pursuing just now.)

The switch of parties in the Oval office had the effect of switching an on-off switch for both the character assassins and the would-be humorizers of the Right. By contrast, any Democrats who expected, say, Jon Stewart to play nice with the new administration clearly wasn't paying attention. The rule is not only fair but important to our political health: When you earn ridicule, you have to get it.

Just today, Newt Gingrich, in defending the Indefensible Willard for his handling of the psychotic ravings of converted Willard booster "The" Donald Trump, explained that birther foolishness isn't the cause of President Obama's. "I think that Obama creates very powerful emotions about him largely because of the radicalism of his views. I think that that's the key." And nobody, to my knowledge, has asked him, "Are you speaking as an insane person, an imbecile, or just a pathological liar?"

Really, it would have been understandable if everyone present had just burst into hysterics pointing wildly at the grotesque turd, maybe muttering, "What an incredible colossal dickwad!" Obama, maybe the least radical pol in the history of the republic, being branded as "radical" by a man who holds so many off-the-chart ultra-zealot crackpot views that it's hard to imagine how he walks the streets free of the loony bin. But of course a country whose citizens have been so unrelentingly subjected to miseducation and lies -- citizens who often seem happy only when they're being lied to by right-wing filth-mongers -- manages to believe this utter lunacy, and the perpetrators walk free.

So Obama jokes are absolutely fair game for Jay. Lies, however -- not so much. The president is, again, accountable for what he has failed to do for the economy, or more accurately failed to try to do, because his political haters would surely have roused themselves to the utmost to prevent him from doing anything that would have helped the country and in so doing been to his political advantage.

But the closest thing to an "economic plan" which might fit the mold of the joke Jay was trying to make is the economic policies of the Bush regime, the policies of commission and omission which paved the way for the economic meltdown. Jay is either so stupid that he doesn't know this, in which case he ought to be encouraged to keep his trap shut about stuff he knows nothing about, or else he's happy to be locking in the right-wing lie about who made the economy go boom.

In which case he ought to come out of the closet as a right-wing propagandist. (The occasional funny joke would be an upgrade to his comedy product too, but that's yet another story.)

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