The year 2012 was defined by the calculated re-emergence of Obama worship, no matter how obvious his failures in office. After his reelection, the actor Jamie Foxx let it all hang out in a tribute at the BET Awards on November 25: “First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior, Barack Obama!”
For that President Jesus gasbaggery, Foxx was selected as one of the winners of the Media Research Center’s Best Notable Quotables of 2012, a collection of liberal foolishness selected by 46 judges of distinction in the conservative media. Foxx won the “Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity.”
But Foxx wasn’t alone in the idolatry category. Naturally, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews won the “Obamagasm Award,” failing to find a single flaw in his idol in a “Hardball” tribute on July 17: “This guy’s done everything right. He’s raised his family right. He’s fought his way all the way to the top of the Harvard Law Review, in a blind test becomes head of the Review, the top editor there. Everything he’s done is clean as a whistle. He’s never, not only broken any law, he’s never done anything wrong. He’s the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect American. And all they do is trash the guy.”
Especially when he’s our lord and savior.
CNN’s Piers Morgan won in the “Media Hero Award” category for his fawning over Bill Clinton at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting on September 25: “People see you putting on this event, they heard you at the convention make a barnstorming speech, an incredible speech….I was there. You electrified the place. And they all say, ‘Why do we have this goddamned 22nd Amendment? Why couldn’t Bill Clinton just run again and be President for the next 30 years?’”
A prime-time CNN personality announces Clinton should be President for Life, even as CNN and its media fans keep declaring the nonsense that this network abhors and rejects political partisanship.
But journalists proclaiming their objectivity, no matter how ridiculous, is a daily event. The Denying the Obvious Award for Refusing to Acknowledge Liberal Bias went to New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who grew angry on February 16 when his newspaper was compared to Fox News in its partisan take on the news: “The word I want to use here...begins with ‘bull’ and ends in ‘it,’ and you can figure out what comes in between. I think it’s absolute pernicious nonsense….Fox News presents the news in a way that is deliberately skewed to promote political causes, and the New York Times simply does not.”
The Romney family would disagree, perhaps recalling items like the 2,300-word Times front-pager by Trip Gabriel scorning Mrs. Romney’s enthusiasm for dressage, where “horses costing up to seven figures execute pirouettes and other dancelike moves for riders wearing tails and top hats.”
Or take Times columnist Charles Blow, who won “The Politics of Personal Destruction Award” for denying Romney’s humanity on MSNBC on July 17: “This is the kind of man that Mitt Romney is. This man does not have a soul. If you opened up, you know, his chest, there’s probably a gold ticking watch in there and not even a heart. This is not a person. This is just a robot who will do whatever it takes, whatever he’s told to do, to make it to the White House.”
Former ABC News political director David Chalian lost his job as Washington Bureau Chief of Yahoo! News for being caught on an open microphone on August 28 during the GOP convention in Tampa, talking over a picture of Mitt and Ann Romney: “They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.” That quote won the “Ku Klux Con Job Award for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges.”
Obama is our savior, and Romney is happy with blacks drowning. Got it?
But on the Left, it’s always easy to believe America is still mired in a deeply racist, imperialist history. MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry won the “Quote of the Year” for offering her unique Happy Birthday to America on her July 1 show:
“The land on which they [the Founders] formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class….This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we've torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”
But for MSNBC, that liberation and hope rests on their “lord and savior” Obama.