Meme Watch: Teleprompter[tm]Gate!

I originally planned to ignore it, hoping it would go away. But in an era when GOP budget proposals without numbers get laughed out of court within hours, Teleprompter^[tm]Gate has shown a surprising amount of staying power.

Enough substance to keep it going for over six weeks, in fact.

By all rights, this--or something equivalent--should have put the whole thing down, like a horse with a broken leg, 'way back in February:

It makes me wonder: Could this campaign by the Obama-Fail Forces be an attempt at payback for this? They say elephants never forget . . . .

(H/t to Doctor TV.)

The life cycle of a political meme

Politics is perception, and if things don't work out, the amount of time it'll take you to go from being a hired gun to a cocktail party joke can be clocked with an egg timer.

Leo Solomon, The American President (1995)

Tuesday, February 24, 2009: Following President Obama's address to Congress, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal gives the Republican response.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009: By lunchtime, commentators across the internet have independently arrived at the conclusion that Jindal's performance does nothing so much as remind viewers of Kenneth Parcell, the NBC page on "30 Rock."

Thursday, February 26, 2009: A video clip in which the actor who plays Kenneth Parcell is invited by host Jimmy Fallon to give a response to Jindal's response to Obama circulates on the internet. The resemblance between the perky but clueless dweeb and the future hope of the GOP does not work to the latter's benefit:

At this point Jindal can only pray for a miracle, such as that, by Friday, Alabama Sen. Dick Shelby will have flubbed his way back into the spotlight to draw the media attention back onto himself again. And that--or something equally embarrassing to the Grand Old Party--certainly seems possible.

There's never an egg timer around when you need one

Leo Solomon, The American President (1995)

Am I the only one tired of the "Hillary/1984" hype?

Okay, for anyone who's missed it, here's the clip that's had its viral 15 minutes of fame, and then some.

There are those out there--including people whose opinion on many topics I respect--who think this is the future of political communication.

I'm not one of them.

I have no beef with the technical expertise it demonstrates but, substantively, I think the Hillary/Big Brother metaphor is silly and doesn't connect. So--Hillary is Big Brother? Or is it that Obama is the Mac? (Probably not the latter--market share's too small.) Does anyone but the most ferociously partisan Obama supporter think that Hillary's "conversation" theme puts her in the same league with an icon of global totalitarianism (or with IBM/Windows, whichever is worse)?

Really?

If we're going to praise that digital non sequitur, why don't we go ga-ga over these yet-to-be-digitized pop-culture references, while we're at it?

Obama digitized as Rick Blaine, Clinton digitized as Ilsa Lund:

Obama: But I've got a job to do, too. I'm going to be President. In the White House. Where I'm going, you can't follow.

Obama digitized as Rhett Butler, Clinton digitized as Scarlett O'Hara:

Clinton: Barak, Barack . . . Barack, if you go to the White House, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Obama: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Obama digitized as Ross Geller, Clinton digitized as Rachael Green:

Obama: We were on a break!

Obama digitized as a young girl, sitting in a meadow pulling petals off a daisy; Clinton digitized as a mushroom cloud rising from a nuclear explosion:

Obama: Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

[nuclear detonation, mushroom cloud rises, Clinton's face appears out of the center]

Clinton: These are the stakes--you must vote for me, or you must die.

In each case, if you're an Obama fan, the point is obvious and in your guy's favor (and, one imagines, you'll forgive and forget how little sense it makes). If you're not, its meaning is totally obscure--but, in this conversation, who cares what you think?

It's really not much more than an old Diet Coke commercial amped up to the next level--the latest gee-whiz technology linking pop-culturally cool images with a product to which they otherwise have no obvious connection, simply because the technology lets you do it. If it's that technologically sophisticated, so the thinking goes, it must mean something, right?

Let's move on, shall we?

The 2006 p3 Top-10 Meta-list

From the p3 Institute for Strategic Redundancy Institute international headquarters, this year’s top-10 list of top-10 lists:

Top 11 most outrageous comments by conservative commentators in 2006 (Media Matters): Hannity on things worth dying for! Limabugh on obesity! Colter on love and death!

Top 10 national stories of 2006 (Steve Gilliard @ The News Blog): ISG report--DOA. The Karl Rove mystique--over. Gay Republicans--apparently flourishing, as it turns out, thanks for asking.

Top 10 Myths about Iraq 2006 (Juan Cole @ Informed Comment): Starts with the myth that the Iraq war/occupation is something that we can somehow "win" at this point, and marches steadily and depressingly on through the evidence from there.

Top 10 time-shifted TV programs in 2006 (Nielsen ratings, via Lostremote.com): Number One is "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which may take some of the logistical heat off Lance Mannion if he’s going to keep live-blogging it--now he can simply wait until Wednesday or Thursday to do it.

Top 10 Yahoo! Searches in 2006 (Yahoo!): Here’s a shocker: Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, and the North Korea nuclear program didn’t quite manage to nose out Steve Irwin’s death and Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.

Top 10 places to live in the US in 2006 (Money Magazine): And for those of you outside the state, Oregon is nowhere on the list. Honest. Nothing to see here. Keep moving. Have a lovely visit. Don’t stay.

Top 10 books of 2006 (NYTimes): Comedies of manners, searing memoirs, revisionist histories, and the inevitable, even obligatory allusion to Borat.

Top 10 online scams of 2006 (Consumer Affairs): Approach at your own risk: I wrote about the Nigerian scam last summer, and within a week or two the amount of that crap my email filters were catching went up by an order of magnitude. I’d recommend reading this list on a friend’s computer. You never know.

Top 10 insider political events in Oregon in 2006 (NW Republican): They’re absolutely right to list the rise of the Oregon-based political blog (including Blue Oregon and my cronies over at Loaded Oregon as well as their own blog) near the top. The comments are as juicy as the list.

Top 10 viral videos (The Viral Factory, via Countdown with Keith Olbermann): The enduring clip of Oregon’s exploding whale (350 million hits) is #3, but it probably says more about the ephemeral nature of the overall topic that #10 is already no longer available.

Top 10 signs of the impending US police state (Alternet): Nothing new here, alas, but it's definitely disturbing to see them lined up end-to-end. The Democratic Congress has its work cut out for it. If they’re up to it.

Memetic Marketplace Watch

Two very interesting showings by political memes this week. Neither is an IPO; both have been around for some time.

Meme: "The Bubble"

Value: For those on the left, "bubble" has been a mimetic warhorse almost since the day Bush took the oath of office in 2001. One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration is the largely successful effort by his team to keep him insulated from exposure to disagreeable ideas. The bubble meme carries several ideas that stick when tossed at Bush: Someone young--a preemie?--left by genetics or upbringing without the ability to resist things that most of us--of hardier, mongrel stock?--simply shrug off without thinking. Isolated in a bubble, for his own protection, the "bubble boy" depends on family and helpers to mediate between him and a hostile world. Lacking resistance to ideas--critical thinking as immunity mechanisms? ideas as viruses?--he tends to be infected by whoever he talked to last.

Forecast: Bullish. "Bubble" has enjoyed quite a surge in the last week--including at Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times, plus an enthusiastic piling-on by Keith Olbermann--owing mainly to Bush's diffident reaction toward the Iraq Study Group Report. As the Democrats start flexing their congressional muscles, the carnage in Iraq continues, and more Republicans start jumping ship, expect to see more and more of this meme in its many varieties.

(As an aside: The terror of White House staffers at being caught uttering a discouraging word within earshot of the POTUS reminds me of the old Monty Python "Oscar Wilde" sketch:

OSCAR: Your Majesty is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
PRINCE: I beg your pardon?
OSCAR: Um... it was one of Whistler's.
WHISTLER: I never said that.
OSCAR: You did, James, you did.
(The PRINCE OF WALES stares expectantly at WHISTLER)
WHISTLER: ... Well, You Highness, what I meant was that, like a doughnut, um, your arrival gives us pleasure... and your departure only makes us hungry for more.
(Laughter)
Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat's piss.
PRINCE: What?!?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's. One of Wilde's.
OSCAR: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
SHAW: I... I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
PRINCE (accepting the compliment) /: Oh.

Can't be a lot of fun to be a sycophant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.)

Meme: "Crisis of Confidence"

Value: When this phrase got pinned to Carter's energy policy speech (you remember--the cardigan sweater speech) even though, if memory serves, he never used the phrase in the speech, it became just one more nail in the coffin of his reelection hopes, . The lesson learned by all Republicans: Never use the "CoC" phrase, no matter how bad things look. Never.

Forecast: Sell! For pity's sake, sell! What on earth could have possessed Tony Snow to use this phrase in describing the American public's documented disdain for Bush's Iraq policy and the lock-step Republican congressional support for it? Any rookie PR flack knows you never repeat a hot-button phrase like than when it's tucked into a reporter's question, and you never--never!--introduce it into the conversation yourself.

Why didn't Snow drive the stake in the rest of the way and call Bush's middle-east policies "Carteresque" and complain that America is experiencing a "malaise?"