May 25, 2012

Obama and the "cowpie of distortion."



Thanks for calling attention to that, Drudge.

Now, why did Obama say that? He was in Iowa, talking about a speech Romney had just given in Iowa, and I'm picturing Obama's speech-writing team brainstorming about how to insult Romney appropriately:

Speechwriter #1: Romney's speech was bullshit.

Speechwriter #2: Yeah, it would be great if Obama could just say: Bullshit!

Speechwriter #3: Here we are out in farm country. Just a lot of farmers. They know bullshit. There's bullshit, cowshit everywhere on farms. So I've heard. Cowpies everywhere. This state is wall-to-wall cowpie. Get me outta here.

Speechwriter #2: Romney's speech was a big cowpie. A cowpie of...

Speechwriter #1: Distortion! Cowpie of distortion!

All: Ha ha ha ha.

Speechwriter #2: Seriously, he should just say that.

Speechwriter #1: Yeah, because Iowans love all the endless visits from politicians who try to suck up to them with Iowa-related humor and can never think of one damned thing except that Iowa is farms, farms, farms.

Speechwriter #3: And are these really even cattle farms? Dairy farms, whatever? I thought Iowa was more: corn.

Speechwriter #2: Shut up. Cowpie of distortion. It's hilarious. The college kids will love it. He said bullshit, but he didn't say bullshit. Grandma and college dork alike will titter.

Speechwriter #3: They'll titter their udders off. But could you please just Google to see if cows are an Iowa thing, because I'm afraid cows are more Wisconsin, and, you know, cattle, like steers and shit, they're more Nebraska. You've got Iowa right there in the middle...

Speechwriter #1: You win the National Geography Bee, now shut up.

Speechwriter #3: Iowa right there in the middle, but with the corn. Corn, so....

Speechwriter #1: Corn is too obvious. They hear corn all the time. It lacks subtlety.

Speechwriter #2: Subtlety?! What the fuck are you talking about? We're in Iowa. There's no subtlety. Subtlety is a nonissue. Focus on the topic at hand. We need an Iowa-appropriate joke, and the joke on the table is "cowpie of distortion."

Speechwriter #1: The cowpie is on the table. Now, get out your knife and fork and dissect this thing. Dig in!

Speechwriter #2: I say cowpie of distortion is the perfect joke for these fucking farmers, and kids and grandmas all over the country are gonna laugh their asses off if it's the last thing I do for our very cool POTUS.

Speechwriter #3: Cowpie of distortion isn't cool. Who talks like that? Cowpie of distortion? It's like Ball of Confusion.  [Sings:] Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul, shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon, politicians say more taxes will solve everything.... Ball of confusion!

Speechwriter #1: Ha ha. You Googled those lyrics.

Speechwriter #2: Yes, and by the way, more taxes will solve everything.

Speechwriter #3: Ha ha. Now, could you please Google and make sure they have cows — in addition to corn — in Iowa? Because the joke on the table is cowpie of confusion... I mean, distortion.

79 comments:

Michael Haz said...

Speechwtiter #1: Let's have the boss do a standup in front of some - what's that stuff in Iowa? Yeah, a field of arugula.

Chip S. said...

A kewpie doll of a metaphor from our carny barker of a prez.

KCFleming said...

Well done, an Arrested Development segment never aired.

Bob Ellison said...

Professor, outstanding work!

Patrick said...

Kicking it up a notch at 8:00 a.m. on a Friday.

With shit kickers.

Tom said...

This is properly termed "projection" - it's Obama's own cowpie

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Matthew Weiner is on record having said that the main characters on Mad Men all reflect different aspects of his own personality.

That's almost certainly false.

Shanna said...

It's the Final Countdown.

When does Barack start doing magic?

Phil 314 said...

It's gonna be a long year

KCFleming said...

And "cowpie of distortion" is a horrible description of anything.

Does everyone that works for Obama have a head injury?

Bob Ellison said...

By the way, anyone interested in this type of humor should take a look at Why Not Me? by Al Franken. It's fantastically funny. Never mind the man's politics.

KJE said...

It fits with a cowpie of a campaign.

I've never worked an election, but I have to think making tacit fun of what you'd find in a given electorate's geography might be... off putting to those voters?

I mean, it would be like going to NY and saying, "let's take the subway to go vote."

Curious George said...

Dumb Obama speech writers, Iowa is actually the nation's #1 pork producer (yup, you can look it up.) I see the making of a perfect Romney comeback!

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

It was maybe 20 years ago there was a political attack ad on TV where PR people sat around a conference table and talked about the ways they could best package the other candidate.

It was blasted by the Sunday morning pundits as ineffective for being too obscure, IIRC, the target audience being unsophisticated.

It was off the air within days and I haven't seen, or heard of, anything like it since.

But then I really wouldn't know.

The Drill SGT said...

Speechwriter #3: Here we are out in farm country. Just a lot of farmers. They know bullshit. There's bullshit, cowshit everywhere on farms.

Maybe all those Iowa rural corporations are farms, but out in the West West, unlike the Mid-West, our cowpies are found on ranches, not farms :)

though I guess your WI folks call your milk corporations, Dairy farms.

beyond my cowpie lesson, I'm also trying to make the point that Obama may not understand. Farmers and Ranchers throughout the country know a lot more about corporations than Obama, the community organizer, does. Every farm in the country is a corporation. Unless some organic weekend hobbyist is using it for a vacation home. The organic guy sure isn't using it for taxes, else it would be what? repeat after me, a corporation....

Bad mouthing corporate greed to corporation owners isn't nearly as effective as it is to welfare moms

My uncle is a CPA to corporations in Delano, CA, those that are still in business after Obama turned off the water, but I digress. You can't farm unless you know your corporate tax code these days

Stan25 said...

Reads like something straight from Mad Magazine. Of course, Team Obama is what Mad Magazine is all about.

JimMuy said...

The best part is that Drudge makes it look like someone is calling Obama the "Cowpie of distortion."

Which is . . . accurate.

pauldar said...

I used to respect the office of the Presidency, whoever was in the Oval office.

Used to.

Earth Girl said...

NPR chose to play that clip this morning, proving they are as clueless as Obama's speechwriters. The phrase struck me as very odd, confirmed by this post.

Cedarford said...

Obama also used his time to tout Wondrous Wind Power and reiterate that being successful in business is a detriment to being a good President.

1. I think it is sinking in that solar and wind power are only afordable with massive government subsidies we and the Euro socialists are having difficulty affording anymore.

2. If being a successful leader of an enterprise is a detriment..then along with Hoover, you also have to say wealthy businessmen like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Reagan, HW Bush were all failures as President or were impaired somehow by running people and budgets. Add in people that were not rich but had experience running smaller businesses - Adams, Truman, Nixon. And those managing huge budgets and tens, hundreds of thousands of "employees" like Eisenhower on the military side and those that got their executive cred as governors.

Or Obama questioning the fitness for the Presidency of those that grew up immersed in the world of large, prosperous family businesses like FDR, JFK.

Obama is making a losing, populist argument.
He is even implying that many Democrat leaders present and past are unfit for the highest office through their involvement in "the dirty world of the private business sector".....Lautenberg, Kohl, Teddy Kennedy, Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

BTW, anybody ever observe the making of a cowpie?

Pretty impressive.

A well-focused, high pressure stream of sludge that all pretty much lands on the same spot a reasonably safe distance away from the source.

In manufacturing, I believe they call it extrusion.

alan markus said...

Curious George: I see the making of a perfect Romney comeback!

Something having to do with the estate death tax and it's impact on passing family farms to the next generation.

Hagar said...

"Paririe fire of debt" is also worthy of mention.

That actually may work. When the amount of money they have "printed" finally gets into circulation, the results may actually look a bit like a pariefire and its aftermath, metaphorically speaking.

alan markus said...

Mitchell: BTW, anybody ever observe the making of a cowpie?

Your comment reminds of my younger days at my cousin's dairy farms. When walking through the barn, it became second nature to scoot to the other side of the aisle when a cow started to lift it's tail.

The Drill SGT said...

Mitchell said...
A well-focused, high pressure stream of sludge that all pretty much lands on the same spot a reasonably safe distance away from the source.


ROFLMAO, Watched many a steaming pile be made...

...a reasonably safe distance away from the source yes, but not the tail :)

unlike dogs and their legs, I have yet to see a cow smart enough to flip its tail at the moment of extrusion. just sayin....

KCFleming said...

In contrast to Romney and capitalism, Obama is promoting the leftist approach to wealth: flash mobbing a 7-11 and stealing shit, then beating up the manager.

Obama will make us all Detroit.
At least with Romney we might end up with Knoxville or Austin.

Obama is a distortion of cowpies.

Scott M said...

In manufacturing, I believe they call it extrusion.

Is it just me and my family (with kids as young as two), or can pretty much anyone sit down and watch two or three "How It's Made" straight through without realizing it?

Why did it take TV so long to figure out that show would work so well?

Dan in Philly said...

Ann, you are overthinking this. Obama actually thought the "Lipstick on a pig" comment was quite clever. He probably thought up the cowpie line himself and thought it brilliant because he thought of it.

cassandra lite said...

That would've been really funny...if it didn't have the air of documentary about it. I'm afraid that the truth wasn't far off from that.

virgil xenophon said...

alan markus@8:35/

Yes, Obama's policy proposals/programs are such a target-rich environment that it's impossible not to score a bulls-eye no matter which topic one picks--now if the Romny camp only knew what a target looks like..

(BTW, I'm arguing against myself here, I made a healthy living in a former life selling life insurance to farmers to put inside their pension plans in order to have enough discounted dollars to pay their estate taxes. I should be cheering Obama on, but I'm retired now, lol))

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Who can ever forget what they were doing when they first heard Pat Buchanan "pusillanimous pussyfooters" or Safire's "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history"?

Nothing like the classics.

edutcher said...

Jim's right.

Less a juxtaposition than a caption.

PS and by no means OT:

Sixteen states have offered Democratic voters an alternative to Barack Obama, either an actual candidate, "Uncommitted," or an opportunity to write in someone's name. So far 15 percent of those Democratic voters have done so. In five states where there has been an actual opponent, 27 percent voted against the president. In New Hampshire, 1 Democrat in 10 wrote in an alternative.

From Wesley Pruden's column today. We never heard those number from the media, but I'll just bet they've got Axelrod and Plouffe sweating.

harrogate said...

But, was Romney's speech actually bullshit? Oh, who cares. Let's just keep doing this sort of "analysis," post after post after post. That way the regs here can really

pile
on.

jungatheart said...

The Des Moines Register article Drudge links to didn't seem to have a problem with the phrase:

"Obama offered a no-holds-barred thumping of Romney on Thursday night, ridiculing his GOP rival’s profit-maximizing philosophy as inadequate for the White House, blasting Romney’s plan for big tax cuts for almost every millionaire in the country, and poking fun at the Republican’s speech in Des Moines 10 days ago.

“You know, he left out some facts. His speech was more like a cowpie of distortion,” Obama said to hoots of laughter from a crowd of 2,500 inside the Knapp Center at the Iowa State Fairgrounds."

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120525/NEWS09/305250025/1001/

Scott M said...

Speaking of cowpie, by what baseline is the Obama administration claiming itself to be one of the lowest spending in decades?

traditionalguy said...

Nice writing job. Are you also a secret playwrite?

I do have to watch out for the OH WOO WOO given out by grade B Church ladies to use of the useful word "Bullshit."

It will sneak up sometimes. Bullshit is not a curse word. It is not even a vulgar word, but it can be accused of being both by fearful kindergarten teachers.

dbp said...

I would rather benefit from somebody else pursuing their self-interest than get screwed by someone who means me well.

edutcher said...

deborah said...

The Des Moines Register article Drudge links to didn't seem to have a problem with the phrase:

The Register is one of Gannett's papers. Read the article, especially the emotive language, and do the math.

The Drill SGT said...

deborah said...
Obama said to hoots of laughter from a crowd of 2,500 inside the Knapp Center at the Iowa State Fairgrounds."


What the Register wont tell you and the MSM photos wont show is that according to wiki, the Knapp Center seats 7500 and Obama got a crowd of ? 2500....

Chuck66 said...

Remember when Hillary went to Davenport Iowa and went up on a stage, surrounded by hay bales? The Quad Cities is a large metro area with much industry (and many minorities).

It would be like if a national politician came to south Milwaukee, and decarated the stage with Paul Bunyans and cows.

Penny said...

Well! Done! Althouse!

Put me in the mood for some Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

Ha ha

Bob Ellison said...

Dan in Philly, Occam's Razor suggests that you are right. I've been reading Ed Klein's book, and it's tendentiously hostile to Obama, but there's some there there. Obama thinks he is very much smarter than the average bear.

MayBee said...

These are cow pies of decoration.

Distorted into something attractive, then used for cooking fuel.
A cow pie of distortion is a very good thing!

MayBee said...

harrogate said...

But, was Romney's speech actually bullshit? Oh, who cares


Well, was it?

edutcher said...

"Cowpie of distortion"

Sounds like something from "Get Smart".

Scott M said...

Sounds like something from "Get Smart".

No, that was the Cone Of Dung.

Chip S. said...

Just don't step in one with your phone.

Scott M said...

"Cafe" challenge to you, AA. Can you get an interesting picture of something that looks like a cowpie, but isn't?

Michael Haz said...

The non-agricultural cowpie.

Bonus! It's from Wisconsin!

Christopher in MA said...

harrogate said. . .

But, was Romney's speech actually bullshit? Oh, who cares.

MayBee said. . .

Well, was it?


Don't be cruel, MB. You're asking harrowgate to actually apply critical analysis.

Much easier to just plug your ears and say "I don't care, Obama is awesome!

minimus said...

Cowpie as Democratic platform http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX_NlxkKgKw

Chip S. said...

MHaz, That really put a Baby Ruth bar in my punchbowl.

jungatheart said...

Good point, DS. At least they didn't just say 'thousands' :)

(Great link MayBee. Makes me want to go off the grid :)

Anonymous said...

Oh boy, the "most powerful" man in the world, and his MSM propaganda machine are stepping on cowpie.

You know if people could go to work every day, they wouldn't have time for the cowpie.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Does everyone that works for Obama have a head injury?

It is more like everyone who works for Obama are really Beavis and Butthead.

Original Mike said...

I don't understand what's distorted. That we have a debt problem? That Obama is going to make it worse?

Dust Bunny Queen said...

At our annual fair we have an event that is very popular.

Cowpie Bingo. A large grid of numbered squares is painted on a fenced in pasture at the fairgrounds. People buy a ticket for a square. The exciting conclusion to the event is when a steer is put into the pasture and people can hang out, drinking beer of course, and watch to see which square the ..ahem...cowpie will land in.

The lucky winner takes home most of the money and the rest goes to support the local 4H club.

Maybe this year we could put a picture of Obama in one of the squares as a double bonus square. Costs you twice as much but you win big. If the cowpatty lands on Obama's face, you win a rifle or shotgun as well as the money prize.

Scott said...

"Dumb Obama speech writers, Iowa is actually the nation's #1 pork producer (yup, you can look it up.)"

So if it's not a cowpie, what is it? A pigpie?

You can always tell a cow farm from a pig farm by the smell. Pig poop smells nasty!

Scott M said...

AA,

I very, very rarely ever say this, but I just caught this and I think it deserves it's own thread.

Vice President Biden will deliver remarks to families of fallen military service personnel in Arlington, Va. President Obama has no public appearances.

No Memorial Day speech by a sitting president about the troops he claims are fighting for "him".

Original Mike said...

Wisconsin has an annual Cow Chip Throwing Contest.

jungatheart said...

Scott, Obama's done this before, I think.

Scott M said...

I thought so too. It still bears talking about especially after POTUS' recent remarks.

raf said...

Is cowpie the new cowbell, now?

walter said...

Pork production is pretty important to Iowa. But I suppose O didn't want to step in that.

walter said...

"No Memorial Day speech by a sitting president about the troops he claims are fighting for "him"."

Fallen troops can no longer (intentionally) vote for him.

David R. Graham said...

"In manufacturing, I believe they call it extrusion."

Expulsion. Extrusion is deliberate forming on the way out.

harrogate said...

Christopher in MA writes,

"Don't be cruel, MB. You're asking harrowgate to actually apply critical analysis."

I take he it means the sort of highly substantial critical analysis being modeled by this post, and in the comments that follow.

Scott M said...

I take he it means the sort of highly substantial critical analysis being modeled by this post, and in the comments that follow.

Why would you choose to respond with a passive-aggressive insult rather than actually answer MB's question? Does that say something about your priorities?

Christopher in MA said...

Well, harrogate, I read Romney's speech. Almost every political speech nowadays is bullshit in its own way, but Romney made the point - which cannot be too often stressed - that self-proclaimed "fiscal hawk" Obama added five trillion dollars to the debt in between bites of barbecued bulldog.

So is that what you define as bullshit?

Yes, I know - It's Bush's fault. And Obama is awesome.

Anonymous said...

The proper technical term is "meadow muffin."

harrogate said...

Scott,

Because my point was not aimed at Romney or in support of Obama. Rather is was a commentary on AA's post. On getting all caught up in the word choice without pausing long enough to consider whether or not there is merit to the charge Obama leveled. It is classic misdirection. Instead of engaging the ideas, we engage the way the critique of the ideas was communicated.

Original Mike said...

"Expulsion. Extrusion is deliberate forming on the way out."

I would defer to Titus on this.

dbp said...

since the main source these days of meadow muffins of deceit is Obama, he really has no business casting shit in Romney's direction.

jungatheart said...

Although, Drudge nailed the picture selection.

(Understood, Scott.)

Sage said...

I really thought Iowa was more home to pig slop than cow pies.

Either way, this should be great for te-invigorating Obama's "shovel-ready" jobs campaign.

george said...

You will notice that Obama's term is much more inclusive than "bullshit" as it encompasses both male and female cows. This proves there is a Republican war on women...... somehow....

Jane said...

So a politician goes to give a speech at a farm. He jumps up onto a haybale, begins to deliver his speech, and at every pause he's heartened to hear rousing cheers of "Ooga! Ooga!"

On his way out through the farmyard gate, his host politely reminds him, "Don't step in the Ooga!"

Ignorance is Bliss said...

What he did not also tell you was that after inheriting a trillion-dollar deficit, I signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law, so now I want to finish the job.”

Who does he think he inherited that deficit from? He signed the 2009 budget into law, a budget created by the Democrat controlled House and Senate, of which he was a member for most of the budget process.

fernstalbert said...

This is another example of being too cute - its basically an insult to Iowa - kinda like the long finger by the nose gesture that Obama loves to give. Clever he ain't. cheers