In case you're keeping track of these things, cultural and political references in Obama's jokes included torture, swine flu, "mother fucker", gay marriage, the death of the Republican party, "negritude", racism, mysogyny and César Chávez ---a lot of them by omission.

Obama's speech is really is an amazing piece of pop politics and culture. If Jon Favreau is the only guy writing these for him, then he has a future as a comedy writer.

Transcript after the jump.  more this way»

Let that sink in for a minute.

Today George Bush gave his last press conference as President of the United States and seems to be "desembuchando" what he wasn't able to say for eight years. Maegan described the event as a hot mess that proves the man who hates being president; proving he was indeed a front for Dick Cheney.

So it's no wonder Shrub has been dropping little bombs (or mini-molotvs) like this one :  more this way»

If you thought that Hillary Clinton's increasingly directionless campaign did not have some further reservoirs of self-immolating malice to draw upon, please disabuse yourself of the notion. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Exhibit A: a new television spot being run in Texas in advance of that state's primary on March 4th. The conventional wisdom is that, simply, Team Hillary needs a clear victory to even stay in the race. So here's the spot, titled "Children":

To place that in context, here's one of the final ads from Team Bush in 2004, "Wolves":

How astonishingly depraved: after eight years of fear-mongering, a leading Democratic candidate embraces the Rovian playbook. They're not even being subtle about it.

Vote for me or your children die.  more this way»

I can't believe this is the last time we will ever hear George W. Bush lying to the country.

I am glad it will be the last time I will have to hold the urge to barf seeing all the Democrats cheering the motherfucker.

BTW : I can't believe I missed this Letterman bit about Shrub's oratorial gifts.

Location

The Wall Street Journal gave the top half of its opinion page to a long essay by Peter Berkowitz titled “The Insanity of Bush Hatred.” If anything, it deserves a gold medal for political propaganda – make that political lies. What caught my attention immediately was the frequent use of the word “progressive” to describe the people Berkowitz was attacking. It was used ten times. In other words, progressives were attacked for hating Bush.

There is a major lie of omission. No mention was made of the vast number of Americans that certainly do not call themselves progressives that hate Bush. Surely there are many millions of sane independents, moderates, libertarians, conservatives and liberals that rightfully hate Bush. To ignore all these Americans betrays the intellectual legitimacy of the article and its arguments.

Here are the few core reasons given by Berkowitz for condemning Bush hatred:

It is not a rational force in politics. It clouds and impairs political judgment. It subverts sound thinking. It has addled minds. It damages the intellect. It reduces “complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil.” It “blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.”

There is no detailed analysis of all the ways that the Bush administration has betrayed our Constitution. No mention, for example, of Bush signing statements that self-justifies not obeying the laws passed by Congress. No mention that the Bush claim of not using torture is so obviously a lie. No mention of using illegal surveillance of Americans and lying about it. No mention of countless lies used to get us into the absurd and costly Iraq war. No mention of the enormous amount of evidence showing that 9/11 was not solely an operation by foreign terrorists, but involved the federal government. And on and on.  more this way»