ZOMG - Barack Obama’s (not) Buying Michelle a GREAT BIG EXPENSIVE Ring!!!111!!1!!111

What an astoundingly well reported story!  Kim Priestap at (Cheez)WizBang reports that Barack Obama is buying Michelle one massive, honking, studded with diamonds, and made of freakin rhodium, $30,000 ring as a little “winky, winky” thank you for being there for him the last two years. And then, to prove her point, links to a sight that says he’s NOT buying her one!  A little internets research (courtesy of Sadly No!) says this is about as true as the lobster/champagne/Iranian caviar fiasco.  As does this.  Still, totally undeterred by “facts” she proceeds to chide him and suggest that:

instead of spending $30,000 on a ring, how about instead spending $15,000 on a ring. I’m sure there are some beautiful rings out there in the $15,000 price range that are suitable for his wife and that would adequately show his appreciation and love. Then he can take the other $15,000 and give it to a charity in Michelle’s name. I would recommend Operation Smile. For just $240, a child in a Third World nation can have the surgery needed to correct a cleft palate. With $15,000, 62 children can get the surgery that would give them a beautiful smile and a changed life.

And none of the commenters in any of the items referenced believe it’s not true either!  I usually can think of something pithy, scathing and yet still witty :-) to sum up a situation but I am kind of out of words over this.

Posted by marindenver on 12/03/08 at 07:00 PM • Permalink

You miss the point.  In these hard times, it’s tacky for Obama to not buy a $30,000 ring for Michelle; the appropriate thing would be to not buy something much more modest and inexpensive.  Just like I’ve scaled back all the stuff I’m not buying for people this year.

The comments on her site, once the Sadly Naughts get going, are priceless.

Oh, and Li’l Debbie Schussel jumped all over this one as well.

angienc at the Confluence has most PUMAriffic reaction:

Briana — FACT CHECK my @ss — I expected these bs denials just like they did with the caviar & lobster story at the Waldorf — I fully believe he bought that ring, just like I fully believe MEchelle ate that lunch. I don’t care what FACT CHECK denials are issued. The press will pretend he didn’t buy the ring just like they pretended their wasn’t any fraud or voter intimidation during the primary.

The truth means nothing!  Only my inflated senses of self-righteousness and persecution matter!  PUMA!

It’s impossible to deter a conspiracy theorist.  They have an excuse for everything.

Oh, and Li’l Debbie Schussel jumped all over this one as well.

Well, her claims about his faking his selective service registration haven’t gotten much traction, so.....

Angienc, New Orleans Puma, Jenniforhillary, PUMA’s Three Little Maids of Fail. 

Falsity of the story aside, if Obama wanted to spend his own money on a present for his own wife it should be his own business,unlike the RNC money Palin wore on her back just a few days ago, campaigning in Georgia for Chambliss.

I suppose after she “returned” the $150,000 wardrobe to the RNC, they cleared the skeletons out of one of their closets to make room for it, with the label “for Palin campaigning purposes”. Please note the quilted silk Valentino jacket she wore for Saxby, the one she wore repeatedly during the Presidential campaign. It looks good; you can hardly tell it spent so much time in the belly of the plane. Around Sarah, you can never tell how much time anything spends in the belly of anything.

First of all, this seems to be untrue.

Second, a $30,000 ring is not really that big of a deal considering that there are a lot more rings with a pricier tag.  It is way less expensive than a house!

Third, if he can afford it, that’s his money.  Spending money is one of the ways to help the economy keep going, as long as one can afford it.  Also, for going through the whole election, I think Michelle Obama earned it.

Fourth, instead of sending the money overseas, how about some other charity organizations that focus on helping our own people first?

Fifth, just because it’s made of rhodium, doesn’t mean it is expensive or magical.  Platinum is by far the most expensive jewelry metal.  Rhodium is one of the stuff they coat on gold to make white gold.  It is by no means rare.  Just like palladium or other platinum-like group metals, it is around the same price as 18k gold.

There just seems to be so many thing I see wrong with this whole ordeal.  Seriously people, the election is over, now either join us in making the country better or GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR WAY!

I’m disappointed in them.  Nobody has invoked the Kobe precedent and mentioned Barack’s secret mistress that they were all excited about just before the election.

It is way less expensive than a house!

i wish BO would buy Michelle Darragh Murphy’s house. Which is currently listed - asking $849,000 (discounted from about 929,000 a little while back!) - all true.. at least i think so.

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Reporting:

BRIGHT NEW CONSPIRACIES, NOW WITH LESS FAT!!!

BrianH 12.03.08 at 9:34 pm

Buncha hot issues out there.

First: Not only may granny Dunham still be alive, maybe Stanley Ann is, too. And both may have been/may be up to eyeballs in a HUGE international real estate scamming scheme.

TerryDo 12.04.08 at 12:32 am

I didn’t see tha tpost from Brian earier about Bo’s mom and grandma being still alive. but to me that’s the kind of stuff people see here and then report back to their camps that we’re all a bunch of kooks

They’re all a bunch of kooks, rite?

BARACK OBAMA TO PRESENT HILLARY CLINTON WITH $30,000 RHINESTONE JUMPSUIT!

i believe it. and thats all that really matters.

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In fact I don’t think they’re kooks - I wont let them fool me, ha! That’s a shrewd deception to trick the enemy into thinking how they are just harmless village idiots.

That’s a shrewd deception to trick the enemy into thinking how they are just harmless village idiots.

yup. and it worked for Ronald Reagan.

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... and for Dubya as well.

Wait, I can see a pattern here.

Wait, I can see a pattern here.

its kind of Faulkneresque ain’t it. and the whole plan and structure, for the meantime, has finally collapsed on itself. with nothing left smoldering among the ruins but Joe the idiot plumber and a hand full of puma droppings. unfortunately, they will claw their way from the debris and rebuild their village on the original pattern. and the road goes on forever.

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The PUMAs had their panties in a knot about this a few days ago in a post until somebody mentioned that it was denied by an Obama spokesperson and likely not true.

Then somebody (I hope humorously, but somehow I doubt it) said, paraphrasing here, “See… he even flip flops on giving his wife a ring.”

“In these hard times, it’s tacky for Obama to not buy”

Mr. Hilton nails the essence of all this as usual.

What happened to the right wing ethos of its my money and I can spend it exactly the way I fucking please and it’s nobody else’s business?

Obama is a communist from a third world country, Jake, so everything he does that doesn’t involve living in a mud hut on a commune eating grubs is a violation of the socialist values we’ve decided he espouses.  Also, Michelle is uppity enough already, amiright?  PUMA!

He could have used that $30,000 to retire Hillary’s campaign debt!!!

SEXIST!!  LAWSUIT!!  BERG!!  FLORIDA!!!

Wow, they’re bringing the full-on crazy. Four (eight?) years of this is going to be a grind.

Did they get this from the post-election South Park? (You knew it was a cartoon because Sarah Palin was smart.) The only detail they missed on that episode was Barack’s evidently reanimated mother and grandmother. Who knew? Perhaps they can reanimate Vincent Foster so Michelle can kill him, as an anniversary gift.

It’s an internets tradition.

I took a trip down Crazy Lane last night on some sites and now I’m sorry I did. Thing is, there’s a fine line between the OMGWTFBBQ crazy and the seemingly reasonable folk—like a former friend of mine who is STILL screaming that Obama didn’t win the nomination fairly because caucuses are “sexist” against women candidates. Why? Because wimmens can’t attend them in the evening because they’re taking care of the young’uns—even though HRC won Nevada, and over half the attendees of the Iowa caucuses were female, as tends to be true of voters (esp. Democratic voters) overall in primary and caucus contests.

Her underlying assumption is that if more women voted, Hillary would have won the caucuses (despite no discernible evidence of a concentrated “get out the vote” strategy in her campaign for caucus states beyond the early ones—Iowa and Nevada). Yet at the SAME TIME, she decries African American voters for being “lockstep” in voting for the black candidate. Women voting for other women is a sacred feminist duty—blacks voting for blacks is just idiotic identity politics in her book.

This is the kind of shit that annoys me even more than the PUMAs and Phil Bergs of the world. This woman is a professor of economics, not a random nutburger, yet she STILL has no qualms about making intellectually dishonest and incendiary arguments in order to discredit Obama (whom she routinely calls “The Windbag,” because you all know how annoying it is when black folks just flap their gums—had I called HRC “The Cackler” to her, the outrage would have been seismic). She had earlier asserted that blacks have a much easier time getting elected to office than women in America, despite the fact that there have been far more women governors and U.S. senators than black ones (or Latino or Asian, for that matter).

Yet BECAUSE she makes her arguments in an articulate way and BECAUSE she has real academic credentials, it doesn’t play like the googly-eyed wingnut paranoia.

I’m all for electoral reform, but these attempts to discredit a legitimate president-elect, whether through laughable “show us your COLB!” nonsense or whispering campaigns about nefarious plots in the caucuses piss me off.

Sorry this is somewhat OT, but I had to vent. God, I wish I could be asleep until January 20. For reals.

I think he should buy a $30k ring and send it to the starving children in Africa.

Seriously though, has it never occurred to the loonies that the jeweler might be trying to drive up sales of their rings by saying Barack is thinking of buying one for Michelle?  Oh wait, they haven’t noticed how popular our President-Elect is.

Kerry, I don’t think there’s anything to indicate this will let up after Jan. 20.  I think we’re going to be hearing this garbage for the next 8 years at least.  On the other hand, if Barack is getting some things done during those years it will feel very good to thumb our noses back at them.  The idea of government actually getting something done again in this country (beyond starting wars and screwing the middle class) sounds like a “once upon a time” story to me but I’m willing to close my eyes, wish real hard, turn around a few times and touch my nose to make it come true!

I gotta say the one about Barack’s mother and grandmother secretly being alive and involved in international real estate scams left me speechless.  Probably someone from one of these blogs started that as a “rumor” just to see if the kooks would pick up on it.

That’s what I’m thinking about right now, marin.

What patently absurd rumor can I push into the zeitgeist. 

For the lulz, of course.

Say, are we still being paid $7/hour to write favorable posts about Obama?  Cuz I haven’t seen a check in a while.

Anyone have the number for Payroll?

Marindenver, I think you’re right about the attacks not letting up, but even more right about competence and steadfastness being Obama’s ace in the hole against the nonsense.

And it’s again the thing that has consistently impressed me about Obama—he doesn’t get bogged down too often in playing the other person’s game. His attitude always seems to be “You do what you want over there, but I’m going to get my shit done and focus on what I think matters, and not let you set my agenda for me.” So of course he’s not gonna cave to the wingnuts and produce his “vault” birth certificate to placate them and show that he has “nothing to hide.”

Now, in someone like Bush, this going-my-way attitude was dangerous, but because Obama is a pragmatist who shows a willingness to listen to other people with opposing viewpoints, rather than an ideologue bent on filling government with hacks and crooks, it fills me with some hope that we can have some grown-up discussions about the future of the country and the world over the next few years.

And yeah, I think Obama’s mom and grandmother are alive in a secret location. Along with Andy Kaufman and Jim Morrison and Elvis!

Fadge - maybe we should start a contest!

Check’s in the mail, Rip.

Crazy Lane is an economically diverse neighborhood, running as it does through trailer parks and second homes in horse country alike. You’ve got Darragh Murphy in her $850,000 McMansion, and the erstwhile jenniforhillary (now Jennifer X; she only keeps the old nom d’guerre to avoid confusion. Um, besides the confusion she’s promoting)who occupies the turret room in her mother’s ormulu-stuffed recession-proof Gothic warehouse of Texan estate gimcrackery and rusty flintlocks. And at least one PUMA who has lost her house, sad to say. No, really, this woman lived there for 25 years, and was screwed over by the policies of the party she tried to get reelected. I haven’t seen her posting, so she’s probably in the throes of moving.

A number of PUMAs are not stupid by any means, until you get to the subject of Obama. They remind me of that vaudeville routine where one player goes into a murderous rage whenever he hears the words “Niagra Falls”: “NIAGRA FALLS! Slowly I turned, inch by inch, step by step---”

My mother was a Hillary supporter originally, and after some of Hillary’s primary antics, Mom and I had some crisp little chats: “You don’t understand, Hillary has wanted to be president since she was EIGHT, and along comes this BASTARD and takes it away from her!”

That was when I realized Mom had a definite Her/me thing going on: “How dare he take this away from Her/Me!” “All the work she/I have done, and nobody appreciates Her/Me!”

Ultimately,though, Mom happily voted for Obama, just another one of the eighteen million minus a thousand or so who did. She took a look at the lawn signs on Crazy Lane and decided not to move in.

It helps to keep a little perspective on these lopsidedly demented people: try to explain to your friends that you’ve been monitoring PUMA blogs, and most of them will say, “What? Cats? Shoes?”

I’ve had to explain to many of my friends what PUMA is, and the response I usually get is “Oh yeah, I think I remember--You’re kidding, are they still around?”

I like the sound of a Soetoro-off!

Mrs. Polly, you definitely deserve a slot on the “Talk Me Down” segment on Rachel Maddow’s show!

Glad your mom was able to get past her disappointment. I honestly had no problems with people who preferred Hillary over Obama (and all the other Dem candidates, for that matter)—what started getting my hackles up (and still gets them up from time to time, obviously) are the Hillary supporters who focused ALL their ire on Obama as the empty-suit, unqualified, “windbag” interloper who ran to thwart her dreams and rightful place in the line of succession. If it was “her turn,” then Richardson, Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Kucinich, and Gravel all missed the memo, too (well, with Gravel, no surprise!) So why was there so much more disdain and rage directed at Obama for getting in her way? Other than the fact that he surprised the hell out of her organizations by showing just how good he was at winning, that is.

Anyone have the number for Payroll?

No, silly!  Our last day was 11/3.

Oh nertz! I’m into golden time and you’re telling me we’re off the clock?

Mrs. P. I have tagged you.  Check your blog. :)

Thanks Mar, for reminding me about my blog--almost forgot that thing existed. Too enthralled with other people’s blogs. And with watching the geometric majesty of the PUMA’s golden death-spiral.

It’s no trouble coming up with six oddities about myself, but do I know six other people? That may take some time. But I’m all over it, like mange on large civet cats.

It helps to keep a little perspective on these lopsidedly demented people: try to explain to your friends that you’ve been monitoring PUMA blogs, and most of them will say, “What? Cats? Shoes?”

Very true! Mr. Cracker follows politics fairly closely, but I had to explain who Murphy was and what PUMA is when she showed up on some MSNBC program toward the end of the primaries. He just thought she was some random crackpot they snatched off the street for entertainment value. And he was right. All manner of lunacy gets magnified in blogland.