Good advice

From Atrios:

Be prepared for the final onslaught of the really stupid, when the media feels
the need to balance reality with whatever horseshit that McCain/Drudge are
spewing that day.

I recommend a locked windowless room with a vat of
vodka.

Actually, I thought we were already in the final onslaught of the really stupid. It's hard to see how it can get much worse. Oh, wait....



I'm literally speechless. Every single one of her questions is predicated on a fundamentally dishonest premise. She even quotes Karl Marx and asks Biden to explain how Obama is not a Marxist! It's like a right-wing blogger's wet dream; to them, this is a "real reporter asking real questions".

Here was one of the questions:

WEST: You may recognize this famous quote, “from each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen.
Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

BIDEN: Are you joking? Is this a joke? … Or is that a real question?
(LAUGHTER).

My God, if this is representative of the Florida news media, no wonder the state is a tossup.

ThinkProgress has a roundup of some of the reaction. The consensus seems to be that it was an utterly embarrassing and unprofessional display on the part of Mrs. West. I think she just wants a job at Fox News, as does AL:

The right wing blogs are all worked into a lather over an interview Joe Biden did recently with WFTV, a local television station in Orlando. They seem to think Biden somehow embarrassed himself or got rattled during the interview. The fact that they think that is further evidence of the rapidly widening gulf between the reality most of us inhabit and the alternate universe where most right wing bloggers now reside.

In the interview, Biden never loses his composure, despite being bombarded with questions that were so ridiculously loaded and counterfactual that Sean Hannity would have been embarrassed to ask them. [..]

For those of you who can't see the video, here are the six questions asked by Barbara West, the WFTV anchor. I'm not cherry picking here; these are the only questions she asked:

1) Aren’t you embarrassed by the blatant attempts to register phony voters by ACORN, an organization that Barack Obama has been tied to in the past?

2) But in the past Senator Obama was a community organizer for ACORN, he was an attorney for ACORN, and certainly in the Senate he was a benefactor for ACORN?

3) Senator Obama now famously told Joe the Plumber he wanted to spread his wealth around. A Gallup poll showed 84% of Americans prefer that government focus on improving economic conditions and creating more jobs in the U.S. as opposed to taking steps to spread wealth. Isn’t Senator Obama’s comment a potentially crushing political blunder?

4) You may recognize this famous quote: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

5) Now you recently said “Mark my works, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.” But what worries many people is your caveat asking them to stand with him because it is not going to be apparent initially that he’s right. Are you forewarning Americans that nothing will be done and that America’s days as the world’s leading power are over?

6) Getting back to the spreading the wealth question, what do you say to the people who are concerned that Barack Obama will want to turn America into a socialist country like Sweden?

That's it. That was the entire interview. The woman was like a cartoonish caricature of a wingnut, and her questions were straight out of a Steven Colbert interview. I kept waiting for her to ask Biden when Obama stopped being a member of al Qaeda. At one point, toward the middle of the interview, Biden actually had to stop and ask the anchor--in all seriousness--if she was joking. I don't blame him. The questions were so off the wall that he had to have been wondering whether this was some sort of Daily Show-esque mock interview.

Yeah, final onslaught of the stupid indeed.

Just to reiterate, the Right wing blogs were very impressed with this lady. Think about that for a second. And then read these posts by Daniel Larison.