Sultan Knish
Summer is traditionally a weak shopping season, but lately the bargains
just keep on coming. First there was an offer to have dinner with Obama
and now a chance to have him there in your family photo. You can bid on
an opportunity to wish Obama a happy birthday in person with the present
that he likes best... money.
The prices are reasonable, and there are so many ways to buy Obama. You
can play the dinner lottery or ask your wedding guests to gift to Obama.
The Barack Obama website accepts all payments, Visa, Discover, Master
Card, foreign donations and stolen credit cards.
The opportunities are endless. Birthdays, wedding anniversaries, major
disasters; everything is just another reminder to give till it hurts.
All you have to do is click one of the many buttons beneath the
color-tuned hues of Instagram photos of Obama or his worse half smiling
while the country slides deeper into poverty and debt.
There's a reason that they call America, "The Land of Opportunity". Sure
it's gotten a lot harder to come here and make a fortune with your own
business, but buying time with the man at the top has just gotten a lot
more affordable. You may not have the big wallet of a Warren Buffett or a
George Soros and you won't cash in to the tune of a few billion dollars
like they did; but for 25 bucks you might end up briefly exchanging
pleasantries with the man who is slowly sending you to the poorhouse.
The designers are working overtime digging up retro fonts that summon up
the image of a more prosperous America. There are so many Obama
portrait shirts that they will be filling up landfills for generations.
More likely, they'll be shipped over to the Third World, along with all
the other surplus clothes that people donate once the trend has passed
or they no longer fit, and, somewhere in an African village, children in
the year 2021 will run around playing in "Obama 2012" t-shirts and
Islamic terrorists in the Sahara will execute rebellious women while
wearing "Forward" shirts.
You can get a "This is Change" shirt that lists all the things that
Obama has done on the back, but the text is too small to read on the
website, so, like ObamaCare and Obama 2012, you will have to buy it to
find out what's in it and on it.
There's a collar for cats that says, "I Meow for Michelle" and an
85-dollar Vera Wang tote bag with Obama inside a scrawled heart. There's
an Obama-themed dog collar, to express the relationship between the
administration and its lapdogs, and a t-shirt with an all-red American
flag that has a distinctly Soviet feel to it. There's a 65-dollar polo
shirt designed by rapper and Farrakhan supporter Russell Simmons; which
is just a generic polo shirt with a small Obama logo.
A Joe Biden cup holder sits next to a knit Obama dog sweater, a silver
Obama brooch, an Obama basketball jersey, an Obama University hoodie,
which has a seal but no motto, along with beanies, keychains, more dog
collars, water bottles, tumblers, lanyards, cuff links, duffel bags,
tube socks and a dog bowl with the Obama logo inside for your dog to
drink out of.
Obama isn't just a politician; he is a Walmart of useless crap. A
one-man Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie and Fitch and Ed Hardy with enough
t-shirts, polo shirts and bandanas to outfit a small army of young men
and women with more credit card limits than taste. And upstairs on the
third floor of his cyberspace Target, you can find a plethora of
90-dollar reusable canvas bags from major designers that have become the
stamp of consciously responsible consumption.
You can buy Obama and wear Obama all over your body. You can read Obama
at the beach, stick him on your toddler, your dog and your cat. You can
cover your car, your house and your barn with his stickers. And, if you
are truly lucky, you may even win a chance to spend 72 seconds in his
presence before you are firmly ushered out to go back to your Obama 2012
car and drive back to your Obama 2012 yard sign where your dog is
barking for food in his "Obama Best Friend" collar and then sit down to
read through the Help Wanted ads in the paper while wearing an Obama
Hope Lapel Pin.
The price of meat has risen sharply, going up by a dollar to a dollar
fifty a pound since last summer, and beef consumption has fallen to an
all-time low. But that's okay, because you can still grill your burger
in an Obama 2012 apron while using an Obama grill spatula to embed the
Obama 2012 logo into the meat that your family eats. At 40 bucks, the
grill spatula isn't exactly cheap, but it's a bargain compared to what
another four years of Obama will cost you. And the burgers with Obama
2012 on them are a date stamped in time, reminding you that, if Obama
wins in 2012, pretty soon you won't be able to afford meat at all.
There's an old joke about an honest politician being a man who stays
bought. And while you can buy hundreds of dollars worth of ObamaCrap
2012, you don't have the money it takes to buy Obama. That's reserved
for the bundlers and the billionaires, who get their payoff in the form
of bailouts and stimulus packages. Al Gore gets a 500-million dollar
loan to build cars in Finland, Solyndra executives get another
500-million for their 100 thou worth of donations and Warren Buffett
gets billions in bailout profits. But you get to take home a 15-dollar
dog collar with your master's name on it.
But don't worry, it's only money, your money, and they have to give it
away to somebody. Paul Holland, a venture capitalist who sucked up some
of that sweet money, described a DOE official walking into the room and
announcing, "I’m Matt Rogers
I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy, and I have $134
billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December.”
"So upon hearing that," Holland said, "I sent an email to my partners
that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into
a prison exercise yard. And I had the lack of judgment to go up and
share that with him and the other people who were all standing around
him…Fortunately for me they all laughed and thought it was funny.”
Of course Rogers thought it was funny, because Matt Rogers wasn't the
one getting treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.
The American taxpayer was the one being treated like a hooker in that
crony capitalism exercise yard. Rogers, a longtime employee of energy
consulting firm McKinsey & Company, who went back there after his
brief term dispensing hundreds of billions of dollars, was just the
assistant to the pimp-in-chief.
In Hollywood there's a big difference between the movie producer and the
guy who buys a ticket. Holland, like Buffett and Soros, is a producer,
and, like producers, he shares in the profit of the trillion-dollar
production of Obama 2008 and is hoping to share in the boffo box office
of Obama 2012. That's a world away from the chumps buying Obama spatulas
and dog dishes who can bask in the historicity of a national debt that
is so big it might as well come with a dog collar around their necks.
Obama's supporters can buy tickets to the inauguration, buy lottery
tickets to win a dinner with Obama or a chance to feel Obama's sweaty
arm on their necks for 3.5 seconds in an Instagram photo. They can buy
Obama merchandise, share Obama on social media and do all the other free
promotional grunt work that fans are tasked with in the social media
age, but all they are ever going to be are spectators.
No matter how many shirts reading, "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting
For" get lugged around an impoverished country by tired UPS men in
brown; there has never been a "We" here. Obama is an "I" guy and
whatever "We" there is, is strictly limited to the kind of people who
don't buy t-shirts, but who buy energy companies and banks.
Obama is for sale, but like the 100-dollar reusable tote bags, you
really can't afford him. And unlike the bags, you won't be able to
afford him even if you skip a lot of meals this summer. The "Win a
Dinner with Obama" and "Win a Family Photo with Obama" and "Win a Lock
of Obama's Hair" entries are meant to create the illusion that Obama is
affordable. That you can buy access to him the way that you can buy his
t-shirt.
While his website pitches branded bangles, running shorts, baby bibs,
golf divots, blankets and a "Michelle 2012" gold pin, the real action is
happening where the big men and women are being pitched more tangible
benefits of another four years from a guy who spent 5 billion dollars a
day. An administration which in its first term compelled every American
to buy health insurance as a penalty for breathing has a lot to offer
its crony capitalist billionaires. And the benefits don't have anything
to do with "history"; only with "profitability."
The best con artist makes you pay for the privilege of being robbed. He
doesn't just take your money, he convinces you to buy his t-shirt too.
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