Comment of the Day: Obama letchery edition

Over at Edge of the West, SEK has done an excellent debunk of the above picture, which seems to show Obama checking out that woman’s ass, but which video evidence puts the lie to. Not that this has stopped wingnuts like Ann Althouse from obsessing over Obama’s crudeness and infidelity and all that good wingnutty stuff. You could argue that this doesn’t matter and let the wingnuts have their fantasies, but Scott was alive during the nineties and knows what similar moronic memes did to Clinton, so:

I’ve taken to pre-emptive meme stamping. I figure if I can marginalize these idiocies before they have the chance to “blossom” into the mainstream a la Lewinsky and the Foster murder, we might could avoid a repeat of the ’90s.

The comment thread on this post shows exactly why this meme stamping is needed, as comment after comment shows that people, rightwing or not, have been taking in by these false accusations of letching. It’s also worth reading for one of the best putdowns of a troll I’ve ever seen– “If you have anything substantive to add to this conversation, by all means, add it; but if you’re here to remind the rest us that people like you someone survived long enough to learn how to type, I’d rather you took your sad act somewhere else“.

But the most insightful comment comes from Thers, a reminder of why this incident is important even if seemingly trivial, as it’s not a trivial incident to the young women int he centre of it:

The thing about this nonsense is that the young woman in question, and her family, are being put through the wringer, and what should have been a wonderful moment in what sounds like a pretty hard life has now been trashed. For, as you show, nothing but an obvious cheap shot. NY Post article is even more despicable than most NY Post articles, and intensely depressing.

If you don’t buy the abstract idea that dishonesty like Althouse’s should be given a response because it just should be, well, consider that stuff like that almost always features a human being getting hurt by it.