Gabourey Sidibe at the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony.

Fat is a feminist issue.

If you don’t understand that, you can’t call yourself a feminist. Because I say so. Yes, I do so, too, have that power.

I love it that People Magazine included Gabourey Sidibe in its list of the “100 Most Beautiful People of 2010.” I don’t believe they are holding her up as an ideal in the sense that they are telling slim women they should look more like Gabourey. I don’t believe they are sending the message to Gabourey, or other obese women, that there are no health risks associated with obesity.

But I do believe that People Magazine is sending the message that Gabourey’s heart and soul are very much a part of her beauty AND that she is doing the most in her current situation to be beautiful — and lovable — just the way she is. That kind of love and acceptance empowers people — in their own way, on their own schedule — to improve their health and appearance.

Criticism and shame have the opposite effect of love and acceptance in helping people transform themselves for the better. For one thing, when you love and accept other people just the way they are, it means you have healthy boundaries (that means you aren’t constantly judging and interfering with and bossing other people instead of minding your own business and letting them mind theirs the way THEY see fit). For another, someone who is being attacked with criticism and abused by shaming now has two more problems to solve than if they were just left alone to wrestle with their original problem. That is, now, in addition to being overweight, or whatever, they have to set a boundary and push their attacker out of their psychic space AND heal from the wounds the attacker inflicted. Having to worry about future attacks doesn’t help, either.

Women are so bullied and controlled by people who have some kind of power over them — the ability to bestow or withhold love, marriage, approval, career advancement — based on their appearance that that is why fat is a feminist issue.

I understand very well that some people try to make their hatred of fat people respectable by claiming to be criticizing and shaming us for our own good — that we are in danger from obesity and would be healthier if we were slimmer. Gee — why didn’t WE think of that?

The short version of how I got to obesity is that I have obstructive sleep apnea. Oh — and I’m 56. I was taking off the weight pretty well until I had to drop out of Body Pump class last year because when I bend over I feel like I have a hot golf ball where my right ovary should be. (No, I don’t have health insurance or the money for healthcare — why do you ask?)

But I’m very lucky. I had 20 years basking in the loving gaze of my late life partner and she was the most beautiful woman in the world to me and I was the most beautiful woman in the world to her. No matter what aspect of my body and appearance I am working to improve, I guarantee you that I will never settle for anything less from my future spouse than that — and it is certainly what I will give to her.

In college I had a lover who was anorexic. She was very emotionally abusive and since my own mother was emotionally abusive I didn’t know to dump her. She was a gymnast in her teens — when we met I was 21 and she was 23 — and when she wore a leotard and walked through the gym where the University of Michigan women’s gymnastics team was working out, every single one of those young women stopped what she was doing and stared in awe. Well, also, our sex life was so incendiary that to this very day I feel superior to ordinary mortals who know not what I know. Really, at the time I thought we owed it to the world to tour and give classes and demonstrations.

Where was I? Oh, yes — she was emotionally abusive. It took me several years to recover from the abuse and what really helped me turn the corner was the fact that books about anorexia began to be published in the late 1970′s. My opinion now, especially after watching two of my friends make one of their daughters anorexic, is that anorexia is caused by parents who usurp a child’s own choices and impose their own will on the child so that the child’s self never gets a chance to figure things out on its own and develop and grow. Then, when the parent lets go around 13 or 14 — still expecting the child to make only the choices the parent approves of — anorexia, which is about control, tends to manifest, especially if the child has a talent involving performing in sports, music or the stage.

By the way, one of the reasons that anorexia is very difficult to treat is that if the therapist tells the parents of an anorexic teen the truth — which is that their domination of their child and enmeshed family dynamic is what is making their child so sick — to defend their own narcissism they will fire the therapist.

To illustrate my point that eating, obesity and being loved for what you are by people who have healthy boundaries and let you figure out on your own how and when to improve yourself, I want to share six videos — four of Margaret Cho and two of Karen Carpenter. The first is Margaret Cho, from her show, “I’m the One that I Want,” talking about how the producers of her sitcom, “All-American Girl,” nearly killed her by putting her on a diet and exercise regimen in which she lost 30 pounds in two weeks. That sounds great until you figure in the peeing blood and kidney failure (and probable permanent kidney damage and loss of bone density). Do the math on this: to lose a pound of fat you have to burn 3500 calories. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. Probably one-third of Cho’s weight loss was water — thus the kidney failure. She had to burn something like 49,000 calories in 14 days in addition to the 2,000 calories her base metabolism would burn.

In the first clip, Cho tells the story of how she was bullied into the nearly-fatal weight loss regime:

In the next two clips, Cho talks about how she felt accepted for the first time in her life when she found out her show was going to series and what it was like to give her mother this news on Mother’s Day (the good part is about seven minutes into the first clip):

Margaret continues by telling how the tabloids and celebrity magazines bullied her about her weight — and her boyfriend at the time, Quentin Tarantino, correctly told her that her show’s producers were stealing her voice:

Now, moving on, to Karen Carpenter, who rose to fame as a popular singer when I was in high school. Karen Carpenter died in 1983 at the age of 32 of heart failure due to taking ipecac to induce vomiting — the vomiting caused an electrolyte imbalance that made her heart beat so abnormally that she died. Carpenter was both a singer AND a highly regarded drummer. I’m including a video of her singing my favorite Carpenters song, “Top of the World,” and a video of her playing the drums — both to show how talented she was, and how emaciated:

I think the bass drummer in the following clip is John Denver — Karen Carpenter was an amazing drummer:

Now let my friend, Jennifer Lawson, The Bloggess, bring this all home and show you why “Everyone is beautiful.”

This afternoon when Dad and I were buying groceries, I noticed the National Enquirer’s headline that Oprah has ordered Stedman out and moved Gayle King in because she’s “tired of living a lie.”

Waddaya know — Kathy Griffin was right.

So, Oprah, if you come out as a lesbian, all is forgiven. We’ll see to it you and Gayle receive the platinum level membership cards, along with the traditional toaster oven, which will be awarded to you in a special ceremony to be conducted by Ellen DeGeneres in June on Pride Day in the chic location of your choice.

What Dan Rather said to Chris Matthews this morning on MSNBC about the current state of Obama’s persuasive powers is, “But he couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him a state trooper to flag down the traffic.”

There’s no racial monopoly on who sells or buys watermelons. Rather made no allusions to race.

So — pound sand, frothing demagogues of the race-baiting industry! Your race cards expired on January 20, 2009! However, it IS time to go over your record of how you treat homosexuals and women, and it looks like you are NOT up-to-date on your Rainbow Coalition vaccinations, so please take off all your clothes and put on this gown. The doctor will be with you shortly.

H/T HillBuzz and iOwnTheWorld.com.

H/T Bookworm Room

This video actually is an amazingly good summary of the melting of the anthropogenic global warming hoax now re-branded as “climate change,” which seems like a safe enough position to hold since change is what the climate does all the time.

I have pretty much recovered from shoveling the record snowfalls we received here in northern Maryland. About all I’ve done this month is prepare for, deal with and recover from the snowfalls. I have a lot of things to catch up on. I haven’t finished working my way through all the comments that accumulated while I was too tired/sore to deal with them. In addition, I wanted to write a post explaining my objections to Gay Patriot and various positions taken by Daniel Blatt, but CPAC starts on Thursday and goes until Saturday evening, Feb. 18-20. I have to prepare for that so it looks like I won’t be able to get that done until after CPAC. I see from the comments to my post on Gay Patriot West that Gay Patriot, Bruce, the founder of the blog, is irritated with me, too. I know Bruce and I are scheduled to be in at least one meeting together, pre-CPAC on Wednesday. This is a discussion that SHOULD be taking place in the open between our blogs. I intend to continue it.

And really — how is it possible there are gay men who have NOT had an outraged lesbian grab them by the shoulders, rant at them, and shake them until they rattle in order to raise their consciousness on some issue? It’s. What. We. DO!

However, I do want to note how much the reactions of Gay Patriot (Bruce) and Gay Patriot West (Daniel Blatt) contrast sharply with those of Stacy McCain, my dear friend and frequent antagonist on the issues of homosexual equality, gay marriage and feminism. Really, click my categories “Stacy McCain of The Other McCain,” and “Robert Stacy McCain” and see what a true professional and good sport he is. It won’t be hard to figure out why I stick up for Stacy, regardless of our opposition on issues we each hold so close to our hearts.

By the way, I plan never to have a public fight with Hill Buzz because our communication is excellent so I would never have to, I adore the Hill Buzz boys, we’ve been supportive of one another from the get-go, and when they criticize the gay community, they do it pretty much from the same place I do — it’s regarding specific people from their past or present. Also, when Kevin, et al., write, they unite reason, love, passion, duty and a fine sense of right and wrong. Their posts always are worth reading because I always learn something I didn’t know and wanted to learn, or my heart is warmed or I get a laugh — like their post today on the meltdown of the religion of anthropogenic global warming with a funny illustration featuring Al Gore.

For my dear gentle readers who are concerned about my father, my awesome nephew will be looking after him when I am in Washington, D.C., at CPAC, assisted by our kitties.

moar funny pictures

Most of the action here over the last few days, in terms of traffic, has been for a post I wrote last February about ridicule being Obama’s Kryptonite (see below for the link). It was relevant to a post Jonah Goldberg wrote at National Review Online’s “The Corner” about Obama having a glass jaw when it comes to ridicule, which I found via Instapundit. So I sent my post to Instapundit, aka Prof. Glenn Reynolds, and he graciously included it in the conversation by linking it. It seems to have touched a nerve — it’s gotten some 14,000 hits in just a few days.

I’ve been working for over a year to get my gentle readers to understand how Obama meets the clinical definition of a sociopath, so you all can defend yourselves better and not fall for Obama’s lies. Obama will keep a campaign promise if doing so supports his narcissism, makes people jump or grovel (which feeds his sociopathy), or destroys capitalism and/or democracy (which affirms his Leftist ideology). If an Obama promise won’t do any of those things, then he made the promise, or told people what they wanted to hear, in order to get people to hand over their power and money willingly. In that case, if he made a promise, he has no intention of keeping it. In addition, he has a well-rehearsed repertoire of behaviors for manipulating, shaming, fending off, befogging, gaslighting, denouncing and  invalidating people who confront him about his failure to keep his side of the bargain. Alternatively, he promises to do his part in an ever-receding future.

In June 2009 I wrote an answer to a column by Victor Davis Hanson: “Dr. Hanson, I can tell you why Obama just makes stuff up.” In it, I pulled together my three fundamental posts on Obama as a sociopath whose Kryptonite is ridicule, which I wrote in February 2009:

• “Understanding Obama“
• “The chilling explanation of why Obama is cool“
• “Why ridicule is Obama’s Kryptonite.

This post also is helpful:

• “Understanding Obama: learn the four types of enablers of narcissists.”

In later posts I did ridicule Obama, as you can see from the LOLCats photos above and below, or if you read my April Fool’s Day post, “Obama confesses to treason and resigns, co-conspirators are in custody, Hillary Clinton sworn in as president.”

Here are some samples of the way I ridicule Obama via LOLCats photos:

How Obama’s presidency will really end:

moar funny pictures

See HillBuzz: “The angrier gays get over DOMA and DADT the more likely you are to hear stories about Man’s Country” and “All we could think of when we saw this cartoon of Rahm Emanuel was ….”

And:

moar funny pictures

The Daily Kos and Democratic Underground have outed Kevin DuJan as the owner of the blog, Hill Buzz. They are smearing him with the false charge that that he is a racist. They are urging their readers to destroy his career and attack him physically. (I’m not linking them, but you can verify this by Googling. Instead, I suggest you read Hill Buzz here.)

The Right blogosphere should rally to the aid of DuJan and Hill Buzz, as he has tirelessly rallied to ours with dozens of posts teaching Republicans how to campaign effectively and supporting Republicans, including Gov. Sarah Palin and now Sen.-elect Scott Brown. If you are not familiar with Hill Buzz, here is a wonderful sample post — they are observing the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration with the thank-you letter they wrote to Pres. George W. Bush last year.

In my transition from lifelong Democrat and liberal during the presidential campaign in 2008, I started reading blogs so I would be able to explain to my Democrat friends that I had legitimate reasons for supporting McCain/Palin. STOP LAUGHING!!! Since I was briefly a Hillary PUMA, I read PUMA blogs and liked Hill Buzz the best. I began to read Hill Buzz every day some time in September or October of 2008. I assure my gentle readers, Kevin DuJan and the rest of the Hill Buzz boyz are not racists. They oppose racial entitlement and racial grievance hate-mongering. That is not racism.

Hill Buzz is written by a group of gay men in Chicago who began the blog in early 2008 as part of their efforts on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Thanks to experiencing the dirty tricks of the Obama campaign up close and personal during the primaries, as soon as the Democratic nomination was stolen from Hillary, they became supporters of John McCain. They blogged, campaigned, phonebanked and donated money for McCain/Palin with unbounded zeal and passion.

Now Kevin DuJan and Hill Buzz need our support. We MUST push back against FALSE charges of racism because Lefties will use it to destroy innocent people as long as it keeps working. Certainly if we do not hang together on this, we will hang separately.

What are the best ways to express your support? Here are some suggestions:

1. Bloggers can write posts in support of Kevin Dujan and Hill Buzz and link to Hill Buzz posts.
2. I’m encouraging Kevin to write an e-book collecting his posts teaching Republicans how to campaign and fight Democratic dirty tricks, plus his posts on the Hill Buzzers’ experiences of Obama’s dirty tricks during the primaries. I suggested he sell it for $24.95, but offer it for $19.95 to people who buy it in advance of its publication. So, if you want to vote with your wallet, please go to Hill Buzz and click the “Donate” button and donate at least $19.95 with a note that you would like a copy of his e-book, if he does write it (if not, please just let it be a donation — he’s losing clients as a result of these false charges).
3. I’m also encouraging Kevin to accept that these attacks destroying his current livelihood are calling him to a new career on a national stage as an author and motivational speaker. He is a professional writer. He has great insights, especially for the 2010 campaign. His books could be best-sellers. I bet his speeches would bring you to your feet cheering yourself hoarse. So if you are a literary agent, publisher or need a speaker for your event (and you pay your speakers), contact Kevin at hillbuzz at gmail.com. (The contact e-mail is published at Hill Buzz.)

Thank you.

Update, 1/21/2010, Thurs.:

Thanks for the link, Instapundit! And welcome, Instapundit readers!

Update, 23/2010, Sat.

I thank the following bloggers for posting, linking, tweeting and re-tweeting this post and standing up for Kevin DuJan and Hill Buzz — if I missed anyone, please leave a comment and I will add you:

• Instapundit, aka Prof. Glenn Reynolds
• Michelle Malkin, who knows what these attacks are like due to her courage as a pioneer in calling out racial grievance mongering: “You know you are getting to these Kossacks and Moveon.org-anisms when they start coming after you”
• Prof. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, for making this a “Post of the Day”
• Dear Little Miss Attila, my fairy blog mother and a staunch friend of Hill Buzz: “Go Help the Guys at Hill Buzz”
• Sissy Willis of SISU — she and Prof. Jacobson were the first two bloggers who went to work using social media to support the candidacy of Scott Brown in Massachusetts — read this awesome post on using social media
• Kathy Shaidle, another fearless opponent of the enslaving and bullying tactics of identity politics — who is paid by the amount of traffic she gets (hint, hint): “Hey, stop me if you’ve heard this one!”
• Gay Patriot: “Stand with Hill Buzz”
• Conservatives4Palin: “Stand up for Hill Buzz”
• Shakey Pete’s Shootin’ Shack — blogroll and bookmark and subscribe to this blog, I REALLY recommend it, and Pete is a great friend and frequent commenter here: “A Friend is Attacked, Unfairly”
• Dan Riehl of Riehl World View has an excellent post with a link to Stacy McCain: “Hill Buzz versus whomever.” Charges like this are tried periodically on Stacy. When it happened in September 2009, I was one of the first to stand up for Stacy, which is how I learned that we really can make tactics like these feel like spitting into the wind for the Left — soon they were whining about how many bloggers were vouching for him!
• Life in 3D: “Smear Merchants”
• Moose and Squirrel: “Driving the snakes out of Washington”
• Irons in the Fire: “Just a Few Things to Note This Morning”
• Death by a 1,000 Paper Cuts: “Hill Buzz threatened by Kos and Dummie Underground”
• iChannel (a news aggregator)
• And all the re-tweets on Topsy.com.

And thank you to Kevin and the dear boyz at Hill Buzz for their kind thank-you post today — since I am old enough to be their mother, I am touched that they called me “a big sister” to them, instead!

I also am grateful to my dear gentle readers, old and new, who came here to read this post. In addition, I am grateful to the readers who donated to Hill Buzz and to me. I’ve gotten a P.O. box so I can send out real thank-you notes to all my donors, but it may be several weeks before I have things around the house well enough in hand to send them. I appreciate your generosity, kindness and patience.

Updated, 1/23/2010, Sat.:

Here’s an example of how to publish a book based on your blog posts: Dan Collins of POWIP has a new book, Was It Something I Said?

Updated, 1/29/2010, Fri.: Thanks for the link, Joe.My.God. — the reason most of the wingnut sites are pointing to this post is because I was the first blogger to take up my terrible, swift pixels on behalf of Kevin and Hill Buzz. I’m looking forward to Leftie gay and lesbian bloggers doing more to hold Obama and the Democrats to their promises of repealing DADT and DOMA. Set some deadlines, for example, and list what will happen if they are not met cheerfully and promptly.

H/T for video to Hill Buzz: “Get off your butts: MSNBC admits electing Scott Brown will cripple Obama.”

Success has a thousand fathers and failure only one, as the expression goes.* Now that Republican Scott Brown is polling ahead of the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, for the election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19 to fill the Senate seat that fell vacant when Ted Kennedy died, there’s a rush in Right blogosphere to take some credit. Today Jules Crittenden gratefully cites Neo-neocon, who wrote that on Dec. 9 Crittenden correctly predicted the conditions that could rob Coakley of the easy coronation she expected.

I could be wrong because I didn’t comb the entire blogosphere, but I think the scoop for rallying Republicans nationally to support Scott Brown to become the 41st Republican senator, able to stop Obamacare with a single filibuster, belongs to Prof. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, and Hill Buzz, the blog of a group of moderate Democratic gay men in Chicago who campaigned for McCain/Palin after the nomination was stolen from Hillary.

In contrast, Crittenden’s post on Dec. 9, the day after the primary vote in Massachusetts that selected Martha Coakley for the Democrats and Scott Brown for the Republicans, was dripping with disdain for Brown, his chances AND anyone who was determined to fight for his election:

Brown, talking up tax cuts and slamming stimulus hackery, talked about how all the jobs that were created were Democratic hack jobs. Which is among the reasons he’ll lose. In a low-turnout election, the many, many hacks of Massachusetts will call the shots.

… Legal Insurrection rates me “reasonably pessimistic.” I’ll rate him reasonably wishful, as he notes a Brown win would be “something else” and includes a link to donate to Brown.

… A reader just berated me for insulting Ayla (Brown’s daughter, a singer who was a contestant on American Idol). Apologies to the lovely and talented Ayla Brown from an F-list political commentator. My kids are fans and have your autograph from a Hanover Mall appearance. No offense intended though I entirely understand how it could be taken. Sorry, once I get started with the harsh realities …

Same reader also berated me for failing to be sufficiently optimistic about her dad’s chances and for failing to engage in GOP cheerleading. Sorry, once I get started with the harsh realities …

The big news stories in December were Climategate, Obamacare and the Christmas panty bomber. Prof. Jacobson published posts on Dec. 9 and Dec. 17 calling for Republicans to support Brown. Then, on Monday, December 28, Hill Buzz published a post endorsing Scott Brown. The headline read, “One of the hardest things we’ve ever had to write: Martha Coakley should NOT be the next Senator from Massachusetts,” and they made this impassioned plea:

Our decision to support Scott Brown has nothing to do with Martha Coakley.

We would not support any Democrat running for that Senate seat, because for the sake of the country we believe Democrats should lose the 60-vote edge they currently are abusing.

Every Democrat blindly voting for the Healthcare Rationing bill is doing a great disservice to this nation. They have not read this bill. They do not know what’s in it. They are not executing their sworn duties as representatives of the people to work in their best interests. This is a pork-laden bill filled with hundreds of millions in bribes. It is a bill that will, for the first time in history, usurp the Constitution to force Americans to purchase products against their will. It is a bill that dictates how Americans can spend their own money. It is a bill that will eliminate the Flex Spending Accounts so many families we know of depend on to make ends meet in their household budgets.

It is a tragedy of legislation, rushed through Congress for no valid reason. Instead of behaving in a considered and responsible way, Democrats are ramming this junk through the Senate at full speed while they have those 60 votes. They know that, without that 60-vote edge, they would never be able to wreck the havoc they intend for this country.

So, it is thus with a very heavy heart that we say, clearly, that Martha Coakley must be defeated — this time — in her bid for the Senate.

Coakley has said she will vote the party line on the Healthcare Rationing Bill. That’s enough for us to say she should not be installed in the Senate next month.

Democrats should not have more than 59 votes, so that bills this massive and economy-changing cannot be shoved through in secret in the dead of night.

Support Scott Brown, and stop liberal tyranny from destroying this nation, while we still have a chance to do some damage control.

This was an about-face from Hill Buzz’s post supporting Coakley for Senate published on Oct. 1. After explaining their change of heart, Hill Buzz continued to inspire people to donate to Brown’s campaign and phone bank for him. They also made sure to get ahead of a possible negative that Coakley could use: Brown posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine when he was in law school. And even I can tell the man is smokin’ hot. Hill Buzz made this photo an asset by nicknaming Brown, “Hottie McAwesome.” (Imagine the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over that at the Coakley HQ!)

It looks like Jules Crittenden picked up the story on the GOP’s abandonment of Brown from the Boston Herald, where he is an editor, on Dec. 29, the day after Hill Buzz’s endorsement. Also on Dec. 29, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and Prof. Jacobson wrote posts about Crittenden’s story on Brown and his importance as the 41st vote against Obamacare and the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda for America.

If Scott Brown wins the Senate race in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, it will be called the Massachusetts miracle, but I believe it began with the love-of-country and determination to fight regardless of overwhelming odds of Prof. William Jacobson and the dear gay boyz at Hill Buzz.

P.S.

Dear Moe Lane also has been quite the staunch supporter for Brown but he does not have an archives plug-in so it’s not easy to go back and see when he first started posting for Brown.

Update, 1/17/2010, Sun.:

Thanks to dear Dan Collins of POWIP for pointing out that Massachusetts blogger Sissy Willis has been a vocal supporter of Scott Brown since he won the Republican primary on Dec. 8 (and probably before, I didn’t check her archives). And I can’t resist adding that dear Little Miss Attila linked Hill Buzz’s campaign in support of “Hottie McAwesome” on December 31.

Update, 1/17/2010, Sun.:

Over at Neo-neocon’s today a commenter and the eponymous blogger note that I “muffed” this saying: failure is an orphan. I actually do have dysphasia, although I usually Google my way out of it.

The National Enquirer reports today that Obama has thrown Oprah under the bus and set his wife, Michelle, up to take the blame. Oprah still does not understand what her idol really is so she has fallen for his ruse, which means she’s hurt and angry with Michelle but still all gooey and starry-eyed about Obama and filled with dreams of power as her reward for choosing him as The One and making him president:

Distraught Oprah Winfrey is telling pals her “thank you” for helping Barack Obama win the presidency has been a knife in the back.

A jealous first lady has frozen the talk queen out of the White House inner circle, say insiders. “Oprah is devastated,” revealed a friend.

“She had no idea that Michelle was so jealous about the influence she had on Barack. She hated the way her husband would huddle with Oprah over strategy and jump when she called.

“The jealousy and anger was eating up Michelle. During the campaign, she vowed Oprah would not be a part of the new administration.

“Oprah had visions of being a close adviser to the president and a regular visitor to the White House. She was actually planning to redecorate the famous Lincoln bedroom, which is reserved for special guests of the first family.

“But in the first 10 months of the Obama administration, Oprah has visited the White House only twice, and one visit was for a business meeting to do an interview with Michelle for O magazine.

“And that was a disaster. Oprah arrived with her friend Gayle King, but was shocked to find Michelle cold and distant. Worse, she all but ignored Oprah and directed her attention to Gayle. It was as though Oprah wasn’t even there.”

The meeting got off to a bad start when Oprah, 55, greeted Michelle. The TV host leaned to kiss her cheek, but the first lady stepped back and extended her hand instead.

Then Michelle, 45, seemed to ignore a question Oprah asked about the Obama children, instead taking a question from an aide and then returning only to chat with Gayle again — ignoring or forgetting Oprah’s question.

By the end of the day, Oprah felt roundly snubbed.

“Since then, Oprah has tried again and again to mend the rift,” said the friend. “But she’s had no luck. Michelle has made it clear she is no longer interested in being friends with Oprah and is going to block her from access to the President.”

Why, yes, I AM quoting the National Enquirer — this kind of story is their bread-and-butter and not the kind of thing they would make up, since Oprah is super-rich and litigious when it comes to libel.

Anyway, it never gets old to see the look of surprise and shock on the faces of the people — Obama’s white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham; Obama’s pastor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright; Obama’s first literary agent, Jane Dystel; Honduran president Manuel Zelaya — and the groups — gays, women, Jews, supporters of Israel, independents who fell for the “no new taxes for anyone who makes less than $250,000” line, and everyone who believes that prosperity comes from the government instead of incentivizing ambition and creativity by letting people keep at least half of the money they make — that Obama has thrown under the bus the instant he didn’t need them any more.

You would think that Oprah has lived and thrived in Chicago long enough to understand that Obama and his cronies are quintessential Chicago Democrats. In case there’s anyone left in the world who does not understand that now, David Kahane explained it in his July 7, 2009, column for the National Review Online on why and how Obama and the Democrats went all out to destroy Sarah Palin. Along the way, Kahane described what Obama’s Democratic Party has become and what it plans to do (boldfacing mine):

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?

Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Remember, I live and work in a town where, “Hello, he lied,” isn’t a joke; we men of the Left are perfectly comfortable lying, cheating, and stealing — hello, Senator Franken! — in order to attain and keep political power. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, “By Any Means Necessary.” You see, we’re the good guys, and for us the ends always justify the means. We are, literally, shameless, which is why Bill Clinton is now a multi-millionaire and Eliot Spitzer is already on the comeback trail.

In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.

Oprah! Because Obama is a sociopath, he sees people just as objects to be used! He tells people whatever they want to hear in exchange for their power and money with NO intention of keeping the promises he made to get them. The only emotion he really can feel is malicious glee at being able to make people jump, or kowtow. Obama used you and now he has discarded you. I believe you are a decent person, so now it’s time to return the favor to Obama and start supporting the people who are working to clean up the mess you made.

Gentle readers, just in case that doesn’t happen — or if, go figure, you are a conservative and in the habit of taking your fate into your own hands instead of waiting for the government, or anyone else, to do something for you — HillBuzz proposes another solution:

… Republicans need to give Independent and Moderate voters an excuse that lets them admit voting for Dr. Utopia was the dumbest thing they have done in a while.

We suggested this the other day, when we suggested a grassroots campaign should be started to “Blame Oprah” for all of this. We’ve found, anecdotally, here in Chicago that people are more likely to admit what a disaster Dr. Utopia is if they don’t also have to admit how stupid they are for having fallen for all of Utopia’s lies.

BUT, when we’ve suggested to these people that Oprah tricked them, and that they never would have backed Utopia if Oprah hadn’t told them to, then suddenly they speak freely about what a promise-breaking, lying, socialist embarrassment the current president is.

You might think this is ridiculous, but we swear it works. Even here in Boystown, where people were so drunk on Kool-Aid and deranged for Utopia that they once believed he really was the Second Coming. Then, they went through a period where they were quiet and disillusioned. Now, the majority of them unemployed (and never receiving any of the unicorns or stimulus money they believe they were promised), they’re starting to get angry.

What’s KEEPING them from speaking out, from taking to the streets, from having a Network “not going to take it anymore” moment, is the simple fact that they’d have to admit they were wrong first.

Republicans and conservatives would do very well to heed HillBuzz’s advice.

P.S.

I doubt that Oprah sees how much this aspect of her announcement that she is ending her talk show on Sept. 9, 2011, will change her world and how she is treated, but today is the day that writers stopped being afraid of her. The dam will burst on Sept. 10, 2011. I am extremely skeptical that her announced new venture of a cable channel will succeed unless the government is her customer because she just will not have adapted to doing business under socialism yet. And for that she will have only herself to blame.

Update, 11/20/09, Fri.: Dear Smitty at The Other McCain asks if Oprah is clearing her schedule to run for national office.

Via Instapundit, I see that Mark Steyn is saying that the fact that it took 11 Associated Press reporters to find six extremely trivial errors — quibbles, really — in former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s forthcoming autobiography, Going Rogue, which will be released on Monday, Nov. 16, shows why newspapers rapidly are becoming obsolete.

I don’t know why I’m the one explaining this to the likes of Mark Steyn, but what the AP was really hunting for was the tiniest wisp of a shred of a rationale to print the headlines damning Gov. Palin — “Errors found in Palin’s biography!” — that they had already written because they know their headlines will drive the narrative they want to push.

The AP’s behavior reminds me of Aesop’s fable, “The Lamb and The Wolf,” from which we have the expression, “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”

Update, 11/14/09: News magazines, too: here.

Reminder: Of the four persons on the Democratic and Republican tickets in the 2008 presidential race, Gov. Sarah Palin was the most qualified by virtue of her experience, leadership ability, intelligence, eloquence, policies and vision for America.

From HillBuzz, THIS is the kind of passion that Gov. Palin inspires:

We here at HillBuzz fully intend to campaign for the Republican nominee in 2012 so that Dr. Utopia gets only one term and there can still be time to save this country from the socialist cancer this terrible man has stitched into the fabric of our nation. If Sarah Palin runs for President, we will quit our jobs and move to Iowa to ensure we do everything we can to stop Dr. Utopia from gaming the Caucus like he did to Hillary. We will relive the nightmare of the last two years’ of our lives, learning from everything Dr. Utopia and the DNC did last time and make sure they do not win again. Those crazy Leftists must be defeated so that, someday, the Clinton Coaltion of 1996 and the Hillary Dems of 2008 can take back the Democrat Party and boot the deranged Carter/Utopia elements out.

(snip)

2012 entirely hinges on three things:

(1) the GOP running a candidate who turns out their base, so that few idiots sit at home “to teach the GOP a lesson” because they believe the candidate is not conservative enough

(2) that candidate needs to talk only about creating jobs, lowering taxes, reining in spending, providing law and order, stabilizing the economy, securing energy independence for this country, protecting our citizens, and providing a solid education and path to a good future for our children. NO talk about social issues…no attacks on gays…no crusade on abortion…no fodder for the Race Industry

(3) balancing (1) and (2), the candidate needs to appeal to conservatives while standing tall and strong as someone Jacksonian Democrats, PUMAS, independent voters, and Clinton Moderates, whatever you want to call us, can get behind.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that person is Sarah Palin.

If she goes for it, she’ll be the 45th President of the United States.

Do read the entire post, it is well worth your while.

Michelle Obama, ever fashion forward in her signature ammo belt and wearing the cheerful colors that always characterize her wardrobe when she is celebrating the deaths of, um, attending the memorial services of U.S. soldiers who have died in the service of their country, watches her husband performing the traditional ceremony of laying a wreath on Veteran’s Day at Arlington National Cemetery.

H/T HillBuzz, where they are giving thanks Michelle Obama didn’t wear her favorite dress. Really, the ONLY times the FLOTUS doesn’t dress like a funeral director is when she’s attending memorial services for U.S. soldiers. Just what IS it about these occasions that cheers her up so much?