President Obama jokes about trading "our Lieberman for their Lieberman"

By GottaLaff

At a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama made a funny. But you know what they say: There are no jokes.

“So," Obama announced, according to the source in the room, "we’ve decided that we are going to trade our Lieberman for their Lieberman," referring to the independent American senator and the hard-line Israeli foreign minister.

So how does the Israeli foreign minister feel about filibusters?

Townhall: Michelle Obama is a Bitch, Get It?

By GottaLaff

My buddy Mark Karlin at Buzzflash forwarded me this piece from HuffPo. It's wrong on a million levels, but it is especially disappointing to Mark and me. We are both former Prelutsky readers. We used to appreciate his writing. But he is not the Burt we once knew. Not at all:

Burt Prelutsky was a TV writer a long time ago. Then he aged out of it and became a crank. [...] Now he writes a column for Townhall.com, the popular website owned by a Christian radio network.

Here's something from his current offering:

Take Michelle Obama...please.

Ohgod, wasn't that hilarious? Ya see what he did there? He took the Henny Youngman line and applied it to the first lady! See that? What a wit. Or should I say "half wit".

Every time I turn around, there she is on a magazine cover. Now, normally, like the Mafia, I lay off the spouses, but inasmuch as this particular spouse attended the same racist church as her hubby for 20 years, I'll make an exception in her case. After all, in spite of the fact that affirmative action got her an Ivy League degree and a $7,000-a-week salary and, moreover, has sent billions of dollars for no particularly good reason to Africa, she insists this is a mean country. The burning question in my circle is: if the First Family gets a female dog, will she be the First Bitch or will she have to settle for second place?

Get it? Because "bitch" had two meanings!

Disrespectful doesn't even begin to say it. Neither does rude, insulting, offensive, or disgusting.

You can read the rest at Townhall. The Internet home of culture warriors Dennis Prager, Bill Bennett and Michael Medved.

(Who have all, by the way, written about Barack Obama's horrible, shocking association with that racist hatemonger Jeremiah Wright. Who called America an ugly black bitch. Oh wait, he didn't.)

(They've also all written columns bemoaning how angry and mean liberal humor is.)

You'll have to follow the link for more of Burt's pearls of wisdom. I won't waste space here, nor will I soil TPC with more of his words.

The executive editor of Townhall is Hugh Hewitt. His current column is about how terribly offended he was when Barack Obama made a joke about the Special Olympics:

We should hope President Obama makes more than apology. We should hope he makes good.

Obama made a bad joke, yes, but it wasn't intended to disparage. He apologized to the chairman of the Special Olympics before the Leno show was even aired.

On the other hand, Townhallers, those paragons of virtue, what with their carefully-crafted attempts at humor and all, have yet to acknowledge their bile. "Making good" isn't on their agenda.

Conversely, the president has "made more good" in the weeks he's been in office than we've witnessed in the past 8 years... unless you consider a secret dictatorship and blatant war crimes "making good".

Oh, the Christian broadcasters who own Townhall, the site that says Michelle Obama is a bitch and Will Smith is lucky he's not picking cotton is Salem Communications. You can thank them here.

Be extra crispy specific. Sincere thank yous should always be specific or they don't count.

UPDATE: The piece was removed with no indication of it being altered, per my Twitter pal Cody Kessler.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Iraq withdrawal agreement

By GottaLaff

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Okay, see, there was this fraudulent war that turned into an illegal occupation. No, no it gets better. There were this guy named Obama who was against this cosmic roto rooter into our collective psyches, but he got ridiculed by this bunch of thugs we'll call BushCo and Friends. In fact, a lot of us got laughs for the same thing, by a bunch of pseudo-patriots. Are ya with me so far? Good.

Okay, so here's the set-up for the punch line. See, after five years and over 4,000 deaths, finally... finally... there was an agreement. You remember the one: between Iraq and the U.S. The one that gets us out of there by 2011, the one that stops our family members from getting their heads blown off. Yeah, yeah, that's the one.

Well, a crazy thing happened. Oh, this'll knock your socks off. What a freakin' riot. In fact, my stomach hurts already, but not from laughing, because, see, this is no joke:

“Shiite legislators could barely conceal their delight” at the agreement, and noted that “they referred to the pact as the ‘withdrawal agreement.’” As proof of its determination to a firm withdrawal date, the Iraqi government even required that the U.S. “scrap the language that would have allowed the American troops to stay beyond 2011 if Iraq requested.”

Iraqi officials made it perfectly clear that they would take the withdrawal agreement seriously:

– Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh: “The total withdrawal will be completed by December 31, 2011. This is not governed by circumstances on the ground.”

– Deputy parliament speaker Khalid al-Attiya: The “Americans have responded positively on two important amendments. The first one is the Americans should withdraw from cities and suburbs on June 30, 2009, and the second one is that Americans should leave Iraq in 2011.‘”

What a set-up, huh? Abbott couldn't have set up Costello any better. Trouble is, there's no payoff. No punch line. The joke's on us.

The Pentagon, however, seems to view things differently. Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said today that he still supports “conditions-based” withdrawal only, and indicated that the agreement could always change long before 2011.

You really killed 'em with that one, Mullen.

Literally.