Back in 2010, Media Matters posed the archly rhetorical question: “Jim Hoft: Dumbest Man on the Internet?” Hoft, who has the nerve but not the expertise or insight to pontificate about politics under his nom de spume, Gateway Pundit, has spent the four years since then proving the question mark unnecessary.
Hoft has made a long-time specialty out of posting photos of the President, which he then subjects to the most preposterous “analysis” possible, arriving at the most negative conclusion possible. As far as I can tell, he does this sort of thing for two reasons. One, his site visitors, being idiots, expect it. And two, being an idiot himself, Hoft just can’t help it. And so it went today with his “Featured Story,” viewable here through a handy donotlink link provided by Little Green Footballs.
Hoft got his dander up after seeing a White House video of the President arriving in New York City this morning on Marine One. As he disembarked from the copter, the President returned the salute of the two Marines flanking the steps, with a coffee cup in his hand! Thereby apparently befouling a presidential tradition dating, as Little Green Footballs notes, all the way back to the Reagan Administration!
To Hoft, this is “A NEW LOW” and the “Most Degrading Salute Ever to Men in Uniform.” Little Green Footballs was quick to trot out the familiar photo of Oval Office appointee George W. Bush saluting members of the military while awkwardly holding First Dog Barney, an event Hoft either missed or, more likely, found entirely acceptable. What’s really astounding is that Hoft overlooked a mile-wide opening to level some valid criticism at the President; the optics of arriving in NYC for a UN Climate Summit carrying what looks to be a Styrofoam coffee cup certainly made me wince.
But Hoft, like the rest of the President’s critics in the fetid swamps at the far right side of the Internet, isn’t interested in the environment any more than he’s interested in objectivity and honest critique. Which he proved later in the day with another post entitled: “Lawless President Announces New Executive Actions on Fighting Climate Change & US Prosperity.” Hoft’s considered opinion is that global warming is “non-existent,” conveniently ignoring a mountain of empirical evidence including the fact that “13 of the 14 warmest years in recorded weather history have all occurred in the opening years of the 21st century.” He’ll probably still be railing about the climate change hoax as the rising seas slip over his mouth some years from now. I wish I could live to see it.
Without a scintilla of irony, windbags like Hoft have spent the past six years decrying Barack Obama’s supposed aloofness and disengagement from statecraft, blasting him for taking excessive vacation time and repairing to the golf links at inappropriate moments, and accusing him of being asleep at the switch when terrorists killed American citizens on September 11 (2012).
Hoft and his miserable ilk hate this man partially because every Democratic President since the last one assassinated has been subject to the same mindless fear and loathing from the right. Even worse in their eyes, this particular Democratic President has the gall to be only half white.
