When it seemed politics could not get any more juvenile, the Left has sunk to a new low. Cindy Sheehan has challenged White House spokesman Robert Gibbs “to a pee-off.”
Earlier this week, Gibbs lashed out at what he called “the professional Left” – as he has everyone else – saying, “Those people ought to be drug-tested.”
“I will put my urine up against Gibbs’ any day, and in fact, will travel to Washington to give him a fresh and warm sample,” she offered. “I actually think supporters of Obama should be tested for ‘Hopium’ in their urine, myself.”
Sheehan said her opposition to Obama was “ideologically pure,” since “the same foreign policies have continued, if not worsened during the tenure of the Obama administration.”
Then she threw down the gauntlet. “Since Gibbs is a liar and a jerk, I will challenge him to a pee-off.”
Nice to see the Left keeping it classy. The invitation to dueling urine samples is another epic fail for the president who promised to elevate our political discourse but has spent every moment of the last two years getting into pissing matches, figurative or literal.
We in the conservative movement are used to having the words of Robert Gibbs lobbed at us like grenades on a battlefield.
Gibbs has called conservatives "crazy." He has called us "birthers." He has said, "I’m almost positive that no argument is somehow going to dissuade [them]."
But now he isn’t firing only at conservatives. His utter frustration in the job has him targeting his guns at the Left. He even used the same word in describing the left-wing critics of Obama. He called them "crazy."
In an interview with The Hill newspaper, Gibbs said of attacks on the administration from liberal Democrats: "I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it’s crazy."
Obama’s press secretary wasn’t through. He went on to dismiss the "professional Left" saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality."
Ironically, we have wanted these same critics of George W. Bush drug tested for years. Finally, Robert Gibbs and we share some common ground.
Seriously, his behavior is paranoid. Webster’s defines paranoid as "characterized by suspiciousness, persecutory trends, or megalomania."
This pretty much captures the modus operandi of the Obama administration: never talk about your opponents’ arguments, just demonize them.
As the popularity of the "Messiah-in-Chief" continues to fall, White House staff is getting desperate to defend itself. They are lashing out at more people and voting groups. This is not the healthiest reaction when the country is teetering on the brink of a depression and mired in an endless war. Charges of incompetence made by radicals on the Left or us conservatives on the Right are accurate and appropriate.
Gibbs’ statements were quickly ripped to shreds by the left-wing blogs.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon called the comments, "one of the most petulant, self-pitying outbursts seen from a top political official in recent memory, half derived from a paranoid Richard Nixon rant and the other half from a Sean Hannity/Sarah Palin caricature of The Far Left."
Chris Bowers of the OpenLeft blog responded in a post headlined "Dear swing voters, you suck. Love, The White House." He wrote, "If the White House really doesn’t think it has any problems among self-identified liberals or progressives, and that all the complaints are coming from a grasstop elite, it needs to look at the data again."
All I have to say to these new left-wing opponents of Obama is, “Welcome to the cause.” I’m glad you agree with us now. Why don’t you join us in the impeachment effort, so we can end this nightmare called the Obama administration a few years early.
When told that Rush Limbaugh was once again calling out the White House on the unconstitutional government takeover of Chrysler and GM, Robert Gibbs started in with an attack on Rush.
Gibbs: “Look, Rush Limbaugh and others wanted to walk away. Rush Limbaugh and others saw a million people that worked at these factories, that worked at these parts suppliers, that had — that supported communities, and thought we should all just walk away. The president didn’t think that walking away from a million jobs in these communities made a lot of economic sense,”
Gibbs and the White House’s war with Rush started in the first weeks of the administration, with the White House using a deliberate strategy of Rush demonization. The only result of this was the destruction of our economy while they spent their time attacking a political commentator.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must have misspoken when he told Al Jazeera last month that one of his top priorities is to reach out to Muslim countries.
"That was not his task and that’s not the task of NASA," Gibbs said […]
The White House also backed up Bolden last week when his remarks first stirred controversy. A White House spokesman last Tuesday said Obama wants NASA to engage with the world’s best scientists and that to meet that challenge, NASA must "partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries."
NASA last week walked back Bolden’s claim that Muslim outreach was the "perhaps foremost" plank of his mission, saying that Bolden was merely talking about his "outreach" responsibilities and that space exploration is still NASA’s No. 1 job.
But Gibbs on Monday appeared to deny that Bolden was asked to focus on Muslim outreach at all.
Asked whether Bolden misspoke, Gibbs said: "I think so."
But why didn’t the Obama administration refute it when Bolden told people this in February?
It looks like the heat is getting to Obama, and they have decided to drop Bolden under a truck.
In a stunning, newly released YouTube video, the California Republican Congressman and member of the House Judiciary Committee has put together a Jobsgate montage of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak in a veritable orgy of denial, evasion, and just plainly obvious dishonesty that could do serious damage not just to the White House but the U.S. Senate candidacy of Sestak.. (Hat tip to our friend Ben Barrack)
The tape was released hours before Sestak and Gibbs were scheduled to appear as guests on Sunday national TV talk shows this weekend. In a statement released by Issa, who is the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as a well as a senior member of Judiciary, the Congressman said:
For months, a United States Congressman has stated that the White House offered him a job in exchange for not running in an election — we call this a bribe. Despite being asked numerous times, the White House has not refuted Congressman Sestak’s allegations, but refuses to disclose who offered what and when. So this Administration, that pledged to be a beacon of transparency and change, continues to conceal from the American people the truth about what exactly was said and offered. Until we get direct answers, this White House doesn’t have a leg to stand on when they talk about openness and change.
The White House press room was a jovial place to be in the early days of President Barack Obama’s presidency. But times have changed.
Back in May, POLITICO analyzed the press briefings and found that the instances of laughter — as indicated by "(Laughter)" being noted in the official transcript — occurred more than 10 times per day during press secretary Robert Gibbs’s briefings.
But the laughter has been reduced by half in recent months: In the first six months of the Obama administration, briefings produced an average of 179 laughs per month. Over the past six months, the average has dropped down to 89.
Chalk it up to the close of any administration’s initial honeymoon — and the Obama administration’s tough second half of 2009, as it wrestled with health care and saw the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat filled by a Republican.
"The tone is one reason for less laughter," says American Urban Radio’s April Ryan. "There are lots of serious questions begging for serious answers. Those questions do not meld with laughter and light banter."
The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.
Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes "climate change is happening."
"I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," he said during Monday’s press briefing.
Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia’s computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.