Outside the Beltway

Did Obama Make a Blow Job Joke? No, Of Course Not.

The crack investigative team at BuzzFeed is living up to its name with a story headlined "Did President Obama Just Make A Blowjob Joke?"

James Joyner · Thursday, June 7, 2012 · 11 comments

The crack investigative team at BuzzFeed is living up to its name with a story headlined “Did President Obama Just Make A Blowjob Joke?”

Here’s the entire basis for this stupid question: Obama attended a “gay and lesbian fundraiser” in Los Angeles last night. (The kind where gays and lesbians give him money, not the kind where he raised money for gays and lesbians.) He did in fact make a joke:

He warmed up with some jokes about the first lady’s appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show. “Michelle outdoes me in pushups as well,” he said, after saying that she’s taken some criticism on her technique “because she doesn’t go all the way down” – a line that he let hang, naughtily, provoking laughter from the crowd.

A different version from the White House transcript:

I want to thank my wonderful friend who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups — (laughter) — but I think she claims Michelle didn’t go all the way down. (Laughter.) That’s what I heard. I just want to set the record straight — Michelle outdoes me in pushups as well. (Laughter.)

You see, there’s a double entendre here because “go down” also refers to performing oral sex. Ha!

But, um, he’s rather clearly not making a blow job joke at the expense of his wife here. Rather, he’s making joke that she cheats on her push-ups. Which, judging from her arms, she probably doesn’t.

How lame is this BuzzFeed meme? Alex Pareene, who followed Ana Marie Cox at Wonkette, won’t even go there.

Let’s all agree to just not pretend the president made an “oral sex joke” at his gay fundraiser last night, because that’s stupid. It’s stupid, and most of the people with jobs as political reporters are at least literate, and understand that this thing did not happen. So don’t repeat it, or even write that “some say” they thought it maybe happened. This would’ve been fodder for one 200-word Wonkette post back in 2006, maybe. “Funny pool report says crowd tittered at unintentional double entendre” is not actually the sort of thing that the INSIDERS and political junkies who read Politico should concern themselves with. (And let’s also agree to stop just adding question marks to headlines when the headline without a question mark is not supported by the content of the story, maybe?)

The Awl’s Choire Sicha at least makes some actual humor out of this nonsense:

Yeah, have you met Michelle Obama? You think she would be the kind of person who was never clear on how she would take her husband making a blowjob joke in public? Of course not. What Muslim women would allow that? Anyway, this did not happen.

Sigh.

UPDATE: Oliver Burkeman agrees but considers the alternative.

At this point in writing this blog post, though, a horrifying thought occurred to me. What if I’m just incredibly naive and clean-minded? What if the president has been sneakily inserting sexy euphemisms into his public pronouncements for months, even years?

I searched for his last weekly address. There, sure enough, he urged Congress to pass a bill to “put thousands of construction workers back on the job” – “on the job”! A transcript of remarks he made in Chicago a few days back, meanwhile, reveals that he talked about “shenanigans”on Wall Street, which is, of course, a blatant reference to vigorous sexual intercourse. Frequently, in speech after speech since he first achieved prominence, he has used the incredibly saucy word “hard”. Heaven help us if, as the election race heats up, he tells his supporters that it’s time to “get down to business” – because that will constitute nothing more nor less than a direct instruction to them to engage in a no-holds-barred, socialist orgy of unrestrained and shameless fornication.

Wake up, America. You are being governed by a filthy-minded sex obsessive! (Or having your political news reported on by a bunch of them. One of the two.)

Indeed.