Smackdown

Re: The New York Post's recent Page Six item about Michelle Obama ordering lobster and caviar from room service during her stay at the Waldorf while New York's workers and peasants fainted from hunger in the streets outside.

This story has now been exposed as a hoax, and the Post's editors as callow idiots who believe anything they wish was true, and think it's true if they believe it. Their embarrassed retraction, which blames the error on their source rather than their own gullibility, reads:

The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

Vanity Fair's inimitable James Wolcott says of this incident: "To believe something this transparently fanciful and maliciously designed, you'd have to be an open-mouthed receptacle and regurgitater of every cockamamie rumor that comes down the pike, an adult version of Linda Blair spewing pea-green bile."

That's a great characterization which applies equally well to anyone who's ever said the Obamas are some sort of elitists, or that Barack Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, or a terrorist. One of these days, and it won't be long, such mouth-breathers as these will dine on their own words, and they won't have to call room service to do it.