L. Ron Obama

Michael Goldfarb observes that the Obama "dipdive" videos are unhealthy, creepy and deeply disturbing.

The Dipdive videos were the creepy culmination of the Obama campaign's messianic rhetoric. And they even seemed to make the campaign's most fanatical supporters a bit queasy.

Obama's rhetoric was always empty, but coming from the man himself, eloquent as he is, everyone seemed willing to overlook how silly it all was. Once you get Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johanson repeating the same phrases and chanting his name as though he were some kind of political immortal--well, it all became far more transparent.

What is even more disturbing to me is that fact that the Democrats are about to nominate one of two very flawed people:

One is a woman whose main qualification is to have been married to a deeply corrupt and immoral sociopath. A woman who achieved wealth via fraud and influence peddling. A woman who destroyed the women who her husband assaulted, all for the sake of their reputation.

The other is a radical leftist with ties to a corrupt Chicago political machine and a messiah complex.

I'm beginning to feel what the Germans felt during the last years of the Wiemar Republic.

Mark Hemingway has this reaction:

Ye gods. I wish Yuval hadn't alerted me to the fact that there's a new will.i.am video about Obama. I watched the original "Dipdive" video after reading numerous hysterical reports on blogs about how the video was so moving that it made them cry. And yet, I watched the same video and its Riefenstahl-meets-Gap-ad aesthetic made me want to perform an impromptu lobotomy on myself with a screwdriver that's accidentally been dropped in the toilet.

But if the pseudo-inspirational music weren't bad enough — lest we forget the orchestrator of these videos is will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, a man who's signature achievement as a professional musician is "My Humps" (Chorus: "my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps") — it's still the celebrity endorsement angle that kills me.

I've written about this before, and color me amazed that candidates still seem to aggressively court this kind of endorsement. I mean, a second rate actor such as Ryan Phillipe telling me to vote for Obama because he wants a "better future for his children"? Alternatively, if Phillipe wanted a better future for his children he could have not gotten divorced amidst rumors of an affair played out in the tabloids, raising them in a broken home. But at least I recognized Phillipe. I didn't have any idea who the pouty guy with the stubble was who proclaimed that he's voting for Obama because "I want to live in a world without fear." Seriously? If a candidate and his supporters are promising to rid the world of fear, I'm very, very afraid.

I mean, I'm not exactly a cultural elitist who doesn't get that rock, hip-hop, Gossip Girl et al. possess a great deal of sway and are relevant to the masses. But GAH. This stuff just grates on me — and I doubt I'm alone in my hatred of such lowest common denominator appeals.