Author Topic: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]  (Read 845 times)

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Offline Rapunzel

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http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-freak-over-pajama-boy


Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’
12/19/13 11:45 AM—Updated 12/19/13 12:42 PM
By Adam Serwer

Conservatives are in a tizzy over a seemingly innocuous Obamacare ad from Organizing for Action featuring a young man in pajamas.

He’s “a metrosexual hipster in a plaid onesie” scowled National Review’s Charles Cooke, a “vaguely androgynous, student-glasses-wearing, Williamsburg hipster.” He’s also “carefully ambi-racial.”

Pajama boy can’t even fight, Cooke’s colleague, Jim Geraghty, surmises. “My money is on the guy from Big Bang Theory once they throw down in a slap fight,” writes Geraghty, a grown man calling someone else a child as he imagines a fight between two fictional characters.

    How do you plan to spend the cold days of December? http://t.co/Rwf5AYc3bG #GetTalking pic.twitter.com/PBQ397yLf4
    — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 17, 2013

“An insufferable man-child,” writes Rich Lowry at Politico, who “might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping.” What kind of man thinks women shouldn’t have to pay more for health insurance because of their ladyparts anyway?

How could the sight of an earnest twenty something in pajamas drive so many dashing specimens of unassailable masculinity to complete panic? The paradox of our gender enforcers that they never sound more terrified than when addressing a person who doesn’t fit their standards. It’s an abject terror that masquerades as courage, relying on the reader not to know the difference. Pajama Boy is both a weak, effeminate symbol to be mocked, and the unstoppable 200-foot tall Kaiju wrecking their shining city on a hill.

Conservatives are calling Pajama Boy a symbol of Obama supporters’ un-American dependence on government, but at this point he’s more of a vehicle for conservatives to express their anxiety about losing wars, political and cultural. For them, Pajama Boy is yet another emblem of an increasingly non-white electorate, a young population that believes in a stronger welfare state, gender equality and LGBT rights. After six years, Obama’s approval is eroding, but most Americans still want an interventionist government to alleviate inequality. They may be frustrated with Obamacare implementation, but they still don’t want to repeal the law.

All of this has the right so worked up that they’re cyberbullying an advertisement. The problem with mocking a president who wears mom jeans is you’re still the folks who lost two elections to a guy who wears mom jeans. Those losses might have something to do with the fact that the conservative intelligentsia’s collective response to an ad trying to get Americans to purchase health insurance is to suggest that the model in the ad looks gay.

Though conservatives have concocted absurdly elaborate backstories for Pajama Boy that tickle their readers, the obvious implication of the ad is that he’s enjoying Christmas morning with his family. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie responded to the ad by suggesting that morning would be better spent volunteering – a conservative dig at the supposed narcissism of young liberals without all the macho posturing.

In 2000, future Senator Al Franken challenged Lowry to a fistfight after Lowry “decried the way liberals and feminists are promoting the feminization of America, and called for a defense of traditional notions of masculinity.”

Lowry declined to fight Franken, who later said he was just kidding, but not before comparing him to Richard Simmons. That may be the thing our Internet tough guys like most about Pajama Boy, after years of losing to the “effete liberals” and the feminazis – he can’t possibly hit back.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline mountaineer

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #1 on: December 19, 2013, 10:02:57 pm »
The dozen funniest variations on pajama boy from The Federalist.
Example:


Quote
Pajama Boy: The Obama Machine’s Id 
 The new face of Obamacare is a man in a plaid onesie. Of course. 
By Charles C. W. Cooke


Oh dear. The Obama administration isn’t doing very well with putting an empathetic face on its calamitous health-insurance law, is it? First, we had Julia, the creepy, eyeless, vision-of-horror from Brave New World whose life was run from cradle to grave by the federal government. Then, we had Adriana, the painfully neutral and carefully ambi-racial stock-model-from-everywhere whose face became so synonymous with HealthCare.gov’s hilarious launch that she had to be replaced with a graphic plugging an 800 number. And now, courtesy of Organizing for Action, we have Pajama Boy, a metrosexual hipster in a plaid onesie who wants you to spend your precious Christmas days talking to him about the president’s vision for health insurance.

Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot. That is to say, Pajama Boy is staying over — priggish facial expression and all — and he won’t leave until you’ve relented. The Founding Fathers certainly couldn’t have envisioned Obamacare, but one suspects that if they had possessed even the slightest inkling that the growth of government would lead to this, they might have expanded the underused Third Amendment to include Advocates of Change™, too. These, suffice it to say, are people you do not want quartered anywhere near you.

When Twitter rather predictably exploded with derision, a few contrarians suggested that the campaign was deliberately self-deprecating — silly, yes, but explicitly intended to provoke a reaction and thus to guarantee discussion. I’m afraid that this doesn’t strike me as very likely. We are, after all, dealing with the tone-deaf team that thought that “Truth Team,” and “Attack Watch,” two services that allowed Americans to inform on their Obama-criticizing neighbors to the White House, were a good idea. As Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins has asked rhetorically, “Is there any battle in contemporary politics being waged with more indignity and less prowess than the tug-of-war for twentysomethings over Obamacare?”

No, there is not. But then what did you expect? OFA, and its various offshoots, are staffed by third-growth McGovernites who have come of age at the exact point that the radicalism of the 1960s finally won out. As David Burge of “Iowahawk” fame likes to joke, perhaps it wasn’t “a good idea to turn the most successful country in the history of the world over to the grievance faculty at Harvard.” Still, that is what we have done. And we have ended up with a parade of over-educated and under-experienced perpetual children who don’t think twice before dressing a grown man up in footie pajamas.  ...
More at National Review
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Offline mountaineer

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #2 on: December 19, 2013, 10:05:46 pm »
Pajama Boy is an Organizing for America doofus named Ethan Krupp. Read all about him here and here. He's already deleted his online presence. Can't imagine why ...
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Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #3 on: December 19, 2013, 10:07:41 pm »
Pajama Boy is an Organizing for America doofus named Ethan Krupp. Read all about him here and here. He's already deleted his online presence. Can't imagine why ...

~LOL~

You’ll also be shocked he’s a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, breeding ground of Moonbat Central.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline jmyrlefuller

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #4 on: December 19, 2013, 11:40:16 pm »
Liberals have been using ridicule as a weapon in the culture war— quite effectively— for decades. Now we are seeing the shoe on the other foot.
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Oceander

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #5 on: December 20, 2013, 03:19:28 am »
Liberals have been using ridicule as a weapon in the culture war— quite effectively— for decades. Now we are seeing the shoe on the other foot.

And that's what we have got to start doing full-time.  Tactics aren't ideological, only goals are; so this tactic can and should be used by republicans/conservatives against the democrats/liberals.

Offline olde north church

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Re: Conservatives freak out over ‘pajama boy’ [Warning - MSNBC]
« Reply #6 on: December 20, 2013, 11:07:58 pm »
"Mom says I'm cool!"
Why?  Well, because I'm a bastard, that's why.