ok i'm willing to accept that 2 year olds shouldn't be watching DVDs from for-profit republican corporations.

let them watch PBS and the cookie monster instead- its like aversion therapy and toddlers won't whine incessantly for cookies after overexposure to sesame street, right?

and i hope that playing mozart while your baby is in the womb is still okay, right?

or is it "undone" if you listen to rush limbaugh in the car while you're pregnant, though?

the simple fact, i suspect, is that being bombarded with propaganda at an early age is no guarantee of success or failure later in later in life.

by all accounts clinton and obama turned out just fine, even though they didn't have daddies, had no PBS, and no in utero mozart either.

but you have to wonder about al gore though - he claims over and over that his parents sang him union organizing songs as bed time lullabys . . . i'm not saying that DEFINITELY warped his brain, but it certainly couldn't have helped

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Did you read the article, or would that have just gotten in the way of your straw man? Noah said nothing about PBS, Mozart, or anything of that sort.

Yeh Baltimore, what were you thinking?... as the jets fly over Colage's head.

Colage:

Did you read the article, or would that have just gotten in the way of your straw man? Noah said nothing about PBS, Mozart, or anything of that sort.

You really do seem to have missed the point of ba's post. As for what Noah was trying to say, I wish I knew: Even if it was the State of the Union, I don't think anybody thinks W's mentioning the Baby Einstein lady was a particularly memorable part of his presidency.

As a general rule of thumb, when the "do you remember when" backstory threatens to be longer than the actual article, it's probably not going to be a winner.

i blame myself when readers fail to grasp - not their own shortcomings.

one unfortunate starting point for many readers/posters however is the expection that any fray top post "must" be a point by point deconstruction of whatever the fray article was. if you deviate from this simplistic game plan in your post, it throws them for a loop.

the baby einstein slate article was a meandering, politically based attack on what was never a politically based premise - that it might be possible to improve infant cognition by exposure to highbrow video.

thanks for understanding my satire - that the political orientation of the highbrow dvd/music has no bearing on whether or not it works - if republican originated DVDS aren't effective at age 2, then its equally implausable that the cookie monster or mozart drives IQ up either.

I still remember a couple years back being so proud of a satire of a particularly clueless Dear Prudence letter...right up until the first three posters mistook it for being real!

ba

But I did notice that you included a gratuitous slap at Al Gore in your “satire”. In stretching to make sure your writing included an insult to a politician you hate, you are no different from the author you deride.

If your top-post was intended as satire, it failed miserably. Calling it satire doesn't make it any less of a straw man argument in any case.

But the point that you explicitly make - that the article was entirely motivated by political leanings - is ridiculous. Bush, in arguably his most public appearance of the year (the State of the Union), singled out Julie Aigner-Clark as an exemplar of capitalism for what essentially amounts to false advertising through pseudo-science.

If Barack Obama similarly recognizes, say, the developer of Hydroxycut or some other snake oil which later offers what amounts to a product recall (thinly veiled, for what it's worth), then the incident, along with Obama himself, would be a valid target for criticism. Noah's political leanings, his preference in radio programming, and the color of his Volvo are all irrelevant.

Well, being he/she said it was intended as satire...and multiple others recognized it as such...it's probably safe to assume that's what it was. But thumbs up to you for having the self confidence to declare as not being so, despite being the only one who didn't get it!

Frankly, because two people (plus the poster) thought that was satire hardly makes it as much.

BA's post was based on a fundamental misreading of the article, and then she attempted to "satirize" it based on the same. But since you're appealing to some non-existent populism instead of actually refuting the points I raised in my followup post, I'm not terribly disappointed to be excluded from such a mob.

Why would anybody need to refute any of your points? They're not relevant. You missed that the OP was making a joke, then when you were clued in you appointed yourself the only person in the world who can label something satire. No more discussion required.

Maybe "tongue in cheek" is a better descriptor than "satire" for BA's intentions?