Do I have to?

Yes, I think I do. 

Given that I'm prone to bust the dude's balls when he screws up (and let's face it... that happens a lot), I feel compelled to offer a defense of our dear president today.

Not regarding the jab I took at him in my last post, of course.  Nah, it looks like I probably nailed that one.  Another week of increased jobless claims and a revision upward for the previous week.  Sounds about right.

But, even hapless presidents are entitled to some sense of fairness when it comes to spelling 'Ohio.'  For starters, it's Ohio.  One would be forgiven for wondering why that state even exists.  Setting Ohio's usefulness aside though, we come to the latest right-wing chuckle at the poor prez's expense.  It goes something like this...

The president was campaigning in the swing state of Ohio.  Since the folks down there are special in a number of ways, they often have to remind each other of the correct spelling for their state.  So they have this little system where each member of a group plays the role of one of the four letters and then they arrange the letters into the proper order.  Sort of like the Village People but without the cool outfits.  With sufficient repetition, this activity helps the fine Buckeyes to remember their state's unfortunate name.

We all assume now that the president has realized there are not 58 states in addition to Alaska and Hawaii.  There are a total of 50 and probably five or six of them will decide the next election.  Wouldn't you have guessed it?  Ohio is one of those five or six.  So it's perfectly natural that the president would participate in the goofy little rituals of those people.  Then the press reports came out with a picture and everyone enjoyed a smile.

See there?  A few happy simpletons and their happy leader.  How adorable.

Then the damned internets struck a blow.  Someone who was at the event used something called Twitter to send another image.  This other image allegedly was captured before the one in the news reports...

Now... I could be mistaken, but that appears to say "Oiho." 

The Washington Post took on its dutiful role as lapdog for the White House by reporting that the unreported image is photoshopped.  Even Jake Tapper, who is by no means a lapdog for the White House, seems to have taken the bait.  The difference would be that Tapper, after realizing his mistake, just deleted his Twitter post and pretended it never happened.  The Washington Post, on the other hand, went ahead and issued a correction - lying again in the process.  The Post did not originally report that the image appeared photoshopped.  They reported that the image was photoshopped.  "Words matter," after all.  Verbs especially.

So I don't have to defend the news media.  They continue to be a collective disappointment at almost every turn.  I do have to defend our moron president and his moron hosts though, and here's why.  I've been drunk before.  (I'm not suggesting that these guys are drunk.  Just hear me out.)  I've been drunk before.  And I've been around other drunk people before.  And I've been at parties with DJ's before.  Do you know what is bound to happen, sooner or later, at a party with drunk people and a DJ?  That YMCA song is going to come on and people are going to start acting it out.

There are two ways that the next sequence can go.  First is that most of the people are like me, meaning that they have no use for this dorky ritual.  In this case, the folks who do try to impersonate the Village People will tend to act out each of the letters individually.  More simply put - each person will act out all four letters - Y then M then C then A.

In the second case, there will be at least four people who are under the delusion that they're funny or original or whatever.  These people will usually try to form a line and spell the entire sequence as a group.  One person is Y.  The next is M, and so on.  Here's the thing though - they almost always do it backward.  We English-speaking Americans tend to read from left to right, you see?  So we're predisposed to seeing word construction in that manner - left to right.

If you ever had a chick send you a self-shot mirror photo with a racy message inscribed on her body somewhere - and I'm taking a wild guess here 'cause there's NO way I would know this - honest, I swear - there's a pretty good chance that the message would appear backward to you.  Why?  Because, if such a thing had ever happened - and I'm NOT saying it has, seriously - the goofy broad wouldn't have realized that she had to reverse the letters to make that dumbassed cellphone-in-the-mirror thing work.

So that's what happened here.  I'm not suggesting that the president is intelligent.  Obviously I don't think he is.  And I'm not suggesting that those Ohio guys are intelligent.  I mean, come on, it's Ohio.  But they are fairly normal Americans when it comes to this sort of natural word construction tendency.  The dude on the left, from his own perspective, is the O.  The next dude (Obama) is the H.  The next dude is the I.  And the last one is the other O.  After the pose was struck someone said, "Hey, wait a second.  That doesn't look right."  Then they switched the roles of the two people in the middle and got their cutesy little picture.  Then the media dutifully sent out the picture.  Then the WaPo dutifully lied when someone leaked the first picture and the Romney campaign had a little fun with it.

In summary - maybe Obama isn't very bright and Ohio is Ohio, but most of us would have done the same thing.  The fact that they tried to hide it is far more embarrassing than the original backward photo should have been.