The Shirt's Off His Back

Twin passed along this paparazzo shot of Barack Obama on vacation, a couple of days ago, when it was on the HuffPo's home page. Click it to big it.

I was just going to post it, to contribute in my own small way to provoking fluttering among Greater Wingnuttia, but then I thought I'd see what they had to say.

JammieWearingFool sniffs that the picture was "staged," calls him "scrawny," and then emits a long stream of what I'm guessing passes for satire among wingnuts, involving an imaginary Obama spokeswoman saying things like, "the gay useful idiot community will come to regard The Messiah as a gay icon of sorts. I mean, why else would he wax himself before we set up that paparazzi shot?"

Ann Althouse finds her obsession with other people's torsos rekindled, happily echoes the scores of pectoral muscle-deficient Freepers who can't stop squawking manboobs! manboobs!, posts a link to a picture of a shirtless Vladimir Putin to provoke her commenters into saying Putin is "more manly" (hey, it worked!), but harumphs that Obama is exempt from her rule -- that she imagines the whole universe must obey -- that men may not wear shorts ever, since he was at the beach. (Phew. I was worried.) She then waddles into her own Comments section to offer, "We can discuss whether those are pecs or manboobs... or implants."

The High Priestess of Unwarranted Outrage calls it "beach porn" and asks, "How many times do we need to see those man-boobs?" (That word again!) We're sorry to hear someone is holding a gun to her head and making her do endless Google Image searches while flipping through the news channels on TV. She then asks, "Who needs eye bleach?" I know I do, and earplugs, too.

Sister Toldjah chimes in. "Not more shirtless pictures of Barack Obama!" she wails. She shudderingly recalls the 2007 beach shot of Obama in People magazine, and also reports, "The UK Sun has shirtless pictures of world leaders from the past - and some from the present. Ew!" Naturally, she links to them all. The horror!

The Troll Beneath The Arch posts what he calls the "Obligatory Messiah Pec Pic." Who, I ask, who is forcing all these poor rightbloggers to do these terrible things?

Jennifer Harper, writing in the official newsletter of Rev. Moon's Unification Church, hastens to downplay Obama's appeal, saying, "Mr. Reagan cut a dashing figure in office whether astride a horse or in spotless tuxedo." She does not mention in what stage of undress she imagines the Gipper in saddle. She quotes a flack from Brent Bozell's Fount of Disinformation, who says that it's okay to speculate that the beach pictures were staged as a way to distract the media from Blagojevich, since "When beauty queen photos of Sarah Palin surfaced during the presidential campaign, the press coverage was negative. And you can be sure if positive images of President Bush in a bathing suit had appeared sometime in 2000, the press would have cast suspicions on them as a staged photo-op." Harpy does not agree with JWF's "scrawny" characterization, instead saying that this picture of Obama, when compared to the 2007 shot in People, shows him to be "a little chunkier."

The woman whom S,N! commenters have called K-Mart Coulter opines: "[I]n fact, it's a carefully orchestrated exercise in the homo-erotic, dreamed up by the Uber-conceit of Obama himself (look at me, I'm bugg) and his largely male team of advisor-ooglers." She then informs us, "I, myself, am not impressed at this wannabe Supermodel soon to become our Commander-in-Chief," and goes onto list all presidents who worked out, since they were unarguably all bad, and clearly, the connection between working out and being a bad president cannot be overstated.

Crippy at RedState also notes the Shirtless Putin/Shirtless Obama comparison (another rightblogger taking direction from Drudge, it appears), and points out the key difference: "the thing that struck me most about the two pictures is that the former KGB Agent and current Russian Dictator is wearing a small gold cross while Barack Hussein Obama is not." He concludes, "I understand and acknowledge being on the fringe but I still have doubts about his citizenship, religion, and most of all his allegiance."

So much for the old saw, "If you think you're crazy, you're not."

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(pic. sources: Althouse, Malkin, Gateway, Schlussel)