Who’s Your Big Daddy?

Forget the comparisons with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, this administration is shooting for a more important role than as Big Brother.

Did The Storm Cause Any Damage, Big Daddy?

From Fox News, Chris Stirewalt reporting:

But before Irene fizzled, the Obama White House wanted to make sure that Irene was no Katrina and that, in fact, the president and his aides would be seen in compassionate command of the situation.

Hence the introduction of what may be the most condescending euphemism for the national government in its long history of condescending euphemizing: “federal family.”

This new phrase was supposed to, Power Play supposes, make anxious East Coasters feel the love of a caring federal government — tender squeeze from the Department of Homeland Security, a gentle embrace from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The phrase was a centrally distributed talking point, appearing in op-eds, press releases and statements from across the administration.

…

President Obama, presumably the federal father, came home early from his vacation and addressed the nation on the progress of the storm daily. The agency heads, presumably the siblings of this caring network, fanned out to show intimate engagement with the subject, from sandbagging procedures to storm tracking.

Meanwhile, Democrats were already pushing hard on the notion that Republican spendthrifts had crippled federal disaster preparedness, laying the predicate for pinning the blame for the disaster on the Tea Party movement. When the worst came, the president’s allies wanted to make sure everyone knew who was trying to break up the federal family.

Not only are we TEA Partiers cold-hearted, butter-clinging, dumbass, evil raaaaacists, but we’re home-wreckers! We’re tramps out to destroy the American Family Unit by seducing the other children [for that is how our self-proclaimed parents think of us] into a degenerate lifestyle, filled with such nefarious and God-awful things such as addictions to freedom and liberty and an unhealthy love of God and The Constitution.

-Tip of the fedora to Doug Powers who reports also on one of the effects of this policy:

This has helped soften the image of the federal government to such a degree that the IRS is now considering referring to themselves as America’s “little audit buddies.”

Pace Ronald The Raygun, will the famous line need to be revised to read: ‘The most chilling words in the English langauge are: we’re from the government family and we’re here to help’?

-The quote at the top of this post is taken from the movie version of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. If you know the story of the play and movie, you’re aware that the family at the center of it is run with an iron first by Harvey ‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt. I’m not sure that he’s the right father to be used to illustrate our Big Daddy in The White House.

It seems to me that our ‘government family’, the Obama Adminsitration, is more like a TV sitcom family. The questions to you, my Friends In The Ether, are:

1) Which sitcom family reminds you of the clowns in The White House; and

2) Which of the dungbats in the Administration are closest to which sitcom characters?

Fire away.

‘What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick?
Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?’