You’re A Big Girl Now

I flipped on the radio last night and heard the famously dog-whistle-pitched voice of conservative pundit Mark Levin attacking President Barack Obama for … well, I couldn’t tell what. Levin played a clip from the president’s Sunday interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, in which Lauer waved a new issue of US Weekly.

LAUER: You got replaced by Jessica Simpson.

OBAMA: Yeah, who’s in a weight battle apparently. (LAUGHTER) Yeah. Oh, well.

Having been in a supermarket at some point in the past 48 hours, I had seen this magazine cover. Here’s a small picture.

You can make out the headline “Inside Jess’s WEIGHT BATTLE” above a Jessica Simpson who, indeed, looks like she might be a horrifying size six or something. Levin, though, had no idea what the president was talking about. He launched into a minute-long rant about how he’d “never made fun of Barack Obama’s ears,” but now that the president had “made fun” of Jessica Simpson, his “Dumbo ears” were fair game. If I didn’t know that Levin had the mind of a particularly paste-hungry second-grader (he likes to call Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “her thighness”) it would have been off-putting. Actually, it was just confusing.

After some intensive research, I now understand what’s going on: NBC had released a slightly mistyped transcript of the interview (in which the president allegedly said Simpson was “losing” a weight battle). Media Matters has more, including the outrage of Time’s Karen Tumulty, who tells the president that he still should have known to “just don’t go there.”

A president who can read: It’s a problem.