IS THE GLASS EMPTY, OR 76.5% FULL? OPINIONS DIFFER!

I imagine I avoided a lot of stupid last week while I was taking a break from blogging, but I see I'm already making up for lost stupid time: President Obama officially kicked off his reelection bid yesterday in Ohio, and right-wingers are informing me that OMIGOD THE HALL WAS ONLY 76.5% FULL HAR HAR HAR OBAMA HAS EMPTY STADIUM!!!1! Yes, "empty" is now a synonym on the right for "76.5% full": The Washington Post tells me that the attendance at the rally in question was 14,000 at a stadium that holds 18,300, which at Breitbart.com results in the headline "Obama Launches Campaign in Empty Arena." This makes me think back to dinner last night: I guess those glasses of wine we were drinking were actually empty, because they weren't filled to the rim (I'm not even sure they were 76.5% filled); perhaps a Breitbartnik can explain to me why there's so little left in the bottle this morning when we were drinking only air.

But a reelection campaign is surely doomed to failure when it can attract only 14,000 for its kickoff rally, right? We can demonstrate this by looking at the 2004 Bush reelection bid, which drew 12,000 people to its kickoff rally in Orlando on March 20, 2004.

Oh, and that Bush reelection kickoff rally in '04 gave us this:

12-year-old Tyler Crotty appeared to be the boredest kid in the world during a 20 March 2004 George W. Bush speech at the Orange County Convention Center in Florida. While Bush spoke at length (42 minutes) Tyler yawned, stretched, looked at his watch, and almost fell asleep on his feet. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a big deal, except that Tyler happened to be onstage, 10 feet from the President at the time. Tyler's fidgety antics quickly appeared on all the news shows and made him an overnight celebrity. Two weeks later, he appeared as a guest on David Letterman's show.





Clearly Bush was doomed to failure, and that's why John Kerry resoundingly defeated him in November 2004.