This comedy video, starring Barack Obama and Larry David, shows that the ex-President is a natural actor and comedian. (I’ve added a Facebook post below that also shows Obama’s comedic talents.) Here the Calm Man interacts with the Neurotic Man.  As for the tan-suit thing, Wikipedia has whoe article on “Barack Obama and tan suit controversy,” which includes this:

On August 28, 2014, President Barack Obama held a press conference about the situation regarding ISIS in Syria, and how the U.S. military was planning to respond to it. At the conference, Obama said that the U.S. had yet to develop a plan regarding the removal of ISIS, and talked extensively about his concerns in the region. During the conference he wore a tan suit, which until that point was uncommon for Obama.

Although it is common for men to wear light-colored suits in Washington during the summer due to the city’s heat and humidity, it was seen by conservative commentator and Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs as “shocking to a lot of people”.^[6] The controversy was seen in the context of the slow news season before the run-up to the 2014 election campaign. The suit received mixed reviews from a sartorial perspective.

At the time, the unusual attention given to a male leader’s fashion choices was contrasted with that of his 2008 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s “regular experience” as a woman in politics.

This bit gives a fictitious backstory about the Obama Tan Suit Incident, showing that it was all Larry David’s fault when he interacts with a mango smoothie. This could have been right out of “Curb Your Enthusiasm“:

Here’s Obama in an actual tan suit worn when he was President:

Merilee found this video of Barack being funny at other times.

Merilee found this video of Barack being funny at other times.

This week’s Real Time with Bill Maher comedy-and-news bit takes up Rand Paul’s jihad against Anthony Fauci, which includes Paul’s publishing Fauci’s personal diary, which showed Fauci basking in his celebrity.

Maher concludes that Fauci is, at the same time, “an esteemed, dedicated public servant” and a “vain, flawed bureaucrat”.  As Maher notes, Fauci got some stuff wrong, but was not deliberately lying; as Maher says, “science is complicated.” And I agree with Maher that “we should not call people criminals for just the part they got wrong.”

Yes, Fauci did pressure scientists to publish a “wet market” conclusion about the origin of covid, but its origin is irrelevant to how the pandemic should have been handled.  But Fauci nevertheless fell prey, as did Trump, to the addiction to worship that comes with fame. In fact, Maher plays a game, giving quotes from either Trump or Fauci’s diary and asking the viewer to decide “who said it.” Maher gets a dig at “progressives,” noting that Julia Roberts called Fauci “Jesus with a Petri dixh.”

But in the end Maher concludes that Fauci put in a lot of service to the country, but was not a criminal, even though the adulation he received might have made him more dogmatic.  It’s sad that Fauci became seduced by celebrity, but he’s human and that’s a human tendency.

The guests shown are journalists Tara Palmeri and Matt Welch.

Reader Enrico alerted me to last night’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher, whose guests were t.v. producer and writer Sam Levinson, California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, and political journalist Jonathan Martin. Maher’s two-minute opening monologue, below, deals with the abject failure of the U.S. to achieve any of Trump’s aims in our war with Iran. As he says, “I just hope we play Iran in the World Cup so we can beat them at something.”

Below is the big (9-minute) monologue, this time celebrating America’s 250th birthday (“America is Ours”).  His theme is that while Trump will try to make the anniversary about himself, we should resist it.   Maher:  “He [Trump] isn’t America—he’s the temporary caretaker of America—America’s employee.” He concludes, “For all of Trump’s nonsense, America is still here: Still incredibly prosperous by world standards, still the place where people want to get to, still free enough to let me put the word ‘nonsense’ next to the President’s name.” (Yay for free speech!)

Maher then lists some of Trump’s failures (court losses, no big changes in the budget, no name on the Kennedy Canter), and declares, “America may right now be the country Donald Trump is President of, but America is everything that keeps Trump from being the king he wishes he were.”

It’s a paean to American democratic principles. As Maher says, “The message that most threatens authoritarians isn’t ‘America sucks’: it’s ‘America is ours too’.”  There’s a litany of progress that’s been made since America’s 200th anniversary in 1976, as if Steve Pinker became a comedian.

The upshot is that, as Maher maintains, there’s nothing embarrassing about being a patriot if you’re an American, and we should go out and celebrate on July 4. It’s not Trump we’re celebrating, but America, flawed but still the destination of many immigrants.