If future historians seek to pinpoint the precise moment when the wingnuts completely lost their marbles, let me suggest that it was the moment they decided to take Obama to task for his choice of condiments. Legal Insurrection has the whole sordid story on what the kids are calling ‘Dijongate’:
MSNBC, Obama’s favorite network, reported on Obama’s trip with Joe Biden to get a burger. Just two wild and crazy guys out for some red meat. Andrea Mitchell (does she have nothing else to do?) reported that Obama ordered a burger and mustard. Sounds like it had that “real guy kind of quality.”
Mitchell even noted that Obama left a $5 tip in the tip jar. But she didn’t mention one arugula-like fact, and you couldn’t hear it on the MSNBC video because Andrea and her correspondent Kelly O’Donnel (they needed two people to cover this story) were talking so much.
NBC’s regular news reported Obama’s order as follows: “”I’m going to have a basic cheddar cheese burger, medium well, with mustard,” Obama said. “Do you have spicy mustard? I’ll take that.”
Actually, the quote was “you got a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that” (at 0.55 of the unedited video below without Mitchell’s talkover).
Obama ordered his burger with DIJON MUSTARD! Bet he had to seek John Kerry’s counsel on that.
Note too that this is not just a failing of Obama, but also of the mainstream media, as Mitchell didn’t see fit to mention this ‘arugala-like fact.’ As of this writing, the Dijongate post has eight ten breathless updates (and a followup), including one exposing Obama’s scandalous (i.e., Poupon-containing) tuna salad recipe. And now Sean Hannity has gotten in on the hate. The funny thing is, the post missed the entire story. The scandal isn’t that Obama ordered his burger with spicy mustard, it’s that he ordered it medium well. What’s the deal with this guy? Is he ascared of some red meat?!
I don’t know about you, but all this hatin’ is making me hungry!
Author’s Note: I think that the Legal Insurrection post and its followups are being presented as some sort of elaborate meta-joke. At least that’s the way the author — William Jacobson, an associate professor of law at Cornell — is playing it. He’s taking a tack that is increasingly common on right-wing blogs that anything that “drives the Left insane” must be on the right track. But methinks Jacobson is confusing “driving the Left insane” with people pointing at him and laughing. Over at Balloon Juice, DougJ is equally baffled by the current state of greater wingnuttia as revealed by this post and others like it. The Right has moved into a sort of dog-whistle shorthand with regard to Obama, speaking only to those already well versed in all of the myriad ‘scandals’ and conspiracies that now serve as their navigational guides.
[Props=TBogg]
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Update: Media Matters has a handy wrapup on DDS: Dijon Derangement Syndrome. I would have an easier time taking this all as a joke that “leftists” simply don’t get if the discussion weren’t dripping with the impotent hate that seems to infect everything emanating from the Right lately.
Happy Valley News Hour 
thank gawd you gather together all the details of this burger issue, kamper, cause otherwise, I’d be lost. Grey Poupon is a Kraft product I heard. And without Kraft, there would be no 4th of July barbecues and orange mac and cheese. We take Polish mustard, here in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a mustard that blows all the namby-pamby American mustards out of their cheap plastic containers. Not that I’m obsessing about the issue. because I’m not. Really. I’m not.