Dean Obeidallah Can Suck It

So, a handful of folks have observed, and quite rightly so, that Substack seems to be pushing previously-known and high profile personalities on all of us in the form of our Notes feeds. While I might grumble a little at this, it IS Substack's platform and toolset, and I'm not generating any revenue for them, so I'll bite my tongue for the time being.

In hindsight, though, I really do wish they might try a little harder to parse through writers' posts to get a better impression of what sort of folks we might actually enjoy reading/hearing from. If the placement of "The Dean's Report, by Dean Obeidallah" into my Notes feed were a measure of Substack's Field Sobriety Test, they crashed the car into a storefront, threw up on the responding officer's shoes and belched whiskey breath while tittering like a school girl....

Now, did you notice the title of this piece, pally? Nice and short and sweet, gets right to the point. Anyhow, onward and upward.

After reading Mr Obeidallah's piece, "Meet The Press" Booking Trump for first show with new host is how FASCISM is normalized", I found myself feeling like a man who is recovering from being pulled out of a house with a gas leak. To begin with, outside of scientific journals or thesis papers, nobody titles a piece this way, Mr Obeidallah. I'm not exactly the living avatar of the Chicago Manual of Style myself, but good God, even David Foster Wallace wouldn't title an essay like that, and he was a bigger wind sock than most!

When the brains were being handed out, did you actively select a broken one? Or did you have a standard issue bit of gray matter, and upon Trump's election it started spraying out more sparks of derangement than a 1991 Ford Escort when the rear axle finally forfeits its existence at 60 miles an hour?

Where do I even begin with this turgid slop you're trying to pass off as righteous indignation? Perhaps with your deeply flawed use of the phrase, "led a coup", because last I checked, a coup is an armed attempt by a group to overthrow and supplant the current governing order or body. Given that on January 6th, 2021, Trump was PART OF, nay, the HEAD OF the governing order, explain to me how exactly he "led a coup"!

Let's move along to your praise of our Dementia-Patient-in-Chief and the speech he gave last year, the one jokingly referred to in some circles as his "Dark Brandon" speech. You know, the one that looked like it had been set up in lighting and tone for the equally ancient and decrepit Emperor Palpatine to address a battalion of Stormtroopers? You quote Biden as having remarked during that speech, quote, "The Maga Republicans are an existential threat to our democracy," but you conveniently neglect to include the REST of Biden's statement there, wherein Biden clarified that, at least in his view, the Maga wing of the party was reflective of/in control of the entire party and its voters as a whole.

Your reading and/or listening comprehension skills, or ability to follow through-lines of extrapolation may be as functional as those of a bird that suffered a head injury from dive-bombing into the side of a building, sir, but I, like many, can deduce what Biden and most folks who support him as ardently as you do mean to imply: that ALL Republicans are an existential threat, because of Trump.

Moving along, you say that NBC/MTP are helping normalize fascism. To invoke the Mandy Patinkin meme, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means." You, like every other entitled talking head in the political commentary space on the left, have tortured that word so thoroughly that I sometimes wonder if you took notes from the Bush/Cheney era CIA guys running Abu Graihb and applied those techniques to the english language.

Or shall we move along to tbe provable LIE you espouse regarding Trump's, to quote you, "vowing to pardon the J6 attackers, many of whom brutally beat police officers in Trump's name"? This completely ignores the public statements Trump has made where he has said clearly that those convicted of VIOLENT CRIMES on that day must oay the legal penalty. He said this openly, many times, even when it causes pushback among his own supporters. So maybe you could try to fash us on and say this wasn't you issuing a lie, per se. Okay, buddy, but it IS an omission, and I'm calling you out on it.

You ask if readers have ever, quote, "heard of a leading American presidential candidate vowing retribution on behalf of his supporters against their perceived political enemies?" I'll be honest here when I say no, I've never heard of it. We haven't had to HEAR of it: we've been SEEING IT IN ACTION UNDER THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION!

Pro-life protestors thrown in jail after being raided at gunpoint by federal agents on a loose interpretation of the Face Act.

Parents labelled 'domestic terrorists' in FBI threat assessment databases for being verbally hostile an indignant with school board meetings.

A meme-smith sentenced to jail for 10 years for a political JOKE while a woman who did the exact same thing, but from the political left, was not even detained or questioned for her own actions.

Scores of January 6th defendants being held without bail, charge, or access to an attorney for literally over a year.

Journalists perceived as conservative or right-wing being raided, arrested, their collected materials being seized and never returned (James O'Keefe, anyone?)

So tell me again about political retribution, you bipedal weasel in a skin suit....

Oh, and of course, invoking Godwin's Law, always a classic of those completely lacking in imagination or creativity...


I'm a little tired now, so I'm going to wrap this up pretty soon. I've just a couple more observations to make, Mr. Obeidallah. The first of these is the delicious way you talk out of both sides of your mouth by criticizing corporate media for pursuing profits, while also calling attention to your SiriusXM sattelite radio program. Did you skip every possible lesson regarding the word 'irony'?

Secondly, you seem to have forgotten in the course of your grand display of TDS, which, if measurable by megatons would be equivalent to Tsar Bomba, that the whole 'boycott threat' or call to action thing can cut both ways. As such, I am calling on as many people as possible to contact the SiriusXM Customer Service Line, at 1 (866)635-5027, and let them know that as long as the arrogant and ignorant Dean Obeidallah had a program carried on their airwaves, you're going to have to consider either cancelling your subscription, or refusing to do business with Sirius's advertising partners.

As the kids are saying these days, Mr. Obeidallah, you have fucked around, and now, you may well find out.

And to the folks at Substack- this guy is a keen example of why you need to think twice about who should be thrown broadly into users' Notes feeds.