"The Obama Event Registry"

At first you think it’s a bad joke: life imitates The Onion.

Just when you thought that the Obama administration couldn’t go any lower, its re-election campaign comes up with: The Obama Event Registry.

Our president is offering you the opportunity to politicize your wedding, your birthday, or your anniversary, even your bar mitzvah.

Don’t ask for gifts; tell your friends that you would prefer that they give their money to thee Obama re-election campaign in their name. Forget about setting up your home; forget about the extra dollars you would put save for a rainy day. If you believe in Obama you will forego your gifts and ask your friends to give it to Obama.

And I thought that Obama’s support for same-sex marriage was a sign of respect for traditional marriage.

What were they thinking at campaign headquarters? Have they been spending so much time dodging bullets in Rahm Emanuel's Chicago that they forgot to think?

Was the campaign trying to out-vulgar the opposition? Was it trying to give Miss Manners a stroke? Did it want to wring the joy out of a blessed occasion? Has it lost even the most minimal sense of decorum?

It’s pathetic to the point of self-caricature.

The site opens like this:

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?

Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.

Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy—so get started today.

Hey, all you happily engaged couples the Obama folks are giving you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make your wedding into a political statement. They know, even if you don't, that when you were growing up and dreaming about your wedding day, you were hoping against hope that you could use it to support Barack Obama.

If you do, you will be helping to suck more money out of the private economy.

The campaign sneers at the gravy bowl, but that object is someone’s business. Manufacturing, shipping, marketing and selling gravy boats is someone’s livelihood.

If they had been trying, the Obama campaign could not have found a better way to express it tone-deaf contempt for the commerce and industry.

The campaign website continues:

Instead of another gift card you’ll forget to use, ask your friends and family for something that will go a little further: a donation to Obama for America. Register your next celebration—whether it’s a birthday, bar or bat mitzvah, wedding, or anniversary—with the Obama campaign. It’s a great way to show your support for a cause that’s important to you on your big day.

How long do you think your friends will be your friends when they realize that you are exploiting their good feeling to hit them up for campaign donations?

The campaign is saying that you should not celebrate your son’s bar mitzvah. Don’t allow him to collect gifts that he might put in a college fund.

According to the Obama campaign his college fund is nothing compared with your transcendent duty to re-elect Barack Obama.

Gift-giving is a basic social ritual. Celebration is another. The cohesion of the social fabric depends on exchanging gifts and on public celebrations of important events. In one absurd gesture the Obama re-election campaign has demonstrated that, next to political divisions, neither gift-giving nor celebrating are of any importance.

It’s a new low. Turn your wedding, a sacred event, a time of joy, into a political fundraiser. Hit up your friends for contributions to the Obama campaign.

An administration that pledged to represent all Americans, red, blue and purple, now wants to turn events that are apolitical into political brawls. It wants to give you a new way to offend friends and family.

What if your friends and colleagues and clients have been cured of their Obamaphilia? What will happen to your job and your career if your colleagues and clients think that you are trying to make your wedding into a fund raiser for Obama?

Do you really want your wedding to be tarnished by a brawl about politics?  

Does the Obama campaign live in a world where everyone thinks the same thoughts and feels the same feelings? Does it have any idea what will happen to your wedding if you set out to offend your guests by asking them to express their political opinions?

Speaking for the younger generation Ben Shapiro gets it right:

This is truly insulting. Young couples have been the folks hardest hit by the Obama economy; unemployment rate among the young is at all-time highs. Yet Obama suggests that we should send money not to those couples, but to the campaign of the man who has put them on the bread lines.