During the Obama administration — if you can remember that far back — the right-wing press got pretty good at generating controversies out of nothing — collectively clutching their pearls when, say, Obama allegedly dishonored the White House by wearing a tan suit. And them there was the time he ordered spicy mustard for his hamburger, like some kind of fancy-pants snob.
With another Democrat in the White House, you might expect the right-wing press to be pulling phony controversies out of thin air on a regular basis. And, to be fair, they’ve been trying to. But they’re clearly out of practice and so most of their recent attempts have failed big time.
Last week, they tried to get the crowd worked up over Biden’s plan to restrict the average American’s consumption of red meat to only 4 pounds a year — only to discover that Biden had no such plan; they’d been had by a British tabloid’s misleading story.
The right-wing press also tried to get Americans up in arms about the government allegedly sending copies of a kids’ book by Kamela Harris to children stuck in our border camps. Never mind that the govcernment never did any such thing; it turns out that some random person had donated one copy of the book to the kids in a humanitarian drive.
Now the right-wingers are trying to generate some sort of controversy over a strange but utterly insignificant gesture on Joe BIden’s part. Last Thursday, while walking to the Marine One helicopter on the White House laws, Biden spied a dandelion in its seedy phase, then picked it and gave it to his wife.
Now, I don’t know why he picked a weed to give to Jill. It’s a somewhat strange thing to do. But hey, at least the two of them actually seem to enjoy one another’s presence — in stark contrast to the previous First Couple. I doubt Trump would even bother to pick up a wad of dirt to give to Melania.
Is there any logic to Biden’s gesture? Mediaite points out that
[t]here is a folk belief that blowing on a dandelion can grant wishes, but there is little scientific evidence to back this up.
So maybe Biden was trying, in a not-altogether-serious manner, to wish Jill good luck. Or perhaps there was some other private joke between the two of them. Who knows, and more to the point, who cares?
Well, one person who cares is Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield, who had a bit of a tantrum after seeing the footage, declaring
Joe Biden today getting on Marine One and he stops and picks up, I think it’s a dandelion, but it’s a dandelion that hasn’t even blossomed into a flower yet, like that gives everybody asthma. So you blow it, it goes everywhere, and everybody starts sneezing.
Well he picks up the weed and gives it to Jill, that’s, what, I guess is supposed to be some kind of a sweet gesture. … I say it was a planted dandelion there, who knows?
Is he really suggesting that someone literally planted the dandelion there on the White House lawn so that Biden could see it, pick it, give it to Jill, and then reap sweet praises in the press for such an, er, romantic gesture? Maybe.
But he’s definitely not the only right-wing personality who thought something weird and devious was going on. On Fox News, Mediaite reports,
Laura Ingraham and Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo spent several minutes mocking Biden, snarking that the president had given his wife a “weed” (a common theme among critics), comparing him to Frankenstein’s monster, and decrying the positive coverage that the gesture received.
“It was a sweet gesture, Laura, even if it was a weed, maybe the poor man didn’t know ,” Arroyo said, then joked “Look, at least you didn’t try to pick a lemon off of Jill’s dress, so this is a good thing.”
Fox News host Tammy Bruce, meanwhile, was moved to incoherence by Biden’s little gesture, complaining that the dandelion-picking moment
made the news. That was like the news. This is what we’re dealing with.
[mocking voice] He romantically gave his wife a dandelion.
It’s as though they want us to go into a coma, or do they believe we are infants and we can’t, we don’t know what’s going on, and look, I think it’s nice that when a man picks up a flower in some fashion and gives it to his wife, but he’s the president of the United states, it’s not the news,
We’ve got Covid, we’ve got a border that’s open, we’ve got big enemies looking at us and trying to figure out how to destroy us, and this is the news?
This would be a searing indictment of the triviality of so much political news coverage in the mainstream press — except that the only people talking about it are on Fox News, Newsmax, and, oh, did I forget LewRockwell.com?
“Have You Ever Given or Received a Bouquet of Dandelion Weeds?,” asked writer Thomas DiLorenzo.
I’ve never heard of it; have never seen dandelion “flowers” for sale at any florist or at the section of the grocery store where they sell flowers, or anywhere else. I tried to buy some on Flowers.com but with no success. That’s because it’s kind of like giving someone a bouquet of poison ivy or sneeze-inducing ragweed. It’s cute when a five-year-old child picks a “bouquet” of dandelion weeds for his mom, but creepy and demented when an 80 year-old-man does it. Especially if he’s the man who has his finger on the nuclear button.
But the media are portraying Senile Joe’s asinine picking of a dandelion weed for his wife as some kind of Romeo-and-Juliet moment. Dumb-Ass Americanus is said to be “swooning” all over twitter over it. Jill Biden has that “what an asshole” look on her face in the photos of the event on the internet.
Again, the only people paying attention to the dandelion moment are the right-wingers.
And even they are having trouble caring about it. I looked through Pariots.win — the Reddit-like discussion forum that emerged from the now-banned The_Donald subreddit — to see if I could find anyone reacting to the dreaded dandelion thing. I found only a handful of commenters with anything to say.
There was someone called Crucial8GB who declared
Biden has Dementia. The Democrat Party should be charged with elderly abuse.
There was Tobyrocky accusing the Dems of something like child abuse:
Typical mind of a 5 year old. They give their mom’s dandelions too.
And then there was orrvarpen, who spouted this bit of nonsense that I’m not going to even try to decipher.
Looks like a white rubber duck. And sleepy Joe has gotten gills, did he fall into the deep and cold water of well force one again?
I don’t think “Dandelion-picking Joe” is going to supplant “Sleepy Joe” as a term of opprobrium on the right. But it’s not for lack of trying.
We should expect the next phony controversy to pop up within a few days now. Let’s hope it suffers the same fate as “Joe BIden Picks a Dandelion.”
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Man makes impulsive sweet but meaningless gesture for his wife and people try to make a big deal out of it.
I guess they always calculate how a ‘nice’ gesture for the people they claim to care about will look and exactly how grateful the recipient should appear before they decide if it’s worth doing.
A “weed,” you say? How dare you. Dandelions are a useful plant; they’re edible, attract pollinators, and help aerate the soil, none of which can be said of the high-maintenance grass we value so much for our lawns.
Damn I though Biden actually gave his wife weed and I was about to get excited.
Someone should ask these nimrods to define “weed”.
Video responses.
Add laughter and enjoy!
Uhm, dandelions aren’t used in floral arrangements for the simple reason they ‘wilt’ too fast when cut (at best a day or so, I think). And those seed heads aren’t opened enough to be good for blowing on, either.
As for the right-wing press looking for controversies, back in February Newsmax went after Champ because he didn’t look ‘presidential’ enough for them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tmz.com/2021/02/20/biden-dog-champ-german-shepherd-ugly-unpresidential-newsmax/
At Champ’s age, he gets the right to be a bit rough around the edges if he wants to be.
I’d say it is unfair that dandelions are made out to be these horrific weeds that destroy property values for a three block radius. They are, as noted by Xennial, quite edible, and assuming you are not deathly allergic, otherwise harmless. Also, as pointed out by their denouncers no less, they bring joy to little kids everywhere who want to pick flowers in places where nobody plants such things.
I used to eat the leaves all the time as a kid. Stopped doing that when my family moved to town, as you never know what pesticides and herbicides people spray around, to say nothing of spilled car oil, household chemicals, etc.
I have never heard of this guy, much less know what his show looks like, but based on the name and the context I just imagine the Stephen Colbert character Buck Tuckford. You know, the folksy, ranty rightwing TV host who invariably gets so excited he starts smearing some goopy substance on his face and hair.
Just to overthink this thing, is it uncommon to see dandelions on the White House lawn? I think that’s likely, if it’s a really high maintenance lawn. That could explain why a lone dandelion randomly caught Biden’s attention.
Incidentally, for the white conservative audience, a dandelion planting itself on the White House lawn might be a very powerful metaphor for Biden’s America, where neat, ordered suburbs are supposedly under grave threat of invasion by the unwanted, low-class, off-color people.
I’m actually surprised that they didn’t make a scandal out of how making a wish on a flower is pagan satanic witchcraft. I mean, one day you’re picking a weed and giving it to your significant other and then the next day it’s this
Do you have the dandelion clock thing in the States? Where you blow on them and that tells you the time?
Dandelion flowers make a palatable wine. I’ve made it a couple of times, although it’s more effort collecting the flowers than the wine really repays. The playground lore when I was a kid was that they made you wet the bed, and they actually do have a mild diuretic effect.
I see Grant Stinchfield’s knowledge of what true love looks like is matched only by his knowledge of botany. Seeds come AFTER blossoming, not before.
I learned from other people on Twitter that dandelions are considered symbolic of military families. I don’t know if President Biden had this in mind – possibly all he wanted to do was make a sweet gesture to FLOTUS – but the connection seems to have resonated with military families. After all, the Bidens are a military family themselves.
@Alan
I’d heard about the dandelion clock thing as a kid, but only in books. Where I grew up, dandelions were for making wishes.
@Nicholas Kiddle, as you probably know, they’re called pissenlit in French for that very diuretic reason (or dent-de-lion) 🙂 .
Wait, there’s little evidence? That means there is SOME scientific evidence that they do grant wishes???
Excuse me I need to go pick some flowers…
PS: Thamks to this post I finally googled how to correctly pronounce dandelion. Anyone knows why the tiny yellow flowers are called “Lion tooth”?
For useless language trivia, dandelion in Hungarian is “pitypang” or “gyermekláncfű”. The second one is more interesting as it literally translates into “child (gyermek) chain (lánc) grass (fű*)” which as you can guess is a reference to kids making flowercrowns and other plant based jewelry out of it.
*”fű” can also mean “weed” but exclusively if you mean the drug.
Romantic gestures are supposed to be impulsive and unscripted.
”Weed” is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a moral judgment humans make about whether a plant belongs in a particular space. When you listen to the language right-wing pundits use when they talk about people, animals, or flowers, it’s clear their judgment of the value of living things isn’t to be trusted.
@Luzbelitx: I think it’s the jagged shape of the dandelion leaf that earns it the “lion’s tooth” name.
I’d also never heard of dandelion seeds for anything but wishes.
It’s funny that Stinchfield thinks a dandelion gone to seed is one that hasn’t become a flower yet. He’s got his flower life cycle all mixed up.
I’d rather be given actual weed from my husband then flowers just about any time.
also the dandelion thing, most people don’t actually think blowing on them grants a wish but you do make wishes on them or blow on them the same way you blow out a birthday candle. It’s more symbolic then anything else. Or like throwing a coin into a fountain to make a wish, or wishing on a shooting star.
@Sara – He’s also mixed up about asthma. It’s triggered by pollen, not large parachute seeds bobbing on the wind.
To add to the dandelion-in-different-languages thing: In dutch it’s called ‘paardenbloem’. Which literally translates to Horse-Flower. Apparently that is because horses do not digest the dandelion-seeds so fields with horses tend to have more dandelions than fields with cows.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants – Yes, and things don’t just “give” someone asthma all of a sudden. He’s also getting the dandelion lifecycle wrong, as @Victorious Parasol and @Sara here pointed out.
…
Also, just because this was bugging me: I was guilty of giving an uninformed opinion too, a couple of days ago. I don’t know enough about engineering and economics to know whether the Tesla company is *overall* good or bad for the widespread adoption of electric cars.
…
As for dandelions, when they’re around I sometimes make a “fancy” sandwich with tuna, chopped celery, dandelion petals, curry powder, and mayo. It’s a bit finicky to chop the yellow parts of the petals, but it gives things a nice yellow colour and goes well with the curry. (I’m sure it’d taste good with scrambled eggs too, but I don’t know the best vegan equivalent.)
When I was little, my mother told me not to pick dandelions because their sap would stain my clothes, so in that sense I might understand if giving one to a lady was somehow a faux pas, but also, an adult would probably know to watch out for that.
It’s very strange to say that you shouldn’t give a dandelion to anyone because you can’t buy them at a florist’s. Wildflowers are a thing. Sometimes they might even be preferred.
Re: dandelion names
The Finnish name is voikukka, which means butter flower, probably because of the colour. In Swedish it’s maskros, so a worm flower. Apparently some Swedish-speaking Finns have started to call it smörblomma (butter flower in Swedish), which is potentially unfortunate since smörblomma is the Swedish name for Ranunculus acris, which is not good to eat.
Wishing while blowing dandelion seeds might very well work if you wish for more dandelions growing nearby.
I don’t bother to really collect dandelion flowers, but I do sometimes snack on them when walking outdoors in late spring/early summer. They have a nice fresh taste with a hint of sweetness.
In Finnish dandelion is voikukka, “butterflower”. AFAIK it could be a color association, or maybe dandelions did historically provide good early spring fodder for the cattle, stimulating milk production after winter. Another common, highly edible spring shoot weed is the fireweed, whose name in Finnish and Swedish is directly associated with milk for the aforementioned reason.
Chamaenerion angustifolium – Wikipedia
A famous (in Finland) 1988 pop song portrays fireweed blossom as the “bad boy’s rose”; something a jobless, reckless and romantically opportunistic man might give you as a semi-ironic romantic gift. I also know a woman who sometimes picks fireweed blossom by herself to put in a vase, while receiving more bourgeois gifts from her husband.
Ranunculus is also called buttercup in English, while the North American milkweed is even more poisonous (and not closely related to fireweed).
The antipathy toward dandelions has much more to do with classism and capitalism than anything about the plants themselves. As has been noted upthread, the leaves are edible as a salad green and the flowers can be made into wine. The roots can be dried and made into tea. They should be a staple of every vegetable garden. The reason they aren’t is that they grow and spread so effortlessly that capitalism can’t easily exploit them. So it demonizes them. Don’t grow this handy food plant, says the lawn and garden industry. Instead grow high-maintenance grass (we’ll sell you everything you need). Show off your wealth by wasting fertile land on an expensive monoculture that gives absolutely nothing back. And if anything else should take root in your lawn, it’s a WEED and we will sell you what you need to get rid of it.