Obama has already set the tone for demeaning the presidency

Progressives have taken two approaches to challenging Clint Eastwood’s brilliant performance art.  The first is to claim that it perfectly represents the Republicans’ failure to appreciate the true Obama, as demonstrated by their years’ long invention of an imaginary Obama.  The other approach, which Ann Althouse highlights, is to claim that it was incredibly demeaning to pretend that the president is a mean-spirited empty chair:

“Clint Eastwood was a disaster,” Lawrence O’Donnell said.

“I thought Clint Eastwood was bizarre,” Ed Schultz said. “It was demeaning to the presidency.”

Schultz is late to the game.  Assuming for the sake of argument that Eastwood’s shtick really did demean the presidency, Eastwood was neither the first nor the worst.  The first and worst was Obama himself, who did a comedy shtick that had the American people listen to him as he (supposedly) urinated:

I don’t see how you can get much lower that — and the president did it to himself. Apparently while the seat in the Oval Office is empty, the one in the presidential restroom is in use.