Do these people even listen to themselves? If they love blogging and LGBT people, I can think of a great way for them to support us: buy TBP advertising. Of course, they wouldn't dream of spending $100 or whatever it costs to run an ad here while they'll pay tens of thousands of dollars to put together their ads and hundreds of thousands to place them in traditional media outlets.

Instead, we're supposed to realize that the ads themselves are news, for whatever reason, and then run them for free here, cause a stir, and get them tens of thousands of viewers that they didn't have to pay for.

(I debated whether or not to post it here; my mini-rant on the ad itself doesn't make much sense without seeing the ad. Still, I'm mad at Abolut, so if you haven't seen it already, check it out at JMG.)

That's fine when there's actually a story behind the ad. Sometimes I, or another contributor, have something to say about an ad and we put it up. If it actually is news, then we go for it. People can generally put it in the right context.

But most of the time it's like the press release that accompanied these Absolut ads on Monday:

"As a long-time supporter of the gay and lesbian community, we acknowledge that you can't simply speak to gay men and lesbians as consumers, but instead need to make real connections to their lives which we believe we are achieving with our new creative executions," said Jeffrey Moran, ABSOLUT(R) spokesperson. "As a company, we respect gay men and lesbians not simply in advertising messages, but behind the scenes as well. We're not gay-washing here."

First, what the fuck is "gay-washing"? That's not even a concept. We talk about "straight-washing" when referring to how history books or news reports remove evidence of someone's homosexuality to pander to people's homophobia (like James Baldwin or Alexander the Great). But "gay-washing" means nothing. Way to show that you're in the know, Absolut.

Also, how does this show that they're making "real connections" with the "gay and lesbian community"? Can we first even define what that community is? Because it's obviously just a catch-phrase to Absolut, a series of words that sound nice together because they've heard them from us yet lack understanding, because I don't know that there are many lesbians who have a "fascination with perfect, eight-inch 'member' measurements."

And gay men loving big cocks is a very old joke. Only drag queens are allowed to make it, Absolut.

But that press release is just marketing bullshit talk for trying to take money from our people while pretending to care. Translated into English, the above quotation says: "Please publish this ad, over and over again, for free. You people like to talk about these sorts of things, right?"

Michelle Malkin, like the blathering idiot that she is, toes the corporate line with a series of posts about various Absolut ads, including one about this 8-inch ad:

After watching the far Left politicization of liquor advertising play out, you do feel like you need a drink.

Yeah, Michelle, that's what's happened here. Absolut has been taken over by radical queer Mexican Commies who are more concerned with destroying America, the family, and God than they are with turning a profit.

Uh-huh.

But even she points this out:

The Absolut ad article is now the most e-mailed item at Yahoo! News, with more than 6,000 users e-mailing it out.

The article she's referring to is an AP story about the controversy surrounding a Mexican Absolut ad. And that controversy was sparked by racist bloggers like Michelle Malkin getting people all worked up over it and telling people to write letters to Absolut. That got the AP to cover it and people read the story because it has a colorful photo, and it's a self-feeding system for a couple of weeks.

Talk about an absolut lack of self-awareness.

Absolut ought to send Michelle a thank-you note. 6000 users emailed it to someone on Yahoo! News, and I'm sure that around 200 times more people view an article than send it out. That's about 1,200,000 ad views right there, and that's just what they got on Yahoo. What about CNN, the AP homepage, MSN, the Huffington Post, Google, and any of the hundreds of webpages that carry AP stories?

And then they issue an apology for the ad and try to look they learned their lesson. I'm sure they learned a lesson - pull stunts like this more often because Michelle Malkin's racist brain can't stop selling liquor for you once someone plugs into one of her obsessions and gets her started.

So when I got the email about the Absolut ads, I just thought, no story, let's keep moving. That hasn't stopped fundie sites from talking about the ads, as JMG found. Don't they know that their reaction was fully predicted and expected?

Oh, well. It's a system that works well for these corporations and it's not going to die without me. But if any other ad rep out there has a non-story they want to see on Bilerico, they can buy an ad. That's what they're there for.