Back in May, Barack Obama held a mega-rally in Portland, Oregon, and 75,000 people attended, and for a while we all thought it was because the Democratic candidate was popular. But then, thanks to the hard investigative work of the right-wing blogosphere, we learned the true and sinister reason for the size of the crowd: they'd really come to see the warm-up act, The Decemberists, who are an "indie" rock combo popular with Young People, although it all sounds like a terrible racket if you ask me.
Apparently, this kind of ingenious mind-control trick was too brilliant for the Obama campaign to use just once: the latest gossip today on conservative sites such as NewsMax and 'Philadelphia's Family Newspaper' the Bulletin is that the size of Obama's 200,000-strong crowd in Berlin was mainly due to the presence of middle-of-the-road German pop-rockers Reamonn (above). This is, apparently, somehow compatible with the alternative conservative line on the Berlin trip, namely that the huge enthusiasm for Obama in Europe is real and therefore should be troubling to patriotic Americans.
