The kitchen poster on the left.

Michael Walsh pooh-pooh’s various people on the Right’s efforts to draw conclusions about Jay Carney & Claire Shipman’s political opinions from their tastes in interior decoration.

There’s been a lot of nonsense written on the Right about the Soviet posters in White House press secretary Jay Carney’s kitchen. Here’s some now, first from Reason – “Jay Carney, Communist Propaganda Connoisseur:”

White House press secretary and occasional beard grower Jay Carney likes political art. Particularly, he likes Soviet military propaganda.

This fact was accidentally revealed in, of all places, the latest issue of Washingtonian MOM magazine. The journal did a profile on Carney’s wife, Claire Shipman. There’s a lot of fun facts about Carney’s preferred brand of $275 sneakers (Hugo Boss) and how the family’s Portuguese water dog is related to Obama’s (cousins!)… Can you spot the strangest thing about this totally candid picture? Hint: It’s not that each member of the Carney clan eats a pyramid’s worth of food for breakfast.

Rather, it’s the World War II-era Soviet poster pointing over Shipman’s shoulder, which asks if you’ve enlisted in the Red Army yet (because you’re going to get drafted anyway), and the other one beyond the sink, which asks if you’ve gotten a factory job to fill in for your husband (who has probably been shot on the front lines).

And this, from the American Thinker:

The sad fact is that progressives in much of the developed world have a soft spot in their hearts for communism. Yeah, it murdered a hundred million people or more, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And those who were murdered were not very fashionable, for the most part.

The Washingtonian photo is a tell. There is a sickness, a willful blindness toward the crimes of communism because it is so close to the progressive ideology that animates the American Ruling Class. Shipman and Carney are the perfect exemplars of that class. Smart, fit, busy, anxious to make their own lives perfect, and convinced that the price other people pay for their progressive dreams is not worth mentioning or even noticing.

Oh, please. By this standard, I’m a Commie symp myself, since I also have Soviet-era posters adorning the walls of my home; I picked them up in Moscow and Leningrad during my various working trips to the late Soviet Union. Which is where I met my old Time colleague, Jay Carney. …

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Oleg Atbashian wittily responded:

As soon as the photograph of Soviet propaganda posters in Jay Carney’s kitchen hit the Internet, right-wing pundits began to draw conclusions about White House Press Secretary’s ideology, morals, and political leanings. It was as if things that a man merely places on his walls and looks at day after day can be any indication of his life choices. …

It is beyond imagination that anyone could misconstrue the Soviet agitprop in Jay Carney’s kitchen as an indication that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and his wife somehow share the same ideas as the perpetrators of a brutal regime that starved its own citizens while the political elites lived in luxury, abused power, prosecuted the opposition, and ruled the country by means of executive orders.

Next, they would claim that that a neat stack of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Books in Valery Jarrett’s bathroom is not there merely to serve as an elegant accent to complement the shower curtains; or that the Black Panther Party insignia on Michelle Obama’s pajamas isn’t merely a bold decorative pattern; or that the black flag of holy Jihad in Huma Abedin’s bedroom is somehow indicative of her sympathies towards the Muslim Brotherhood.

Following such flawed right-wing logic, one might even speculate that Saul Alinsky’s books on Hillary Clinton’s living room mean anything other than an effort to disguise an obscure dried spot that had mysteriously appeared on the coffee table in the last year of her husband’s presidency.

The kitchen poster on the right.

Claire Shipman (wife to Obama press Secretary Jay Carney) is co-author of a book coming out (apparently grounding self-help career advice for women in junk science) and her promotional campaign includes just about the puffiest puff piece that anyone’s ever seen in Washington Mom.

Tout le monde is twittering about the piece this morning, gleefully mocking the supposed perfection of the successful couple’s home and family life.

Walter Olson, on Facebook, snarkily remarked:

Does something about this portrait of the WH press secretary’s family seem, I don’t know, stagey and overly polished? Somehow I imagine the shoot wrapping and the crew breaking set (“okay, you clean up the carefully strewn blueberries, I’ll start Photoshopping in the bookcases, tell them they can change back into regular clothes.”)

The cherished and framed Soviet propaganda posters in the kitchen shot did not go unremarked. But what really brought the house down was the photo below featuring Photoshopped evidence of the mouthpiece of the smart people’s book collection. The duplication of the kid’s finger was particularly admired. Twitter 1 Twitter 2