Your daily manufactured-outrage-from-the-far-left alert

The far left is in the midst of having a coronary over a Fox News caption that appeared during a segment on Michelle Obama yesterday afternoon. The caption read, “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama!”

Here’s a screen cap (via James Joyner):

As you can see, Michelle Malkin was a part of that segment, and she writes about it here:

Salon is in high dudgeon over a caption that Fox ran during my segment referring to Michelle Obama as Obama’s “baby mama.”

I did not write the caption and I was not aware of it when it ran (the Baltimore studio doesn’t have a monitor). I don’t know if the caption writer was making a lame attempt to be hip, clueless about the original etymology of the phrase, or both. But I do know that it was Michelle Obama herself who referred to Barack as her “baby’s daddy” and has used the phrase “baby daddy” to describe Barack while on the stump this year.

Here’s how she introduced him during his Senate victory speech on Nov. 2, 2004:

MICHELLE OBAMA, WIFE OF BARACK OBAMA: My baby’s daddy Barack Obama. Yeah!

Joyner quips:

Malkin also provides a helpful link to a two-year-old Slate piece with the awkward headline “” that explains that celebrity gossip rags have “seized upon baby-daddy and baby-mama, two useful terms that have long appeared in hip-hop and R&B lyrics, and are slowly stripping them of their emotional fangs.” Apparently, such black luminaries as Tom Cruise and Keven Federline had been referred to as “baby-daddy” even though they were married to the mother of their child.

So, perhaps Fox was secretly signaling that the Obamas are Scientologists?

Lastly, here’s a quick question: Why does Obama’s fellow Senator and campaign co-chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) believe that people who criticize Michelle Obama are going to hell? Surely he can distinguish between baseless personal attacks against a political spouse and legitimate criticisms of things they say?