Breaking the Oprah barrier

Our celebrity-obsessed culture devours news about who's fat, who's fucking, who's failing, drunk, drugged up, etc. There's no shortage of gossip rags that continue their unfortunate and embarrassing existence covering all aspects of the lives or rich, beautiful and stupid people who don't give a crap about us.

Celebrity egos also get more and more attention these days, especially since the word "diva" was inexplicably co-opted by the gossip-media and has been distorted to an extent that the word's incorrect usage is far more common than the correct one.

Many of the biggest egomaniacs in showbiz are well known. The gossip rags often publish lists of the biggest egos in Hollywood or the music industry, or the growing industry of being a worthless oxygen-bandit who actually doesn't do anything (You know who I'm talking about).

Search for celebrity egos on the ol' interwebs and you'll find a lame hodgepodge of big names, but they're usually just an excuse to talk shit about Kanye West and Paris Hilton, as if there was already any shortage of that.

Inexplicably missing from such discussions is the one of the smuggest, preachiest personalities in all of North America, who flies her self-satisfied face in tens of thousands of bookstores and newsstands each month.

Who else but Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah has unequivocally established herself as one of the most reprehensibly self-congratulatory blowhards in all media and she's done it with her disgusting O: The Oprah Magazine, which features her face on the cover every month.

Let me repeat. Oprah's magazine has her on the cover every month.

By herself.

This April marks the 9th anniversary of her rag's first publication. It's a monthly magazine, so that makes 107 straight covers with just her.

I say 107 because this month, she made the shocking move of deigning to appear with someone else. That's what motivated today's entry. This is some of the most earth-shaking news in the magazine industry. Oprah shared her cover!

This might sound insignificant to you, but really, I can't stress this enough; for nine years, this

woman has been on every single cover of a magazine already named after her. How full of yourself do you have to be to pull a stunt like that? Even Rosie O'Donnell's self-aggrandizing pap showed her with another celebrity each month. Even Penthouse doesn't show tits on the cover every month.

Oprah's already got a high enough profile. Her cachet won't suffer if she featured someone else on the cover, maybe even by themselves.

Well, shut my mouth! Here she is, god forbid, sharing the limelight. Except … wait a minute!

As years of shameless self-promotion and wrong-headed "guidance" to her viewers should indicate, even this is just a calculated move that indicates no deflation of ego on Oprah's part. This is not to laud or promote her guest. It's a slightly more subtle way for Oprah to show off.

The first person who Oprah ever shares her cover with is Michelle Obama. For all her grace, good looks and intelligence, the plain fact is that Mrs. Obama hasn't really done a whole lot, certainly not enough merit a magazine cover. Oprah has interviewed winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers and Oscars, far greater achievements than being the wife or a president. Why don't they merit a cover?

Because none of them serve Oprah's ego the way Mrs. Obama does. It's well documented that Oprah has been a big Obama fan since 2004, cajoling him to run for president, and being prominently shown crying on the cameras after Obama's victory.

Obama's election was the subject of more eye-rolling hyperbole than any other event in recent memory, and Oprah rode that wave of hysterical rhetoric. She's gotten in on the ground floor of Obama-mania and she's attaching herself, leech-like, to the new president. Not content to be one of the biggest media presences in North America, Oprah is now trying to worm her way into history as an close friend of a historic president. And just you watch, that association will come in handy when she decides to run for office or at least finagle some government appointment.

Naturally, the president is too occupied to appear on the cover of Oprah's self-serving rag, but his wife will do quite nicely.

And it may go down as one of her greatest achievements, being the first person to break the Oprah barrier on the cover of the world's most arrogant and insufferable magazines.