Nuts & Mutton

Transcript:

Sanchez: I just need to parse this out as best I can from you, Michael. The fact that John McCain’s organization gave $448,000 to this group that was founded by Mr. Khalidi—is there no reason for some to be critical of that as well, just as some might be critical of Barack Obama for being at a meeting with some girl who read a poem, for example?

Goldfarb: Thank you, Rick.

(Thank you to Shakesville for the transcript.)

So, here’s what I don’t understand. Goldfarb is obviously a dickwad of the finest water. He refuses to answer the question being put to him. He treats Sanchez like he’s a moron. And yet, Sanchez still closes by thanking the guy and praising the quality of the discussion they just had. IS HE NUTS????? In my world – that elusive shangri-la where people say what they mean and mean what they say – the interview would have ended along the lines of “Goldfarb, you’re a fucking weasel. Get out of here, and never darken the doors of a CNN studio again!”

Another snorter from the Obama campaign.

My friend Irene forwarded this riveting article from Rolling Stone magazine.

Excerpt:
This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

Great. Just what the United States needs. Another scion of privilege working out his object relationships in the White House!

In a thoughtful and beautifully-written essay of that title, in Saturday’s Globe & Mail, Timothy Garton Ash raises the dreaded ‘A’ word in relation to Obama:

Where were you when Barack Obama was shot? The line we pray we will never have to say. A line I have hesitated even to write, as if the mere inscribing of the words could invite calamity. Yet, the fear preys on the back of our minds, as we see Mr. Obama plunging into those crowds. I have watched weeks of election coverage on the 24/7 television news channels, in the course of which every tiniest feature of the campaign has been examined to exhaustion, but not once have I heard this mentioned. Yet, almost every day, I have a private conversation in which the subject comes up, especially when talking to journalists. Is this self-censorship in the media right? Should I not even be writing this? There are unstable, suggestible people out there. Experts may argue about the psychological impact of media coverage of such stories, but it clearly has some. Earlier this year, a blogger pointed out that “assassinate Obama” had that day appeared on a list of Google’s top 100 search items. She suggested that newspaper stories about the danger had increased the number of such Google searches – and that her own blog might do the same. As may this essay.

I suspect many of those who lived through the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr have thought along these lines, but mentally crossed our fingers, touched wood, and dismissed the idea before it was fully formed. I remember reading some time ago, during the primaries, that Obama had more Secret Service personnel assigned to him than Dubya. I don’t know if that was true; my reaction, at the time, was “ain’t nobody going to shoot Bush so long as Dick Cheney is VP.” But I remembered the story last week, when I saw the pictures of Obama standing high above a sea of supporters at a rally in St Louis, and I hoped those Secret Service people were really paying attention to their jobs.

A ghastly reminder on boingboing that rumours of the demise of racism in America have been greatly exaggerated.

Reading the New York Times’ coverage, in 1893, of the torture and death of former slave Henry Smith, before a huge, cheering, mostly-white crowd, I just can’t get my head around the mass psychosis that seems to have gripped so many white southern Americans of that time. Even though the events depicted took place at a time when bull-baiting and cockfighting were considered normal entertainment, especially for males, I cannot see a similar horde applauding, as a human set about torturing an animal in the way the NYT reporter describes. His matter-of-fact reporting of such unbridled savagery, as just another piece of news, makes the story even more horrific.

Henry Smith’s lynching took place 115 years ago, and there is evidence, as reported in this Associated Press story that points to Brandon McClelland’s gruesome death being the result of a horrible, drunken accident. But it is not hard to see why some people in Paris, Texas, are crying racism. From the same AP story comes this astonishing little nugget:

Paris, which is 73 percent white and 22 percent black, was in the news last year after a black girl was sentenced to up to seven years in a juvenile prison hundreds of miles from her home for shoving a teacher’s aide at school, while a white girl was sentenced by the same judge to probation for burning down her parents’ house.

Nice dissection by Slate’s Fred Kaplan of the McCain and Missus Palin mantra about his preparedness to handle security because he’s been “tested” in battle. Or, as McCain put it to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, speaking about the Cuban missile crisis:

My friends, you know how close we came to nuclear war. Americans will not have a president who needs to be tested. I’ve been tested, my friends.

Which raises three questions:

One: Don’t you think it’s time to knock it off with the patently false bonhomie of “my friends?”
Two: Do you really believe that many of the “friends” who come out to your rallies know enough about the Cuban Missile Crisis to realise how close it came to a nuclear war between the USA and USSR?
And,
Three: Really, should you be reminding an electorate that is already leery about your great age, that you were old enough to fly planes forty-six years ago?