February 27, 2008

Few news items

The guy who warmed up John McCain's crowd with repeated questionable attacks on Obama is now furious and says that McCain threw him under the Straight Talk Express. Which is funny. And he also says that anyone who has a problem with his repeated emphasizing of Obama's middle name--those people are the racists.

****

Without comment:
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.


****

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the current director of the Defense Intelligence Agency says that waterboarding is a violation of international law.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Da Trib has a few pieces on this whole Barack Husseiun Obama business. See http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/02/middle-name-cal.html for Eric Zorn's piece and http://weblogs.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/obamas_middle_name_is_american.html for a piece by Frank James (no, not THAT one).

It's fascinating to see how people are unable to grasp the difference between Hilary Rodham Clinton, which is often what she calls herself, and Barack Hussein Obama, which is not form of his name that he uses.

Similarly, people are unable to grasp the difference between Barack Hussein Obama and John Sidney McCain. In this case, neither man uses this form of his name, but then again, Sidney doesn't carry the same baggage or evoke the same connotation that Hussein does. One reason might be that there is the "secretly Muslim" whisper campaign out there that Hussein seems to reinforce while also attempting to link him to Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps it would be different (in the sense that it would be more similar) if there was a whisper campaign that McCain is secretly Jewish and beholden to Israel or some such nonsense.

The lack of critical thinking skills and basic ignorance of the American public is frustrating and appalling. Before I go off on a full-blown threadjacking rant about the latest Diane Ravitch-led lamentation of what our kids don't know, THIS is the stuff that really matters, not whether they recognize a particular piece of literature in some arbitrarily constructed canon. Dammit.

leighton said...

John Sidney McCain is a closet Australian and if elected, will pledge our allegiance to Canberra and fly the Australian flag above the stars and stripes. Pass it on.