An Exchange of Words: David B. Coe’s Weblog

Last week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award entry was a fun one.  Certainly it was lighter than most of those that came before it.  And, I’ll warn you now, it was far lighter than this week’s is going to be.

As usual, we have no shortage of nominees.  There’s John McCain, who during several appearances this week repeated his claim that Hamas, the Middle East terrorist organization, had “endorsed” Barack Obama for President.  There’s Hillary Clinton, who spent the latter half of the week talking about how Obama won’t get the votes of “hard-working Americans, white Americans” come the fall.  How is it that she isn’t accused of being an elitist and a racist?  Does “hard-working American” equal “white American”?  Do African Americans not count as “hard-working”?  And does she think so poorly of her low income white supporters that she thinks they’re incapable of voting for an African American candidate?  She should know better.

Then there’s the voter in Greenwood, Indiana who happened to be at an Obama campaign stop a day or two before the Indiana primary.  This was in a restaurant, and as the candidate approached his table, the man waved him away, saying, “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”  News flash, dude:  He’s NOT Islamic.  He’s a Christian.  I mean, come on!  Did you totally miss the Reverend Wright craziness?  And while we’re at, did it ever occur to you that there are millions of Americans who are both Muslim and PRO-America?  Idiot.

But for all my griping about the stupidity of American politicians and pundits, the ridiculous tone of our political campaigns, and all the other buffoonery that I’ve described in this space on Saturday mornings, this week’s award winner makes most of our leaders look like geniuses.

If you’ve seen a newspaper or newscast this week, then you know that the Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma to everyone in the world except the United States government, which continues to insist on using the old name, was struck by a devastating cyclone on May 3.  Myanmar is desperately poor.  It’s also ruled by a brutally repressive and utterly paranoid military dictatorship.  Think North Korea without the quirky charm….  This week, as the United Nations, the United States, other Western powers, and countless NGOs tried to rush medical supplies, food, and other aid to the victims of the storm, the government of Myanmar refused to allow any outside assistance to reach the literally millions of people who have been displaced by this tragedy.  Tens of thousands are dead.  Villages have been flooded.  Drinking water is contaminated and food is scarce.  Soon the physical toll from the storm will be dwarfed by the humanitarian nightmare caused by disease and starvation.  And still the government is dragging its feet.  A few days ago it seized supplies intended for victims.

The Bush Administration’s response to Katrina was a travesty, caused by incompetence and negligence.  Some would claim (and I’d find it hard to argue the point) that had that storm flooded neighborhoods inhabited by wealthy whites rather than poor blacks, the Administration’s response would have been completely different.

But what the leaders of Myanmar have done to their people in the last week makes even that shameful episode in our nation’s history seem a minor offense.  I get absolutely no joy or satisfaction from this, but this week’s BOW Award goes to the government of Myanmar.  Take a BOW, assholes.  You’ve earned it.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition:  “Buffoon — n  1:  A ludicrous figure; clown.”

I offer the definition because for some weeks the BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award goes to someone (or someones) who is not so much a clown as a insensitive lout or a partisan hack.  And there are examples of this among this week’s nominees. (I should note here that the list of nominees is thinner than usual this week.  Not sure why.)  Certainly I was tempted to give retroactive BOW Awards to George W. Bush and John McCain to commemorate the five year anniversary of Bush’s speech given aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln beneath the now imfamous “MIssion Accomplished” banner, during which he announced that major combat activities in Iraq had ended and that the U.S. and its allies had prevailed.  Of course, the mission has yet to be accomplished and the U.S. has not prevailed, and our world is a more dangerous place because of this Administration’s illegal, immoral, and ill-conceived war.  So why nominate McCain for this?  Because just a month after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier, as it began to become clear to people that the mission had not been accomplished after all, McCain said that it had.  Here’s the exchange, in which McCain is challenged on the point by Fox News host Neil Cavuto (I know, I couldn’t believe it either):
NEIL CAVUTO: “Senator — after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn’t over.

McCAIN: “Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it’s very appropriate.”

Now, of course, McCain claims that he always thought that the banner had been inappropriate, yet another McCain flipflop which is almost cause enough to give him this week’s award.  But there will be no award for Flippy McSame this week.

Back to that definition of “buffoon.”  You want clowns?  I present to you the crew at “Fox and Friends”, Fox’s morning “news” program.  Remember earlier in the week when Hillary Clinton was challenging Barack Obama to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate?  This phrase — “Lincoln-Douglas style” refers to a series of seven unmoderated, unscripted debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race, in which Lincoln, the Republican, lost to Douglas, the Democrat.  The debates are still viewed by historians as a high-point in American political discourse, an example of what might happen when two public servants possessing keen intellects and uncommon speaking talent presented their divergent views on crucial issues of the day, unfiltered.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the idiots at Fox and Friends thought it would be funny to tell one of their interns to dig up video of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Of course there is no video, and the Fox and Friends anchors yukked it up on TV the other day, at the expense of the hapless intern who didn’t know that the video he was searching for didn’t exist.  (We can save for another day the discussion of what this story says about the way our schools teach history.)  But what happened next is truly remarkable.  The Fox and Friends folks put up a graphic with pictures of Lincoln and Douglas.  Except they didn’t put up a picture of white politician Stephen Douglas.  They put up a picture of former-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Here they were making fun of their intern for not knowing that there wouldn’t be video of a debate held in 1858, but they didn’t know which Douglas(s) Lincoln debated.  Apparently it never occurred to them that there weren’t any African-Americans, former slaves at that, running for the U.S. Senate two years before the Civil War.   Apparently it never occurred to them that even if a former slave had been running for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he wouldn’t have been running as a Democrat, since at the time the Democratic Party was the pro-slavery party.  The Republicans, of which Lincoln was one, were the abolitionist party.

For managing to screw up so royally, I present this week’s BOW Award to the people at Fox and Friends.  Take a BOW guys; you’ve earned it.  And then I’d suggest you take a quick look at your kids’ sixth grade history textbooks….

Neither cons nor hangovers nor even persistent housekeeping people shall keep today’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award from being given….

Good morning from Richmond and RavenCon.  Fun Friday night, though very busy.  I was on panels at 4:00, 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00, and moderated three out of the four.  Plus we had Opening Ceremonies at 8:00.  Today is slightly less crazy.

Without further ado…

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Another good week, abbreviated though it was.  6000 words; 25 pages.  

I leave tonight for Richmond, Virginia where I’ll be attending RavenCon.  I have a panel tomorrow at 4:00 pm and I lose an hour to a time change along the way.  So it’s either leave tomorrow morning at about 5:00 am, or I get part of the drive out of the way this evening.  I don’t like waking up that early….

Tune in to http://magicalwords.net tomorrow for a guest post by Alethea Kontis, Ingram buyer by day, New York Times bestselling author by night!

And, yes, I will be giving away a BOW Award on Saturday.

BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award time again, and as always, we have no shortage of nominees.

First on our list of possible winners is Bob Johnson, founder of BET (Black Entertainment Television) and a Hillary Clinton supporter, who said this week that Geraldine Ferraro was right in saying that Barack Obama had an easy path to the White House because he’s black.  (Some of you may remember that Ferraro won a BOW Award for her comments.)  Here’s what Johnson said: 

“What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90% of the black vote? And the answer is, probably not.”

What’s wrong with this you ask?  Well, first of all, I don’t care who you are or what color your skin is, making broad race-based generalizations is just a bad idea.  But it’s a particularly bad idea when you have your facts wrong.  If you’ll remember, Obama didn’t start with 90% of the black vote.  He didn’t even start with 50% of the black vote.  Early on, Hillary Clinton was attracting overwhelming support from the African-American community, which still thought of Bill Clinton’s Presidency as a high water mark for racial enlightenment in the White House.  (One has to wonder if Bill’s legacy has survived this campaign.)  People were asking (ridiculous though this might seem) whether Obama was “black enough” to win over African American voters.  It took his victory in Iowa and his strong finish in New Hampshire (both of which are overwhelmingly white) to convince black voters that he could win.  That’s when African American voters started supporting Obama in big numbers.

Our second nominee is none other than George W. Bush, who admitted in an interview given last Friday that the next attack on the United States was probably being planned by terrorist networks in Afganistan and/or Pakistan.  This despite the fact that his Administration has been neglecting the war in Afganistan so that it can pursue its failed policy in Iraq.  I refer you to http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/16/president-bush-probably-true-that-next-attack-will-come-from-neglected-afghanistan/ for more on this one.

Third, we have Senator John McCain, the GOP nominee for President, who unveiled his “economic plan” this week.  Turns out his economic plan should have been listed in the papers with an “(R)” around it for “Repeat.”  His plan consisted of preserving the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (which McCain once characterized as “irresponsible in a time of war”) and instituting a Federal gas-tax holiday (which would encourage people to drive more, thus adding to greenhouse gases which he claims he wants to reduce, increase demand for gas, thus further increasing the price, add billions to the budget deficit, and deny much needed funds to Federal infrastructure repairs).

But this week’s winners (and really, this time around it wasn’t even close) are the goons at ABC who gave us the Debate-from-Hell the other night.  Yes, I speak of Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.  I blogged about the debate on Thursday and will not go back over that material again, except to say the following:  Not only were their questions irresponsible, not only did they play to the worst aspects of our political system, not only did they demean the candidates, the voters, and the process, several of the questions were based on false reasoning (the capital gains question) or, in the case of at least one of the questions from “real voters”, they were utterly contrived.  I urge you to go to www.crooksandliars.com for more on this.  And for those of you so inclined, please go to www.MoveOn.org to register your disgust with ABC by signing MoveOn’s petition.

This week’s BOW Award winners are Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.  Take a BOW, boys.  You’ve earned it.  You should be ashamed of yourselves.

End of the week.  And it was a productive one for me.  Thirty pages on the new book; seven thousand words.  Yay!  I’d love to tell you more.  But a friend is here for dinner and there’s talk of margaritas….

BOW Award tomorrow!

By the way, if one of you can show me how to put a progress bar on a post, so that I can keep track graphically of my word count versus my word goal, I’d be grateful.  (Alex P. the bar from the site you gave me doesn’t seem to translate to other sites.)

So many buffoons, so few awards….

Yes, it’s Saturday again, and that means it’s time for me to give another BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award.  Once again, it’s been a week filled with stunning displays of idiocy by our political leaders and pundits.  These things would be tremendously funny if it weren’t for the inconvenient little fact that the people in question are destroying our country and making the world a more dangerous place in which to live.  But let’s have some fun at their expense and maybe that’ll make us feel a little better…..

We’ll begin by briefly reviewing some of the week’s highlights.  (And let me add here that if you’re interested in more details on any of these matters you should check out some of the fine left-leaning political blogs currently following many of these stories, including www.crooksandliars.com and www.talkingpointsmemo.com.) 

Where to begin….. 

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I’ve tried to make my BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award entries amusing, as well as trenchant.  I’ve looked for acts of buffonery (yes, that’s a word) that were as entertaining as they were idiotic, and I’ve tried to keep these weekly posts at least somewhat lighthearted.

I had intended to do the same this week.  The conservative side of my local paper, the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, which has two editorial boards, one liberal and the other conservative, very nearly won this week’s competition this past Wednesday.  That day (or the day before) executives from the major oil companies appeared before Congress to justify their obscenely high profits AND huge federal tax breaks they receive at a time when Americans are paying record prices at the gas pumps.  So what does my paper do?  They run an editorial saying that the reason gas is so expensive has nothing to do with gas company profits.  Rather, it’s because — wait for it — Federal gas taxes are too high!  Yes, that 30 cent gas tax is the sole reason you’re paying over $3.00 a gallon.  Idiots.

But the Chattanooga Times-Free Press is not this week’s winner.  

And there’s nothing funny about this week’s award.

Leslie Hagen was a highly accomplished lawyer working in the Bush Administration’s Justice Department.  Her job evaluations were uniformly outstanding.  She was a stalwart supporter of the Republican party.  She had won awards for her work as a prosecutor, and had been called, by the U.S. Attorney who hired her, “the best qualified person in the nation.”  She was, in short, a model member of the Justice Department.

She was also rumored to be a lesbian.  And according to an NPR report that aired this week, for this reason and this reason alone, her contract with the Bush Administration was not renewed.   This occurred back in 2006-07, when the Justice Department was still under the leadership of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.  The Department was making hiring decisions based on perceived political loyalty and the willingness of lawyers to put partisanship above the law.  And, it seems, it was also making such decisions on the basis of sexual orientation.

Normally I don’t get too upset about Republicans firing other Republicans, just like Republicans probably aren’t too unhappy about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama bashing each other on the news every night.  It’s intramural, and I’m on a different team.  But this is different.  Gays and lesbians in our society face discrimination at every turn, in every venue, every day.  It’s a national tragedy.  But we’re talking about the United States government here.  We’re talking about the Justice Department for God’s sake!  Shameful.  Inexcusable.  Disgusting.  Choose your adjective.   For more on this episode, please visit one of my favorite political sites, www.crooksandliars.com.

This week’s BOW Award goes to the Bush Administration, its Justice Department, Monica Goodling, and Alberto Gonzales.  Take a BOW guys.  You’ve earned it.  And then please, go away.

Another thousand words and change on the new book today.  I’m not near the pace I need to maintain to get this thing written in a timely way, but that will come.  It just feels good to be creating again, to be challenging myself and finding my voice and getting to know new characters.

Busy day today and another one coming tomorrow.  But I’ll be awarding another BOW Award tomorrow, and I’ll have other stuff to post about on Sunday.

Happy weekend, all.

Another Saturday, another BOW Award.  We had a veritable battle of the titans for this week’s award, national figures who seemed to go out of their way to prove that Buffoon Of the Week is not a title for pikers.  For those of you who haven’t read about the BOW Award before, it’s something I’ve started giving out weekly to the politician or pundit who says or does the stupidest thing.  Very simple really.  And given the number of people vying for the honor, it seems that politicos of every stripe want to be recognized for their idiocy.

So without further ado….

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