History
June 3, 2008
It’s 9:00 Eastern. Polls are about to close in South Dakota, and within a few minutes, the networks will be able to proclaim Barack Obama the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
Yes, I’m an Obama supporter, but this is not about gloating or self-congratulation. The talking heads on TV often use the phrase “historic moment”. They use it to talk about baseball games and golf tournaments and, yes, political events. But this truly is a momentous occasion, one that, quite honestly, I never believed I’d see. Our nation is only three generations removed from Brown v. Board of Education, two generations removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And as of tonight, we have an African American representing one of our two major political parties. Remarkable.
To my many friends (among them my closent friends in my home town and my wife) who supported Hillary Clinton, I’m not going to go through all the “Clinton ran a spirited campaign” and “Clinton has broken down gender barriers” stuff. She did and she has. I began the campaign as a Clinton supporter. But Obama changed my mind. I feared that he couldn’t win. He proved he could. I feared that he wasn’t tough enough. He proved he was. I wondered if there was more to him than great speeches. I believe with all my heart that there is.
I do want to say though, that I feel Senator Clinton was treated terribly by the media throughout the campaign. She has been on the receiving end of a disgusting and sustained assault from misogynist elements in the press including not only Fox News and the right-wing bloggers, radio hosts, and commentators, but also such “mainstream” media figures as Chris Matthews and the crew at CNN. They use different language to speak of her campaign — comparing her to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, dissecting her laugh, her tears, her clothing, her figure, her voice, using gender-loaded terms like “shrill” to describe her. She didn’t lose because of any of this, but she did have to put up with it. It was shameful and she and her female supporters have every right to be offended. Further, she was the presumptive nominee, and so the press was looking for a story, trying to figure out who was going to be her main challenger, and when it turned out to be Obama, they gave him a great deal of positive press. Only when he actually became the frontrunner, did they turn on him, and then they did so with gusto.
Close Race for this Week’s BOW Award!
May 17, 2008
Time for this week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award, and I’m happy to report that with the arrival of warmer weather buffoonery appears to be in full bloom across the nation. Huzzah!
It started early, with something you may have heard about on The Daily Show the other night. As many of you know, the Republicans lost a special election in Mississippi this past Tuesday, failing to hold a seat that had been in GOP hands for more than a decade in a district that George Bush carried in 2004 by a double digit margin. This was the third time this spring the Republicans have lost special Congressional elections in strongly red districts (the other two races were in Louisiana and Dennis Hastert’s old district in Illinois). In the wake of yet another special election disaster, the Republicans decided that they needed to change their image and fast. So they unveiled a new party slogan: “The Change You Deserve” Okay, never mind the ridiculousness of touting yourself as the party of change when you’ve been running the Federal Government for the past seven years. Turns out the slogan is already taken. The good people at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals have used that slogan for their powerful prescription anti-depressant, Effexor (TM). It also turns out that some users of the drug have been experiencing severe and unpleasant side-effects, including nightmares, anxiety, insomnia, and memory loss. Actually, the GOP’s new slogan might be appropriate after all….
BOW Award Time
May 3, 2008
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….
