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

A delayed BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award this week.  I was going to post it yesterday afternoon, but (this is a true story) just as I sat down to write the thing, a thunderstorm moved into the area and we lost power.  No computer.  No satellite, no internet.  Fortunately I hadn’t actually started writing, so I didn’t lose anything, but that’s why this is delayed by a day.

It had been a somewhat quiet week in the buffoonery realm, but you can’t keep a good buffoon down for long; a flurry of stupidity at the end of the week gives us several fine choices for this week’s award.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been asked by a few how it’s possible that I’ve been giving out BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Awards for so many weeks now, and have yet to give one to our Buffoon in Chief.  I have to admit that I share their astonishment.  I would have thought that Dubya would have earned one of these babies long, long ago.  But this week is the perfect example of what happens. The week began with a spate of bone-headed moves from Ole George, and I thought, “Great!  This is the week!  We’ll have a special George W. Bush Lifetime Achievement Award.”  But wouldn’t you know it, fate intervened, and a dark-horse has run away with this week’s award.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Russert was never my favorite journalist.  I always respected his intellect, but I often found myself thinking that he was too hard on the politicians I liked and not hard enough on those I didn’t.  On the other hand, I know plenty of people on the other side of the political divide who felt exactly the same way, so he must have been doing something right.

All I know for certain is that 58 is way, way too young for anyone to die.  My deepest sympathies to his family and friends.  He will be missed by all who appreciated his insights, his wit, and his passion.

Well, I just spent an hour or so writing up my BOW Award entry for this week.  I’ve been on vacation and I missed last week’s BOW Award, and I didn’t get to write this week’s yesterday, when I usually would have because we were driving home from the beach. (Topsail Island in North Carolina.  Great place.)  Anyway I had a good entry going and was nearing the end of the post — it was a long one, too.  But my browser closed unexpectedly and the autosave restore thing didn’t work, so I lost the whole entry.  I just don’t have the energy to write the whole thing over again.

Suffice it so say that I mentioned the McCain campaign worker, whoever it might have been, who allowed McCain to go on television Tuesday night without makeup and then had him stand before that horribly garish green backdrop.  McCain’s delivery is bad enough — wooden, boring, and that fake smile of his gives me the creeps — but add in the venue and the lack of makeup and he looked awful.  When Fox News comments on how bad the Republican Presidential nominee’s appearance went you know you’ve got problems.

I mentioned Fox News’ E.D. Hill, who referred to a little fist pump Barack and Michelle Obama shared at Obama’s speech that same night, as “a terrorist fist jab.”  A terrorist fist jab?  Are you kidding me?

Right wing radio host Mike Gallagher interviewed disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, the other day, and the two of them agreed that Barack Obama is a Marxist.  Yep.  I blogged about this sort of thing the other day and there’s a long discussion of it on my WordPress blog for June 3 (http://davidbcoe.wordpress.com) so I won’t go into it in much depth here, except to say that if this is the best the Right can do in their campaign against Obama, they don’t have a prayer come November. 

Then of course, we have the McCain campaign advisor who, apparently tired of hearing a possible McCain Presidency referred to as “a third term for George Bush” suggested that actually Barack Obama’s fiscal policies were much closer to George Bush’s than are McCain’s.  A couple of thoughts on this one:  Apparently this advisor is ignoring McCain’s willingness to expand and make permanent the disastrous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as Obama’s promise to end those tax cuts, which we can’t afford.  This person is also ignoring the fact that while McCain wants to keep on spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq War, Obama has promised to end the war.  Also, I wonder how Delay, Gallagher, and others who are calling Obama a Marxist feel about this….

There were a couple of other nominees, too.  I’ve forgotten them.  I’m giving the award for this week to Republican Senator Pat Roberts (Kansas) who had been chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2006.  As chair of the committee, Roberts managed to exert influence over the committee’s report on the Bush Adminstration’s misuse of pre-war intelligence in the buildup to the Iraq War.  He never counted on the GOP losing control of the Senate though.  The second round of reports on pre-war intelligence has now come out, and it not only shows that the Bush Administration misused intelligence leading up to the war, and that the Administration embarked on a carefully orchestrated campaign to deceive the American public about Iraq (just as former WHite House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in his recently published memoir), but it also shows how much Roberts did to keep these facts from coming to light.  So this week’s BOW Award goes to Senator Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, for his role in deceiving the nation about the Administration’s Iraq policy.  Take a BOW there, Senator.  You’ve earned it.  And good luck with that reelection campaign…..

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.

At last, after weeks of discussion of Barack Obama’s relationship with the controversial pastor at Trinity Church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the media has turned its attention to John McCain’s ties to Rev. John Hagee.  I say at last, because I believe strongly that McCain’s ties to Hagee are far more significant than Obama’s relationship with Wright.  I understand that my friends on the right will disagree, and I have no doubt that many in the “liberal” (Ha!) press will side with them.  But they’re simply wrong.

Barack Obama’s affiliation with Wright and Trinity Church goes back twenty years.  As the candidate himself has said again and again, Wright presided at the Obamas’ wedding, as well as at the christening of their daughters.  Obama joined the church years before Wright made his most controversial remarks.  By the time Wright made the statements that so many found offensive (and that were taken out of context by the media and Obama’s political enemies), the entire Obama family was deeply committed to the congregation; they were part of a community that was far larger and more important than any one man, even if that one man was the church’s pastor.  Many of Obama’s critics have said that he should have left the church when he learned of Wright’s incendiary remarks, but as anyone with a sense of congregational life knows, leaving a church is no small matter for an individual, much less for a family that includes young children.  Obama chose to remain with his congregation and denounce the aspects of Rev. Wright’s sermons that he and others found offensive.  Given the personal nature of any decision dealing with where one worships with his or her family, I find it hard to fault him for doing so. 

Let us contrast Obama’s experience with Senator McCain’s.  As many of you know, John Hagee has been a controversial figure for years.  He has said the most vile things about the Catholic church, including calling Catholicism ”the great whore” and “a false cult.”  These statements have been part of the public record for several years.  And yet, as John McCain began his campaign for the Presidency he also began a concerted effort to gain Rev. Hagee’s political endorsement.  This effort lasted more than a year and was ultimately successful.  In the wake of receiving Hagee’s endorsement, McCain was confronted with the Reverend’s past statements about Catholicism, and he merely said that while he found such remarks offensive, he still welcomed Hagee’s support.  Only with this week’s revelations about Hagee’s odious statements regarding Hitler and the Holocaust did McCain finally conclude that he had to distance himself from the man.

McCain’s supporters will say that McCain doesn’t have a twenty year history with Hagee.  They simply have a political association that the Senator has now ended.  I say, exactly!  Obama was a member of Reverend Wright’s congregation for nearly half of his lifetime.  By the time Rev. Wright began to make his more offensive comments, the two men had a history.  McCain, on the other hand, pursued a relationship with Hagee despite the Reverend’s religious bigotry.  He did so not because Hagee was part of his personal and spiritual life, but simply for crass political reasons:  He wanted the support of Hagee’s followers.  If McCain knew about Hagee’s past comments his willingness to seek and accept Hagee’s endorsement is deeply offensive.  If he didn’t know, then one has to ask, has the man never heard of a search engine?  

Either way you look at it, McCain’s association with John Hagee ought to be of far greater concern to voters than Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

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….

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.

Imagine being held responsible for the actions of every person you’ve known.  Imagine applying for a job and as part of that application having to justify the stupid things every person in your life has done and said.  Sounds pretty hard, doesn’t it?

Okay, let’s make it easier.  Same suppositions, but this time it applies only to your family, your work associates, and the people you consider close friends.  That makes it a bit easier, but not much.  I know that I wouldn’t want to have to answer for all the things my family and friends have done.  I love these people, but still, I have enough trouble meeting my own obligations and not making a fool of myself.

But if you watched the Democratic debate on ABC last night, you saw Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (whose name I now know how to spell) and, of course, Hillary Clinton, trying to impugn Barack Obama’s character based on the associations of his past.  Personally, I thought it was ridiculous, and I was appalled by the questions from Gibson and Stephanopoulos that dominated the first hour of the debate.  We are a nation at war.  We face a global environmental crisis.  Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse by the day.  And Chuck and George are asking questions about lapel pins and whether Obama thinks that Rev. Wright loves America?

Many of those who read this blog don’t share my political beliefs.  I think that’s great.  We’ve had some wonderful dialogues in recent weeks and I hope they’ll continue.  But I’m wondering if we can’t all agree that our political candidates ought to be talking about issues rather than gaffes, about solutions to our problems rather than something that Obama’s pastor or Clinton’s husband said, or, for that matter, about the “plagiarized” recipes that Cindy McCain posted on the campaign website.  This stuff is meaningless.  It doesn’t give health insurance to one child.  It doesn’t take a bit of carbon out of the atmosphere.  It doesn’t save a single soldier from an IED.  We deserve better than this, and we ought to demand more of the media.

Why is it that white politicians only get in trouble when they tell a lie, and even then it’s only 50-50 that they’ll be caught, but African-American politicians get in trouble when they tell the truth?

Anyone who doesn’t think that Barack Obama was speaking the truth when he referred to the bitterness in rural small-town America, is either hopelessly naive or cynically seeking political advantage (Senators Clinton and McCain take note).  The economic dislocations of the past few decades have engendered resentments that manifest themselves in a variety ways including not only closer ties to religious communities, but also racism, homophobia, and hostility toward hispanic immigrants.

Did Obama phrase his statement perfectly?  No, probably not.  But war rages in Iraq (did anyone happen to notice that 17 American soldiers died in Iraq this week?), we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis, our economy is in shambles, our health care system desperately needs reform, and dozens of other important issues beg for our attention.  And instead, our political leaders and televisions talking heads are parsing the meaning of the word “bitter.”

I am SO sick of this process.