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

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 »

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.

Time to give away this week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award.  Unlike last week, which seemed to be filled with actos of buffoonery, this week was a bit quiet.  And in fact, I’d like to start by acknowledging an act of political courage that deserves some sincere recognition.  

Read the rest of this entry »

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….

Read the rest of this entry »

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….

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.

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….. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Any of you notice the Marist/WNBC poll that came out of New York earlier this week?  It showed, in a nutshell, that if John McCain were to choose Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate, the McCain-Rice ticket would beat the Democratic “Dream Ticket” of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton no matter which of them headed the ticket (the Clinton-Obama version did slightly better than the Obama-Clinton version).  They’d actually beat them.  In New York State!  One of the bluest of the blues!  The state Hillary represents in the U.S. Senate.

I should state for the record here that I actually don’t believe the numbers.  It’s quite possible for a poll to be wrong.  Once upon a time I worked for a political consulting firm and did a good deal of polling analysis.  I know something about this stuff.  Sometimes you get a bad sample, or a question is worded poorly. There are lots of ways to mess up a survey of this kind.  And that’s what I think happened here.  But while I don’t believe that the McCain-Rice ticket would actually win New York, it seems clear that they’re close enough to make a mistake of this kind possible.  And that’s what I don’t get.

Granted, this poll was taken before news organizations got wind of the fact that Rice had been instrumental in formulating the Bush Administration’s pro-torture interrogation policy.  Many now feel that this has ended any chance of her being tapped as McCain’s running mate.

But still, how is any of this possible?  The same poll showed that George Bush’s approval rating in New York is 22%.  No, that’s not a typo.  22%.  And I’ve got to believe that much of that anti-Bush sentiment is directly related to the war in Iraq.  (Not that there’s any shortage of reasons for people to disapprove of Bush’s job performance, but I’m just saying, the war has been hurting his numbers for a long time.)  Whatever the reason, 77% of New Yorkers questioned in this poll rate Bush’s job performance as only fair or poor.  And yet….

Few people in Congress have been more supportive of Bush’s war than John McCain.  Condi is one of the primary architects of the Administration’s Iraq policy.  So how on earth can so many people think that putting them in charge of our foreign policy would make things better?

I simply don’t get it.  Help me out here.