The Obama “dollar bill” remark wasn’t about race before it was about race.
Getting dizzy, anyone?
Olmert vows/promises to quit
Israel prepares to say a heartfelt buh-bye to Olmert, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. He was a weak leader who arguably made the country’s position worse.
The next steps for Israel are unclear. There will be an election in September for leader of Olmert’s party, but if no new name emerges Olmert could linger on quite a while. If a national election were to be called, Netanyahu is the current frontrunner.
The odd trio: McCain and Britney and Obama
Racial paranoia—or strategic accusations of racism, take your pick—has gotten out of hand in the Democratic Party. Now McCain has been accused of racism in his new ad for juxtaposing video of Obama speaking in Berlin with photos of young blond white women Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as examples of celebrities for celebrity sake.
The accusations would be funny if they weren’t so sad. Continue reading →
Obama and the dollar bill guys: not just playing the race card—he’s playing the preemptive race card
The Obama camp says the McCain campaign is wrong to accuse him of playing the race card in the following remarks Obama made while addressing a crowd in Missouri yesterday:
Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’
Yeah. You know. Continue reading →
On acting Presidential (or kingly)
In recent decades, as the Presidential races have become more like advertising campaigns and less like contests about the issues, there’s been a great deal of attention paid to “acting Presidential.” Some of it is reasonable, an attempt to size up a candidate’s character in order to understand what sort of President he/she would make. But much of it has become cosmetic: how firm the jaw, how vibrant the voice, how tall and erect the stance.
Perhaps it started with television and the Nixon-Kennedy debates, when those who listened on radio tended to judge Nixon the victor while those who watched on TV favored the upstart Kennedy. Just as Kennedy was more telegenic than Nixon, there’s no question Obama has it all over the opposition on looks and the projection of whatever is superficially “Presidential.”
But now Obama has taken “acting Presidential” to new heights—or depths, depending on how you look at it. He has started to act as though he were already President. Continue reading →
The times they have a’changed: Obama on state visits abroad
Here’s Barack Obama a while back on the subject of state visits:
“When Sen. Clinton brags, ‘I’ve met leaders from eighty countries—I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then—you go.
“You do that in eighty countries–you don’t know those eighty countries,” he said. “So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa—knowing the leaders is not important—what I know is the people. . I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college—I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. .
Ah, but photo-ops are different. Continue reading →
Shaky ground in LA
There was a moderate earthquake in Los Angeles yesterday that was widely felt in the area, the strongest in more than a decade.
And yet I wasn’t there.
What does that odd statement mean? Continue reading →
For those who might be experiencing Obama withdrawal…
Nursing home baby talk: the goo-goo makes me gaga
I’m with Rachel Lucas on this one. Boy, am I ever.
Rachel has unearthed a study that should be nailed to the doors of every nursing home in America. It found that the widespread practice of talking to the elderly as though they were infants is not only gratingly annoying, but it seems to be counterproductive in getting them to cooperate. And this is true even when the elderly in question are senile.
This brings back unpleasant memories for me of the already-very-unpleasant time when my mother was in rehab after her stroke. Continue reading →
Please remind me again…
…why it is that people seem to think an even more Democratic Congress will do better than this one?
If it had been up to the Democrats the surge never would have happened. If it is up to the Democrats we will not be able to drill for offshore oil. Continue reading →
Correcting a scurrilous lie about jello
This is the falsehood: that it’s made of horses’ hooves.
The truth is not a whole lot better: it’s made from the boiled bones, skins, and hides of cows and pigs. In this way the collagen is deftly extracted, dried, and turned into a powder that is so very refined that it’s not considered to be an animal product any more, except by the sharp minds of those whose task it is to officially declare foodstuffs to be kosher or un.
Although on the kosher question, it’s a lot more complicated than that, as well you might imagine. Continue reading →
Wow: AP says the war is won
If the AP says the war in Iraq is practically won, that’s news—even though one of the co-authors of the piece is John Burns, who has always been more measured and judicious about the war than most journalists.
But I do have a quarrel with the article: it repeats the Meme That Will Not Die:
It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had.
The correction for this error bears repeating, because the misleading story seems to have penetrated almost everywhere. Continue reading →