Scaly, the Preacher, and McKook

Anyone who hasn’t noticed how bizarre this election year is...

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/scalywrightmckook.htm
4/28/08

Antonin Scalia was on “60 Minutes” last night. Scaly always reminds me of Benito Mussolini, and it isn’t just that he has an Italian background. He swaggers, he smirks, he’s charming, he’s intelligent, and he’s a vicious clown. Just like Benito.

But Leslie Stahl, the presenter who interviewed him, isn’t the sort to get a case of the vapors when confronted with Il Duce, and she kept raising questions. Scaly, backed into a corner, finally resorted to desperate lying, claiming, among other things, that Gore brought the case before the SC (Bush did), and that the decision to end “the nonsense” of the Florida courts (which the FSC had already done) “wasn’t even close” (but it -was- moot) and that “Bush would have won anyway." The vote to end the recount because time was running out was 5-4. The court delayed the count inexplicably for three days before announcing that, and somehow failed to notice that the deadline for certification (which 2/3rds of the states usually miss anyway) takes a back seat to ensuring a full and accurate count of the vote. Not that Scaly wanted such.

Right. Mugabe would have won anyway. Never mind that the record showed differently.

Scaly has been on a big charm offensive lately, but I don’t think it’s working. It’s the sneering and the strutting, you see. People who swoon at the sight of fascistic swagger are already firm believers. The rest of us know he’s just a clown who sucked up the to the right demagogues and attained a position he never should have been allowed near.

Reverend Wright did a little strutting of his own in front of the Washington Press Club. Everyone had pretty much figured his 15 minutes of fame were up, and despite the determined efforts of the GOP to keep the story alive about “Obama’s spiritual advisor” screaming “god damn America,” the public had moved on.

Like Scaly, Wright didn’t score any points among his detractors. But unlike Scaly, he got whoops of approval from a lot of people who had never heard his side of the story before. One reporter at the press conference asked him if he thought saying “god damn America” was unpatriotic, and he replied, “I served as a United States Marine for six years. How many years did Dick Cheney serve?” The crowd of reporters gave a collective whoop. Even those most inclined to dislike the pastor despise Cheney and his fraudulent patriotism. Then the Rev. threw Cheney a mocking salute. More whoops.

At another point, he said, “I was Barack’s PASTOR I wasn’t his (fingers bent in quote marks) ‘spiritual advisor.’ Woooooooo!” Loud laughter.

Bob Herbert at the NY Times was utterly appalled. He wrote that Wright was “[s]miling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.” He accused Wright of “all but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself,” and asked why he seemed “so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.”

That last sounded a bit Uncle Tom-ish, but this is Bob Herbert. While the news department of the New York Times disgraced itself by dismissing the controversy over the 2000 election and cheerleading in the ramp-up to war in Iraq, and at a time when voicing even faint criticism of Putsch could bring about concerted drives by the right to destroy the careers and lives of those so bold as to speak out, Herbert was one of the first national media voices to do so. Herbert isn’t the sort to cringe and say, “Now boy, don’t you go messin’ with the white man.” Herbert, along with Krugman, Dowd, and Rich, reminded Americans that there was such a thing as fearless reporting during a very dark and fearful time.

Herbert is saying it because no matter how rational, and no matter how right the Rev happens to be, the right is going to glom on to anything he says that is stupid, or can be edited to look stupid, and run it from now until Election day. He knows the power of the right wing hate machine, and it worries him.

But support for Wright, or at least condemnation of the attacks against him, came in from a somewhat unexpected source: Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who hasn’t resisted the urge to do a little Wright-baiting of her own (and I don’t blame her for that) noted that the GOP is running some really vicious, sleazy ads against Wright in North Carolina and Indiana, site of next week’s primaries. The GOP rarely runs ads that are not vicious and sleazy because they tend to BE vicious and sleazy, but these were so nasty and patently unfair that even McCain complained that they were not helping him.

The ads continued, since the kind of filth behind them (they are tinged with racism, of course) don’t have a whole lot of use for McCain, but will take a Republican they can’t stand over a black or another Clinton.

So Hillary, in a deft move, criticized McCain for not having better control over his followers.

“I believe that if Sen. McCain were serious he would do more than send a letter. He is the putative nominee,” Clinton said. “I think that he could very clearly tell the North Carolina party, tell the Mississippi party that he would not tolerate those kinds of advertisements and I’m waiting to see whether he does that.”

So why did Clinton do that? I can think of a couple of reasons. First, she’s no fool, and she realizes that a lot of Wright’s message resonates with the American people. He doesn’t hate America, but he does hate the imperialism and the arrogance and the bloodshed and the greed that have besmirched America. He hates the racism, as he has every right to. The Clintons are not racists. They understand this, and they know a lot of other people do, too.

Second, it’s an olive leaf. If she doesn’t do well next week, her campaign will be over, and she will have to work with Obama. This was a good place to start.

And third, the Republicans who support McCain are the ones who are the rabid haters, the racists and the xenophobes and the nativists. Hillary doesn’t mind driving a wedge between them. Reducing the influence of the haters and the demagogues is a good thing, in her eyes. Cutting into McCain’s support is just gravy.

I won’t say this is the strangest election year I’ve ever seen, but we’ve got a long way to go. I won’t rule out the possibility that come the second Wednesday in November, I’ll be writing an essay explaining how Ahmedinejad became the first Republican President of America who was of Persian descent.

OK, I was kidding about that. Maybe I’ll just be writing about how McCain might have won if the south hadn’t seceded again. But Scaly will tell us he would have won anyway.