Wow, they're really starting the bar low this general election season, aren't they? [orichalcum]

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Fox News describes Michelle Obama as "Obama's baby mama." The last time I checked, "baby mama" referred to the unmarried mother of a man's child to whom he was neither married to nor currently dating.

But hey, much like "ho," surely it refers to any black woman, right?

I guess they're regretting now that they already used "pimp" to refer to the Clintons.

Sigh. 5 more months of this before we can prove that America is better than this sort of smear and rhetoric. And for the record, I'm also fairly irritated about the current left-wing smears of McCain for his poor treatment of his first wife and his adultery. Yes, he behaved badly, but that was almost 30 years ago, and really, should not be relevant to the discussion of whether or not he'd make a good President of the United States in 2008. There are so many reasons to choose one of these two candidates based on their policy differences - do we have to resort to the petty name-calling?

Mood::

irate

location: home

Music:: Don't Stop Believin'-Journey-Escape

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There are 6 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

McCain has been shamelessly pandering to the Talibangelicals, so that makes his adultery and abandonment of his first wife fair game -- the issue being hypocrisy, not (debatable) personal immorality. If he hadn't made "family values" (how I loathe that expression) part of his campaign, I probably wouldn't find his marital history worth fussing over.

(edited to correct a small, but important, typo -- replacing "martial" with "marital" -- although frankly I think his martial history isn't nearly as big of a plus as his supporters tend to make it out to be)

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I just can't even believe that.

And it's yet another example to throw back at the people who say that Clinton's the only one who's faced prejudice this election cycle. Not to say that any part of me is happy to be able to rebut that claim...

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I would normally agree with you that the stuff 30 years ago should be considered past history, except that stuff that happened *40* years ago (McCain's Vietnam experience) is so central to the image they're trying to sell of him. If that's fair game, then so is the horrendous way he choose to treat his first wife.

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I suppose there's the argument that both go to demonstrate "character." It's just that the whole thing is so tawdry - and his first wife still supports him.

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So, yeah, the way he treated his wife 30 years ago is really nasty. This sort of thing is a particularly sore spot for me and I was pretty shocked by it. But I think more important than the time that's passed (which can really do just as much to crystallize an old deed as to smooth it over) is the fact that he owns up to it and takes full responsibility for what happened. This is why, for example, I think it's reasonable to forgive Senator Byrd for his Klan activities ages ago: because he apparently regrets what he did and says so pretty explicitly and sorrowfully whenever it comes up. If he still were proud of what he did or refused to admit that it was a problem, it wouldn't matter that it happened 60 years ago. It's important to let people change and become better people by owning up to their mistakes. Otherwise, what incentive is there if you're just going to go from a pariah who has a shred of self esteem to a pariah who doesn't?

This sort of thing might be suspicious for someone who had just been caught by the public microscope, too, but I think it does matter that it's an old and repeated admittance. In other words, it matters if he's taken responsibility for 10-20 years rather than 10-20 days (again, crystallization).

I agree that this Fox commentary on Michelle Obama is, BTW, patently ridiculous and uncalled for. I do long for a more high-minded campaign, but as long as loose cannons of both sides lay out the vitriol, it's going to take a steady stream of reflexive condemnations from the candidates to change the tone to demonstrate that they want that a high-minded campaign, too.

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That's a perfectly reasonable approach. I'm much more judgmental of Senator Byrd's penchant for massive pork and earmarks (which he is quite proud of) than the long ago KKK membership - just as I'm more critical of McCain for his current associations with lobbyists because of his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. That's a case where I feel that someone who has already learned the lesson of, at the kindest interpretation, needing to be careful who his friends are, is clearly making mistakes because he assumes that we can all trust his personal sense of honor. I'm not sure it occurs to McCain that while he's certainly not storing 100 dollar bills in his freezer or anything egregious like that, the fact that his sources of information are being paid large amounts of money to advocate particular positions influences the type of information he gets and the policies he winds up advocating himself.

That said, contrariety has a point in that McCain's post-war carousing years may have had as much of an influence upon him as his POW years, which are certainly being stressed by the campaign.

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orichalcum

Wow, they're really starting the bar low this general election season, aren't they?

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