UPDATE [Lee]: If there’s anything I take issue with in this post by Josh Marshall, it’s that “Disgrace” may not be a strong enough term for what the McCain campaign is pulling with respect to Rashid Khalidi.
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April Winchell rocks. Period.
The picture is funny.
So McCain’s busy calling a guy he gave money to a terrorist. Shouldn’t McCain then be in jail for materially supporting terrorism?
Lee- Doesn’t it get heavy carrying all that gray water for Obama?
The LA Times should release the tape or at least the transcript of it. They are using pussy leftist tactics to stonewall a news story because they’re in the tank for Barry. Sad how low the level of journalism has sunk in today’s newsrooms.
“All the news that is skewed to our views”- New LA Times motto
@ 2~ you’re forgetting the 78K the “woods foundation” of Obama/Ayers gave Khalidi..in 2003…perhaps they should all have adjoining cells…
Little Ricky Dumbass @ 3
The man you’ll be throwing the lever for next Tuesday, McSame, gave money to Khalidi.
http://voices.washingtonpost.c.....id=topnews
So you’re supporting terrorism according to your side’s stupid thinking.
How does it feel to be such a dumbass, little Ricky Dumbass?
@3
Lee- Doesn’t it get heavy carrying all that gray water for Obama?
No. You’d be surprised how easy it is for well-adjusted humans to figure out who to vote for when one of the candidates is race-baiting.
The LA Times should release the tape or at least the transcript of it. They are using pussy leftist tactics to stonewall a news story because they’re in the tank for Barry. Sad how low the level of journalism has sunk in today’s newsrooms.
“All the news that is skewed to our views”- New LA Times motto
They can’t release the tape because they made a promise to the person who gave them the tape that they wouldn’t release it. Hell, I’d like to see it released too – mainly because I want to see the look on your stupid, fucking face when you see that it has absolutely nothing controversial on it.
Believing that Khalidi is a dangerous person is rooted in one motivation and one motivation only – racism towards Arabs. Period.
The libs said President Bush was secretive and took away our rights. They have Obama now it’s okay to strip rights and use Government Databases to get info on Americans who ask questions of Obama.
NY POST, DALLAS MORNING NEWS, WASHINGTON TIMES TOLD TO GET OUT… ALL 3 ENDORSED MCCAIN.
OBAMA is SCARY not because it’s Halloween.
@3 The tape doesn’t belong to LA Times and the owner hasn’t given permission to release it. What part of “private property” don’t you wingnut jackasses understand?
AOL News has republished a timely article from Politico.com about the apocryphal stories circulating on the internet (and being swallowed whole by the gullible) — and why the MSM ignores them. (Because MSM doesn’t publish bullshit, that’s why.) Here are excerpts:
“When John McCain and Barack Obama started running for president in 2007, they were two of the most universally liked and respected politicians in America — men who even members of the opposite party saw as decent, unifying characters — and neither of them inspired much loathing. … Now, as the campaign enters its last week, partisans have deluged reporters with e-mails and vented on blogs about why the media is suppressing stories about one candidate or the other. …
“So why hasn’t … the press reported on these stories? Well, some of them we’re working on. But in many other cases, the stories were debunked, or there simply was no evidence for the claims. …
“The demands that the Los Angeles Times release a video that it wrote about several months ago … come in a different category, though the underlying theory — that the Times missed, or concealed, some explosive element when it broke the story of the tape — is driven by some of the same longing for political kryptonite. …
“Obama is the subject of a far greater volume of these e-mails — as many as 20-to-1 concern the Democratic nominee, said Brooks Jackson, the director of the nonpartisan Annenberg Political Fact Check. And they come in waves. ‘Whenever Obama builds a lead — that’s when you hear a new one,’ said Reason Magazine writer David Weigel, the journalist who labored most in the vineyards of the fringe this cycle. … The stories, he said, capture ‘a fear of the other that is given form in ways that most terrify the people who make this stuff up.’ …
“And so here, without further ado, is a roundup of some of the best-known stories we haven’t written, and why:
“OBAMA’S CITIZENSHIP
“Probably the most widely e-mailed Obama ‘tip’ at the moment alleges that he isn’t a natural-born American citizen and thus isn’t eligible to run for president. … So why isn’t this getting wide coverage? Well, first, there’s lots of evidence that Obama was born in the United States, and none that he wasn’t. … And Poliltico has confirmed the authenticity of a contemporaneous announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser. …
“THE WHITEY TAPE
“Obama’s grandmother isn’t the only relative beset by a phantom tape. The most famous of these is the ‘whitey tape,’ … which remains alive in the imaginations of Obama-haters. According to a rumor driven hardest by former CIA operative Larry Johnson, the tape featured Obama’s wife, Michelle, saying nasty things about white people and using the word ‘whitey.’ The story was essentially debunked in June, when Reason’s Weigel noticed that Johnson kept changing the description of his sources. But the rumors grew so noisy that later that month, Michelle Obama denied directly to the New York Times that she’d ever used the word.
“Did that — or the fact that the tape simply hasn’t materialized — end the controversy? Not really …. A blog identifying itself as an African news agency run from Norway has reported, repeatedly, that it is in negotiations with Fox News to air the tape ‘imminently.’ A Fox spokeswoman, Diana Rocco, forwarded a statement from the network calling the claim ‘absolutely false.’
“More recently, the blog attributed delays in airing the tape to threats and bribes, and asserted that it was in contact with the U.S. Embassy in Oslo to sort things out. ‘The Embassy is not involved in any activity or investigation as described in this article and has no further information on the matter,’ an embassy official, Marit Andersen, said in an e-mail. …
“ODINGA
A third popular Obama ‘tip’ has to do with Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister and former opposition leader who claimed that Obama was a distant cousin. The reports surfaced after a political crisis in Kenya in which many international observers believed the vote was stolen from Odinga. As the international community rallied behind the opposition, Obama spoke to Odinga briefly on the telephone.
“The media has ignored stories about the relationship between the two men because there’s no real evidence that one exists. But the story, which comes in many varieties, suggests that Obama campaigned for Odinga and funneled money to his campaign and that they’re close allies. In a particularly resonant twist, the story also subjects Odinga to the same sort of rumor that afflicts Obama: that despite Odinga’s professed Christian faith (the Kenyan prime minister is an Anglican), the two men are conspiring to institute Muslim law…in Kenya.
“A range of officials have denied almost every detail of the rumor, and the story more or less debunked itself earlier this month when anti-Obama writer Jerome Corsi released an e-mail purporting to be a message from Obama to the Odinga camp. The problem is that the e-mail clearly was not written by a native English speaker.”
(Quoted under fair use.)
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The prefabricated Khalidi “controversy” is of the same ilk: Desperate wingnut liemongers flinging spaghetti at the wall hoping something will stick. Khalidi is a respected scholar at the University of Washington. The story that a foundation chaired by John McCain gave him a $500K grant to support his academic research is true. Tales that Khalidi has links to Hamas or is a secret go-between for Palestinian terrorists are baloney. But he has a foreign-sounding name, which is all that wingnut fable fabricators need to get the gullible acolytes to swallow their bullshit.
Erratum @8: Under “Roger Rabbit Commentary,” sentence should read, “Khalidi is a respected scholar at the University of Chicago.”
“An idiot wind” blows from the mouths and the fingertips of trolls like little Ricky Dumbass, Cynical and the rest.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....03244.html
@4 Little Ricky Dumbass is a gullible fool who swallows internet fables whole without any factchecking and then regurgitates them like they mouth-breathe Lush Flimflam’s latest talking points. There’s a reason why idiots like him are home-schooled — because they couldn’t get away with this crap in an accredited kindergarten, let alone an actual college. But ignoring fools like Little Ricky Dumbass won’t do; we must expose them as liars.
@6 When nothing else works, the wingers try to pretend that Democrats behave like Republicans. Ya gotta love it.
11 – Right on Roger. Little Ricky Dumbass is that all too common breed we’ve come to know here in these comment threads ‘lo these many years:
the reflexive Limbaugh-loving dittobrain-LESS.
You can tell the the LA Times is trying to cover up Obama’s relationship with Khalidi because THEY RAN A STORY ON IT. How more obvious can their intention to hide this relationship be?
Republicans do love to howl more or less endlessly about “vote fraud,” but somehow every time a court looks closely at their arguments, there’s nothing there. Another court throws out their ridiculous charges.
Here’s what the Washington Post says (in an editorial) about McCain’s latest smear:
An ‘Idiot Wind’
John McCain’s latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism
WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi.
In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.
For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. …
We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear. …
Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. … Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging …. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position.
To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable …. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous ….
We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.”
That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.
(Quoted under fair use.)
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The guts of McPalin’s use of Khalidi to attack Obama is anti-intellectualism. They aren’t discussing what U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be. This ugly smear merely says, in effect, that listen to a different view makes you as wrong as the speaker, without reference to whether you accept or object his views.
This approach is fundamentally anti-science because it says you should only listen to orthodoxy and only associate with orthodoxy’s proponents, and merely giving a hearing to points of view that challenge orthodoxy is a severe social sin. And, of course, the narrow-minded and bigoted want to arrogate to themselves the power to define what is orthodox and therefore acceptable.
We’ve seen this before. There was a lot of it going around in the Middle Ages when people like Galileo risked being burned at the stake by suggesting the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. Many of us fervently hope that mankind, with all the powerful information and communication resources now at our disposal, has outgrown this childishness. It’s not an entirely realistic hope because there are still children among us. I can name two: McCain and Palin. Among their followers are thousands more who haven’t grown up yet — and ought to.
McCain will lose this election, and rarely in American history has a candidate so deserved to be defeated. He will return to the U.S. Senate in January without leadership status in his own shattered party and having sacrificed the last shred of the respect he once enjoyed from many independents and many Democrats. It seems unlikely he will run for re-election in 2010, so two years from now, he will depart from the American political scene as a sad, pathetic, little man that no one will miss.
McCain turned this election into a referendum on rationality vs. the dark forces of ignorance, bigotry, and meanness.
And that is how he deserves to be remembered.
That picture is perfect for Halloween.
McSame becomes truly the representative of the ultra-rich vampire class..
Sucking out the blood and marrow of our country and passing the weakness onto future generations.
It’s a horror film that’s played out for the last 30 years.
First it was $300,000.00 than $250,000.00 than $200,000.00 than $150,000.00 Now $120,000.00
It WILL go down to $40,000.00 being rich.
http://election.swiftmob.com/c.....6&f=1
19 – Congrats. You must have earned a whole $0.20 cutting and pasting that talking point.
Heard a radio clip of Ann Coulter this morning. It reminded me of that Schwartzenager movie where the woman’s head starts to short circuit, mutters gibberish, then comes off the body and explodes.
Coulter was ranting about Ayers and Khalid and Wright, saying “Would you want to be in the same room with terrorists like them!” They guy who was with her simply replied: “Well, I’m in the same room with you!”