To pick up on an expression from a Shakespeare play, the curs are venom-mouthed, and I don’t mean just any curs, but the most practiced of the lot. These are the left-wing pundits who will use virtually any excuse to defame John McCain.
They’ve lately found a new one, saying in so many words that he himself is a venom-mouthed cur.
It’s lame, this attack, but it’s one of the best opportunities of the moment, and so they’re having at McCain for saying that Barack Obama was playing the race card when he indeed played the race card, and for other dread blasphemies.
The issue of race arose when Obama worried aloud about how McCain and his supporters would aim to alarm voters by noting that the Democrat “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on dollar bills,” an outrage, first of all, because McCain is without racist blemish.
It is also an outrage because signs of racism have been virtually impossible to detect in a lengthy presidential campaign that has seen Obama sweep past a better-known opponent in his own party and arouse a rare enthusiasm among diverse elements of the electorate all over the country.
The Obama campaign’s dishonest response to McCain — that Obama wasn’t talking about being black — raises the question of what he was talking about. Maybe that he doesn’t wear a wig like George Washington does on one famous greenback nor have a beard like Abe Lincoln on another?
Well, neither does McCain, as entertaining as that might be, and what any sensible, halfway observant American has to figure is that Obama was trying to make the other side look like rednecks getting ready to rumble while simultaneously imagining a country unlike the one that he has otherwise recognized as having made extraordinary racial progress.
There’s a good chance that, even without a Republican broadcasting the fact, a decidedly unbothered public has already noticed Obama is black.
Another source of feverish concern was a TV spot wondering whether Obama isn’t more a celebrity than a qualified candidate for president. Images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were flashed on the screen, a tactic that fell short of unspeakable horror even if it was overreach.
The ad served the legitimate political purpose of prompting the bedazzled to get past the Democrat’s oft-mentioned rock star status to his policies favoring higher taxes and energy dependence on the Middle East. There may have been some beneficial effect there if Obama makes it to the White House. He now says offshore drilling could be OK.
One other TV ad said Obama didn’t visit with wounded troops in Iraq for feared lack of publicity. McCain was wrong here, but close to the mark in his contention that Obama would rather lose a war than a presidential election.
Obama’s timetable stance on withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq even if ground conditions aren’t favorable could in fact spell defeat of our efforts there. While he sometimes talks as if he would indeed keep a wary eye on adverse circumstances, he won’t scoot to the common-sense but supporter-displeasing policy that these circumstances could flummox his plan.
What the leftist pundits have missed is that Obama himself has been venom-mouthed, as in misconstruing McCain’s remarks about the possible long-term need for U.S. troops in Iraq, the same as in Japan and Germany since World War II.
To Obama, this is equivalent to wanting to fight an all-out war there for the next century and more. He knows better, and you’d think even a leftist might note the saint sometimes isn’t saintly.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington, D.C., opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
