Return of the BOW Award
Today I bring back the BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award, after a hiatus of several weeks. I feel a bit refreshed and I’m ready to go after Buffoons wherever they may hide. Fortunately, Buffoons are no better at hiding than they are at doing much of anything, so this shouldn’t be too hard. And, as it happens, there was enough Buffoonery on display this week to fill up a book, much less a blog entry.
Where to begin? We could start with our Buffoon in Chief, who was in Beijing, China this week for the Olympics. Mostly he spent his time sitting in the stands, cheering on American athletes. So how could our President get himself in trouble if he was just being s sports fan? Good question. It seems (and yes, there is photographic proof of this) that during one of the swimming competitions he held up an American flag in order to show his solidarity with the U.S. Swim Team. Problem is he held it up backwards. His wife, Laura, had to point this out to him. ‘Nough said.
Then there was Jerome Corsi, well-known wingnut, purveyor of lies, and all-around poor excusxe for a human being. Corsi is best known as the swiftboater who in 2004 released Unfit for Command, his “biography” of John Kerry, which helped spread such vicious lies about Kerry’s service in Vietnam. Well, Corsi has “written” a new “book” called The Obama Nation, which seeks to do the same kind of smear job on Barack Obama. In this new piece of trash, Corsi perpetuates the ridiculous lies already circulating about Obama -- you know the stuff: he’s a Muslim, he’s anti-American, he was educated in a Madrassa -- but it also is filled with misstatements about Obama’s father and the circumstances surrounding the the divorce of Obama’s parents, as well as factual errors about Obama’s life. This guy is a sleazebag and his book is tripe. Yet it’s also the number one non-fiction book on the NY Times bestseller list. Fortunately Media Matters is on top of this, as is the Obama Campaign, which has put out a 41 page document exposing the lies in this book.
John McCain garners multiple nominations this week for a variety of reasons. He has been running ads on energy independence all week during the Olympics, criticizing Obama and touting his own plan. But an op-ed piece by Thomas Friendman points out that McCain has managed to miss every vote on a crucial piece of energy legislation currently making its way through the Senate. Most recently he missed the vote on July 30. In fairness, Obama missed that last vote as well (shame on him for not being there). But McCain is 0 for 8 on this bill.
The McCain campaign is also responding to charges that he is too close to the Bush Administration (the charges are based on the bact that he voted with the Administration 95% of the time in 2007) by claiming that Barack Obama “voted in lockstep with President George W. Bush nearly half the time.” (See www.crooksandliars.com for more about this one.) Hmmm. 95% versus “nearly half”. Hasn’t McCain’s campaign been claiming that Obama is the Senate’s most liberal member? And now they claim that he’s “in lockstep” with Bush? Yeah, that’s bound to work.
But this week’s premier Buffoonery has come as McCain tries to make political hay out of the Russian invasion of Georgia. McCain has been all over this thing, doing everything he can to make the point that he is better equipped to deal with an international crisis than is Obama. Unfortunately for McCain, he keeps on tripping over himself as he does this. He has announced that he is sending his Senatorial lackeys, Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to Georgia on a fact-finding mission, drawing criticism from many who see this as presumptuous and dangerous, and who point out that if Obama had announced that he would be sending Senators Carl Levin and Joe Biden to Georgia as his emissaries, pundits on the right would be screaming bloody murder about his presumptuousness and arrogance. But it gets worse. McCain wrote an opinion the other day about the Georgia crisis and actually said, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” Yes, you read that correctly. “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” This from one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq war. He also said that the Georgia situation is the “first…serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.” Is it possible that McCain has forgotten about Iraq and Afghanistan and 9/11? Is it possible that he doesn’t remember the first Gulf War? Is it possible that anyone (other than CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who was all over this story) will call him on these ridiculous statements?
This week’s BOW Award goes to John McCain for his dangerous and frightening rewriting of recent American foreign policy history. Take a BOW, Senator. You’ve earned it. And then tell us again how important your foreign policy experience is….