Perhaps because we are in the middle of the most scripted, rehearsed, canned (choose your adjective) part of the political campaign, there was far less buffoonery than usual coming from the campaign trail this week.  Which is not to say there was none, but rather that one had to dig a bit deeper to find it.

I should note here that I will not be nominating John McCain for a BOW Award on the basis of his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.  Personally, I don’t think Palin is a good choice; I believe when all is said and done she’ll hurt his chances.  But I’m fully aware of how wrong I might be -- it could rally his base and draw women to the campaign (although according to preliminary polling, it seems that she’s helping McCain much more with male voters --  see www.fivethirtyeight.com -- proving that it is impossible to underestimate the ability of men to base EVERY decision in their lives on sex).

On the other hand, there was certainly no shortage of buffoonery in the news coverage of the Democratic National Convention.  The commentary from the various political “experts” on CNN was utterly ridiculous.  Within two hours of the convention’s opening on Monday night, David Gergen, who I usually respect a great deal, was declaring the convention a failure because it had no narrative.  Although he wound up saying that Michelle Obama’s wonderful speech had “saved the night.”  That same night James Carville and Paul Begala were lamenting the fact that Democratic speakers were going too easy on George Bush and John McCain.

Throughout the convention the CNN storylines were “Will Democrats leave Denver united?  Will Bill and Hillary do enough to make Clinton voters throw their support to Obama?  Will the Clintons overshadow Obama?”  Every analysis began and ended with those questions, until I was ready to pull out my hair (which is already thinning quite enough, thank you).  Instead I switched to C-Span and watched much of the convention unfiltered.  Occasionally I went back, of course, just to keep up with CNN’s fabricated dramas.  By the end of the week, Gergen was saying that this might have been the finest convention he’d ever seen, and Carville and Begala were saying that the Democrats had done everything they needed to do.  So much for drama…

Oh, and did any of you hear about Stuart Shepard, who works for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, asking fellow right-wing Christians to pray for rain to disrupt Obama’s acceptance speech on Thursday night?  He said that he was hoping for a deluge-producing, “flood-advisory rain”.  Of course that didn’t happen.  Turns out God might not be a Republican after all…..

One of this week’s nominations does come out of the Sarah Palin nomination.  (This one comes to you thanks to the good people at www.crooksandliars.com.)  On August 10, Karl Rove (how is it possible that this man, who ought to be in jail, who may be the most partisan man in America, who has made slash and burn politics so pervasive that such tactics are called “Rovian”, is now accorded the status of “political pundit”?) was giving his analysis of the Veepstakes on “Face The Nation”.  Rove was just certain that Obama was going to choose Virginia Governor Tim Kaine as his VP (Such insight!  No wonder he’s a pundit!) and so he set about savaging that choice. 

“With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa or Gilbert, Arizona; north Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town. So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?”

I wonder what Rove is saying now that McCain has chosen Palin.  Kaine has been governor of Virginia nearly twice as long as Palin has been governor of Alaska.  Virginia has ten times the population and nearly nine times the GDP of Alaska.  Richmond’s population is twenty-five times larger than that of Wasilla, the town where Palin served as mayor before being elected governor. Talk about an intensely political choice!  Talk about not being concerned with whether the VP choice is capable of being President!  I doubt though, that anyone will call Rove on this.  And I doubt that Rove himself will have anything but praise for McCain’s decision.

But today’s BOW Award winner comes from the McCain campaign.  I spotted this item in the news and later that same day received an email from my friend Linda Dunn nominating this person for the BOW.  Well, Linda, here you go!

On August 27^th, John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, “a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank,” according to the Dallas Morning News, said that it was misleading to speak of there being people in America who don’t have health insurance.  Goodman, who helped John McCain put together his proposals for reforming health insurance (such as they are) said that, “anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has health insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort.” 

He went on:

“So I have a solution [to the health insurance crisis]. And it will cost not one thin dime.  The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

I thought that we’d reached the nadir of stupidity from McCain advisors when Phil Gramm said that we were in a “mental recession” and that American had become “a nation of whiners.”  Clearly I was wrong.

To say basically that the health insurance crisis is a matter of category rather than policy, that health insurance that pays for emergencies is all poor people need, that people who can’t afford insurance don’t need or deserve preventive care or family doctors or help with prescriptions is unbelievably insulting.  But more than that, it shows a complete failure to understand the way our health care system works.  Emergency room-based health care increases health care expenses across the board, whereas check-ups and other preventive steps actually decrease costs for all of us.  This guy is the president of a think-tank?!  This is the person John McCain turned to for help with formulating his health care reform policies?!  Amazing.

This week’s BOW Award goes to McCain advisor John Goodman, for his unbelievable short-sightedness and insensitivity.  Take a BOW there John.  You’ve earned it.  And I sure hope they give you a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

Well, gentle readers, I find myself in the same position with this week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award.  Last week’s deserving winner was Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, whose statements and actions in the wake of the Russian military’s incursion into Georgia were shameful and reckless.  How could I have known that McCain would outdo himself this week?  How could I have guessed that in a week relatively short on buffoonery, McCain would come up with such a remarkable gaffe?  Actually, I suppose if I’d been watching the previous six months of his campaign more closely, I would have been prepared for this. . . .

This actually should have been a pretty good week for McCain.  He was on message most of the week.  President Bush managed to get through much of the week without doing anything too stupid or embarrassing.  And every poll released over the last seven to ten days has showed the Presidential race narrowing significantly, including one somewhat dubious poll from Zogby/Reuters that shows McCain with a 5 point lead.  (Don’t worry, fellow Democrats, that poll lies far outside the range of every other poll, and Zogby is just about the most erratic of the big-name pollsters.)  Still, it was a good week for McCain, and I found myself hard-pressed to identify any BOW Award standouts.

But then McCain was asked about his houses by a reporter from Politico, and suddenly all was right with the world.  The buffoonery floodgates opened, McCain’s right-wing apologists crawled out of the woodwork to defend him, and I had something to blog about.

For those who missed it, the exchange on August 20 went like this:

Politico Reporter:  “How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?”

McCain:  "I think — I'll have my staff get to you.  It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you."

That was it.  He couldn’t remember how many houses he owns, which is pretty incredible when you think about it.  (I have one, which is fairly easy to remember.  How many do you have?)  Soon after the interview, his campaign said that he and Mrs. McCain have four houses.  Newsweek looked into the matter and found evidence suggesting they have seven.  Politico turned up evidence of eight.  At one point the estimate, including condos and houses, got as high as ten before settling back down at nine.  Yeah, that’s right, nine.  They’re worth a total of well over $13 million.  In 2007, the McCains spent $273,000 on household staff.  That’s more than my wife and I made in 2006 and 2007 combined.  It’s not even close, really.

All this from a man whose campaign has spent the last two months trying to paint Barack Obama as an elitist who is out of touch with the every day concerns of average Americans.

But it gets worse.  In their efforts to cover for McCain’s mind-boggling inability to pinpoint the extent of his wealth and property holdings, Republican operatives have gone to some extraordinary lengths.  A writer on the conservative blog “Powerline” made this remarkable statement:  “I can relate . . . For example, if a reporter asked me how many ties I own, there’s no way I could answer. Just like McCain, I’d tell him he has to ask my wife. Likewise if someone wants to know how many Wii games my kids have.”

Joe Watkins, a Republican strategist, cautioned Democrats about going after McCain on the house gaffe. “Everybody knows John McCain is a patriot. There’s nothing wrong with having investment properties. Lots of Americans do. If I was Barack Obama, I wouldn’t get into this argument with John McCain, who is an American hero.”  Hmmmm.  It seems that you can say anything you want as long as you’ve been a prisoner of war.

Anyway, there were a few other nominees this week, including Uber wingnut Rush Limbaugh, who long ago proved himself to be one of the most racially insensitive people on the planet.  This week he said that the reason Barack Obama has the Democratic nomination is that “nobody [in the party] had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy.”

But like Tom Hanks in 1994 and Mickey Mantle in 1957, John McCain has overwhelmed the competition and earned himself a second consecutive award.

This week’s BOW Award goes to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, for not knowing how many houses he owns, even as he claims to be the candidate who understands the economic concerns of the average voter.  Take a BOW there Senator.  You’ve earned it.  Again.  And when you get a chance let me know to which house I should send your award . . . .

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 21^st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”  Yes, you read that correctly.  “In the 21^st 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….

But it gets tiring and discouraging to hit the same points every week and see that nothing changes.  John McCain flip-flopped this week on gay adoption and Afghanistan, he made disingenuous claims about the safety of offshore drilling, and he unleashed a barrage of unfounded attacks on Barack Obama, even going so far as to imply that Obama is a socialist (which, of course, is utterly ridiculous).  And yet the so-called "liberal" press covered none of it.  Just as they have covered none of McCain's previous flip-flops, of which there have been many.  But Obama says that he'll be pulling out troops from Iraq over a 16 month period (which he has said since January 2007) and mentions that he will continue to refine his stance on Iraq withdrawals as he gets information from commanders on the ground (which he has said since January 2007), and the press runs story after story about how he has changed his position.  It's enough to make a person crazy.

Anyway, I need a break.

But first, this week.  Did any of you see the Daily Show clip this week in which Jon Stewart juxtaposed George Bush's rosy assessment of the economy and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's not so rosy assessment.  The two men were speaking simultaneously, Bernanke before Congress and Bush at a White House press conference scheduled at precisely the same time (Hmmm....I wonder why...).  The contrast is stark, even frightening.  Either Bush really is that out of touch, or the White House is trying to downplay the trouble we're in for political gain.  Whatever the reason, that earned Bush a nomination.

Then there was John McCain's about-face on Afghanistan.  He suddenly is calling for more troops for Afghanistan, now that the war there is going so badly.  He continues to mock Barack Obama's foreign policy credentials, but he has now embraced the approach to the Afghanistan war that Obama has been advocating for months.

Not only that, but there was an item in today's paper about the agreement reached by the Bush Administration and Iraqi government on -- get this -- "timeline horizons" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.  The White House is very quick to point out that this is not a "timetable" for withdrawal and that they are not moving toward the position that Obama and Democrats in Congress have been advocating for some time now:  namely that the sooner the Iraqi government is put in a position where it has to take responsibility for its own security, the better off Iraq will be and the better off American troops will be.  

So McCain is taking Obama's position on Afghanistan and the Bush Administration is taking his position on Iraq.  I guess he's smarter than they thought.... At this point, the only person in America not ready to talk about a timetable for getting out of Iraq is John McCain.

But in keeping with tradition, this award needs to go to someone who does something so egregious and stupid that it's more than contemptible, it's also laughable.  Fortunately, we have just the person in South Carolina's Republican Senator Elizabeth (Liddy) Dole.  There is a bill before Congress right now that will reauthorize funding for the worldwide fight against malaria and, more to the point, AIDS, which continues to kill people across the world at an alarming rate.  The bill is currently named for the late Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos of California and the late Republican Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, who, despite differences on other issues, both worked tirelessly to help fight the spread of AIDS.  Dole proposed an amendment to add a third name to the bill, again as a memorial.  Whose name?  Funny you should ask.  Jesse Helms, the former Republican Senator from North Carolina who died last week, and whose bigotry against African Americans and gays was the stuff of legend.  This is a man who spent the last twenty years of his career attacking any attempt at expanding gay rights.  He justified his opposition to the Ryan White act by saying that people who got AIDS did so because of “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”   He said that AIDS prevention literature was "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up.”   And Liddy wants to memorialize him on this legislation?  Unbelievable.

So, this week's BOW Award goes to Senator Elizabeth Dole, for her staggering insensitivity and foolishness.  Take a BOW there, Liddy.  You've earned it.  And good luck with the reelection campaign....

To the rest of you, the BOW Award will return before long.  In the meanwhile keep your eyes open for acts of buffoonery that might warrant mention when the posts resume.

The LibertyCon folks -- those who run the con and those who attend -- are terrific people.  They’ve always been great to me.  But they are pretty typical of Southern Fandom in that they are politically VERY conservative.  So I’m writing today’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award entry from the heart of enemy territory, as it were. 

I had a whole list of this week’s nominations that I began gathering on Monday.  It’s right there on my desk at home, next to my computer.  Of course, I’m not there, but that list sure is…..

So this is going to be kind of a shorter entry than usual.  Basically we had many of the usual nominees for the week, with John McCain topping the list.  No matter what your criteria, McCain had a terrible campaign week.  He called the Social Security system a disgrace because it requires younger taxpayers to pay into a system that then pays out benefits to retirees.  He didn’t seem to understand that this is the basic premise of the Social Security system and has been since it’s inception in the 1930s.  He was utterly unprepared for a question on health insurance that addressed the inequity of insurers covering Viagra but not women’s birth control pills.  This problem was compounded when reporters confronted McCain with his past votes in the Senate against requiring insurers to cover birth control and McCain countered that he didn’t remember the votes.  “It’s something that I had not thought much about,” he said.  This from a candidate who is trying to a) attract women voters to his campaign, and b) convince voters that he is not too old and out of touch to be President.  Not good.

We also had a nomination for Jesse Jackson, who was being interviewed on Fox News, and after the interview, when he thought the microphone was off, said that Barack Obama had been “talking down to black people.”  He added, “I’m going to cut his nuts off.”  First of all I’m not sure that telling absent fathers in the African American community that they need to step up and take responsibility for themselves and their families is “talking down to black people.”  Most African American political leaders seemed to feel that Jackson’s remarks were out of line and revealed more about his feelings of being increasingly irrelevant as a political figure, than about any coherent critique of Obama’s policies. But more to the point, Jackson is a professional.  He’s a political veteran who has been interviewed on television hundreds if not thousands of times.  He should know that studio microphones will pick up anything.  Makes you wonder if he did know….

But this week’s BOW Award is going not to a Democratic Party operative, but to a Republican.  Yeah, I know:  Big surprise.  But you’ve got to admit that Phil Gramm earned this one.  In case you missed it, Gramm said that the country was not suffering from an economic recession, but rather a mental recession.  He said that America had become a country of whiners and that basically all the economic woes written about in the papers and talked about on television were a figment of people’s imaginations.

Where do we start with this one?  Record home foreclosures, rising unemployment, inflation, energy costs for both gasoline and heating fuels that have become a true economic hardship for ordinary Americans, an economy that has ground nearly to a halt.  This is not in anyone’s imagination; this is real.  Are we in a recession?  Not according to the classic definition, no.  But anyone who doesn’t believe that middle class families in America are hurting is either in denial or totally out of touch.  More to the point, though, Phil Gramm is one of John McCain’s chief economic advisers.  His candidate has been facing charges that he doesn’t know much about the economy (something McCain himself has said and then denied saying) and that he doesn’t understand the day to day lives of ordinary people.  Can Gramm think his remarks are going to help?

Barack Obama was all over this, saying that America didn’t need another “Dr. Phil” (great line) and making it clear that he understands the painful circumstances so many people are in.  Gramm gave him an opening you could drive a truck through, and Obama took it.  Lower income voters had been ready to look at McCain.  They voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and weren’t sure they could trust Obama.  They trust him now, at least more than they do McCain.

Look, I’m delighted by Gramm’s comments.  I hope McCain takes the guy to all his campaign appearances (though I’m not holding my breath).  But that doesn’t mean that the remarks were smart.  This week’s BOW Award goes to former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, for being just about as stupid as he could be.  Take a BOW there, Phil.  You’ve earned it.  And feel free to keep on talking.

We begin, as we did last week, with a nomination from one of my loyal readers.  It seems that an article came out in the New York Times this week written by Jacques Steinberg and edited by Steven Reddicliffe.  The upshot of the article was that while Fox News reclaimed the ratings lead in its battle for cable news supremacy with CNN and MSNBC, long term rating trends seem pretty ominous for Fox.  Their ratings are leveling off, even contracting a bit, while CNN is growing at a decent rate, and MSNBC is positively surging.  Well, Fox and Friends co-anchors Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade didn't like this story one bit.  They claimed it was a "hit piece".  Fine, let them whine.  They're losing their audience anyway.  But they also posted pictures of Steinberg and Reddicliffe during the story, and these pictures had been doctored to make the two Times employees look like freaks.  Fox digitally yellowed the men's teeth, they made Steinberg's nose huge and exaggerated Reddicliffe's forehead while moving back his hairline.  Of course, they never admitted that they had done anything to the pictures.  They just made it seem that this was how the men really looked.  Sophomoric?  Absolutely.  Journalistic integrity doesn't seem to be a big deal over there at Fox.  No wonder they're lagging behind their competitors.

Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) and Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho).  Remember these guys?  If not, here's a quick refresher course.  Vitter, a family-values conservative from down on the Bajou, was implicated in a prostitution scandal a year or so ago.  He claims to be "clean" now.  And, of course, Larry Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in a men's bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.  Well these guys, both of them married of course, are back in the news again this week.  No, it's not what you think.  They're co-sponsors of the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution.  Seems these pillars of society want to preserve the sanctity of marriage by bashing gays.  How noble.  There's so much more I could say, but really it's just too easy.  The word "hypocrisy" doesn't do it justice.

While we're on the topic, here's a wonderful item from www.crooksandliars.com.  The American Family Association, a right-wing "values" group, does a daily news roundup on its website.  Those who maintain the site look for stories that might interest their constituency, mostly from the AP, and put them on the site.  But one thing they always do is an auto replace on the stories to take out the word "gay" and put in its stead "homosexual."  Why?  Who knows with these wingnuts.  Maybe "homosexual" riles up the base more than "gay" does.  Anyway, it's not always a good idea to use that auto replace function.  A story appeared last weekend that reported on the track and field Olympic trials victory in the 100 meter dash of one Tyson Gay.  Except, when the AFA picked up the story and put it on their site, the auto replace did its thing.  Seems the race was won by Tyson Homosexual.

This next one comes from Georgia, where gun rights proponents have been enboldened by the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down the District of Columbia's gun prohibition.  Now it's not that Georgia had a gun ban in place.  On the contrary:  Georgia has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation, and has just passed a new law allowing concealed weapons in state parks, historic sites, restaurants, and public transportation areas.  But Republican State Representative Timothy Bearden isn't satisfied.  He wants Georgians to be able to carry concealed weapons anywhere they want.  Even airports.  Yup.  Let me note here that when Justice Antonin Scalia, hardly a left-wing gun rights opponent, wrote the DC gun decision, he noted that the court did not intend to cast doubt on the right of local and state governments to keep guns out of "sensitive" public places.  But that didn't stop Bearden and his pals.  Bearden even threatened to take his handgun to the airport on Tuesday, for a legal showdown.  He chickened out, but he and the organization GeorgiaCarry.org, have gone ahead with their legal challenge to the airport's ban on guns.  Which is good, because I know I'll feel safer at the airport knowing that everybody is packing heat.

George Bush has a nomination this week.  Coming off of two consecutive BOW Awards, you'd think that George might rest on his laurels.  But this man is driven to maintain his status as America's Buffoon In Chief.  This week he earns his nomination in Afghanistan, where his neglect of the real war on terror has reaped grim results.  Over the past two weeks, Afghanistan has surpassed Iraq as the deadliest venue for U.S. armed forces, the Taliban is resurgent and threatening the regime of U.S. ally Hamid Karzai, and the Pentagon has just announced that it is extending the tours of thousands of U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.  It's not just that Bush has wasted American lives and treasure on his immoral and illegal war in Iraq, it's that he's done so while neglecting a war that, sadly, needs to be fought and won.

John McCain also has a nomination, as he usually does.  Remember the video that surfaced a couple of months back in which McCain told reporters that he was no economics expert?  Actually he's said something to this effect several times.  Here's one example.  Well, now he's denying that he ever said anything to this effect.  Really.  The video exists.  LOTS of people have seen it.  And he's denying it.  Does he think we won't remember?  Is it possible that he doesn't remember?  If the Obama campaign is smart (and we have ample evidence that it is) then all summer long we'll be seeing ads that show McCain saying it and then denying it.

But the winners of this week's BOW Award are the fools and ciphers in the mainstream press who have spent the past several days giving the lie to the myth of the "liberal press" by parroting McCain campaign talking points about General Wesley Clark.  Wes Clark is a genuine American war hero.  He served in Vietnam before being wounded.  He received the Meritorious Service Medal for his service in Germany in the 1970s. He was NATO Commander during the American peacekeeping campaign in the Balkans.  He was a supporter of Hillary Clinton and is now an advisor to and supporter of Barack Obama.  Clark went on "Face the Nation" last Sunday and after saying "I certainly honor [John McCain's] service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me, and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war," went on to say, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

In the days that followed, Clark was savaged in the media.  He was accused of criticizing McCain's military service (which he didn't do), of denying McCain's status as a war hero (which he didn't do), and of engaging in personal and vindictive attacks on the Republican nominee (which he didn't do).  Read again the first half of Clark's statement.  He says that McCain was a hero, and he says he honors McCain's service.  But for years now the mainstream media has constructed a mythology of John McCain.  Part of this is that McCain is a maverick, a straight-talker, a guy who stands up to his party.  That's patently false:  he's flip-flopped on more than a dozen major issues, all for political expedience, and in 2007 he voted with the Bush Administration 95% of the time.  But the other half of the McCain media persona is that he is a war-hero whose five-year stint as a prisoner of war makes him uniquely qualified to be President.  All that Clark did was challenge the last part of that myth.  In what way does being shot down and held in a Vietnamese prison qualify John McCain to be President?  Did it keep him from being wrong about Iraq again and again?  Of course it didn't.  Does it give him expertise in dealing with economic issues or running an executive office?  Of course it doesn't.  McCain has plenty of Senatorial experience -- more than Obama does.  That might be considered relevant experience.  Obama has organizational experience that might also be relevant.  But being a POW does not qualify McCain to be President.  That's all Clark said.  And it's true.

Rich Sanchez, on CNN, accused Clark of "swiftboating" John McCain!  Are you kidding me?  Swiftboating, if you'll remember, refers to the efforts of the so-called "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" to smear John Kerry during the 2004 Presidential campaign.  It's an expression that means to spread unfounded lies as a way of destroying a candidate's political viability.  What Wes Clark said was not swiftboating.  It wasn't even close, though Republicans would like to characterize it that way. Rick Sanchez (and Andrea Mitchell and Howard Kurtz and John Roberts and several others) don't like the fact that a man of Wesley Clark's credentials is challenging their "John McCain is a Maverick straight-talking war hero" narrative of the campaign.  And so they have picked up the McCain campaign's attacks on Clark and presented them as news.  Fortunately, there is already a bit of a backlash forming against this;  as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column yesterday, many in the press are starting to reexamine their coverage of Clark's remarks.

Still, the press is doing it again with Obama's remarks about Iraq earlier this week.  Obama held a press conference in Fargo, North Dakota and stated that he would be traveling to Iraq in the near future and would use what he learned there to further refine his Iraq policy.  Still, he said, he expected that he would be removing a brigade or two from Iraq every month and would complete the troop withdrawal within 16 months.  You may or may not agree with that policy, but he has been saying the same thing for the better part of year.  Still, the Republicans jumped on this and said that Obama was flip-flopping on Iraq, and the press believed them!  

So, this week's BOW Award goes to the entirety of the mainstream media for their inability to distinguish between fact and Republican talking points.  Take a BOW there folks, you've earned it.  And then for God's sake, get your head out of your butts and start reporting the news!

It had been a somewhat quiet week in the buffoonery realm, but you can't keep a good buffoon down for long; a flurry of stupidity at the end of the week gives us several fine choices for this week's award.

Our first nominee actually comes from one of my readers who called my attention to the tale of Massachusetts State Representative James Fagan, a Democrat and full-time defense attorney, who was arguing against a state law that would have established a 20 year mandatory prison term for the rape of a child under the age of 12.  Fagan was quoted as saying that he would “rip apart” 6-year-old victims on the witness stand and “make sure the rest of their life is ruined.” Fagan went on, “when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.”  Sounds like a total jerk, doesn't he?  I mean he's against the mandatory sentencing law for this unspeakable crime, and he speaks with relish of destroying the victim's life in his courtroom cross examination.  The right-wing press and blogs were all over him.  For good reason it seems.  Except that things aren't always as they seem.  Here is the entire quote, with these remarks in context:  (The “it” in “it’s so wrong” is the proposed mandatory sentence of 20 years):

“Let me tell you why it’s so wrong, It’s so wrong because in these situations . . . that 6-year-old is going to sit in front of me, or somebody far worse than me and I’m going to rip them apart. I’m going to make sure that the rest of their life is ruined. That when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep. When they’re 19 years old they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody. And that’s not because I’m a nice guy. That’s because when you’re in court, and you’re defending somebody’s liberty, and you’re facing a mandatory sentence of those draconian proportions, you have to do every single thing you can do on behalf of your client. That is your obligation as a trial lawyer.” 

We can argue the merits of mandatory sentencing guidelines and have legitimate disagreements on the issue.  But as you see here, he's not relishing the idea of tearing these victims apart.  He's saying that would be, in his opinion, the tragic consequence of imposing the mandatory sentences.  Context does matter.  His wording was poor; he did himself and his cause a disservice by phrasing his remarks the way he did.  But this guy doesn't seem like a monster to me.

On the other hand, Karl Rove is, in my book (and this is my blog, after all)  just about the definition of a monster.  The fact that this man, who could soon be under indictment for his role in any number of Bush Administration scandals, is now given a forum at legitimate news outlets like the Wall Street Journal from which to dispense his partisan tirades makes me want to scream.  But that's beside the point.  For a while now, Rove and his wingnut buddies have been trying to come up with some kind of attack on Barack Obama that will make a dent in Obama's relatively small but consistent lead in the polls.  It seems the best they can come up with is to call Obama and his wife "elitists" and hope that the realities of Obama's poor upbringing in a single-parent household, and Michele's difficult childhood in Chicago's South Side, won't get in the way of this fiction.  So Rove said earlier this week, in describing Obama, "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."   Let's see how many ways this is wrong.  First off, the snarky guy Rove is describing is actually already in the White House; Rove helped put him there.  Second, most of the country clubs Rove has been to with his rich GOP buddies wouldn't even let Obama in the front door because of the color of his skin.  Third, and this is the one that gets me most angry, Rove doesn't have the courage to say what he really wants to here.  He's too afraid, because he knows that calling Obama "uppity" would get him in a world of trouble.  But that's the real message.  It's not just that Obama is urbane and smart, it's that he's Black and urbane and smart.  That's what bugs him.  And that's how he thinks the attacks on Obama ought to be framed.  

But these two were basically all I had heading into the weekend.  Then came the flurry.  First there was Mitt Romney dismissing nuclear non-proliferation and energy efficiency as "Liberal issues" in an interview with John Roberts on CNN.  Apparently conservatives don't care who gets a nuclear weapon or how much oil and gas we import from foreign nations.  I have some very conservative friends who would be surprised to hear this.....

You ever hear of Grover Norquist?  He's a long time conseravative activist who is particularly associated with anti-tax campaigns, and also with indefensibly stupid comments.  A few years ago, while being interviewed by Terry Gross on Gross's wonderful NPR program, "Fresh Air", he said that the estate tax was the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.  Yes, he really did.  This week's statement was less disgusting than that (one reason he doesn't get the award:  I want his winning comment to be a personal best.....) but still unconscionable.  In talking about Obama's liberal issue stances, he said that the candidate was, "John Kerry with a tan."  Which is great, because what this campaign season needs is a bit more racial tension.  Idiot.

John McCain has an entry this week, as he usually does.  After opposing the Webb/Hagel GI Bill to expand educational benefits for returning soldiers, and then failing to show up for the Senate vote on the bill (Obama was there and stood with the majority in a 92-6 vote), McCain went on TV and started talking about how pleased he was to have been part of the effort to promote the bill and expand educational benefits for returning GIs.  He actually tried to take credit for a bill he tried to defeat, a bill he couldn't be bothered to vote for or against.  This is why I call the man Flippy McSame.  He changes his stances on major issues from one week to the next, one day to the next, sometimes one moment to the next.  And when he's not doing that, he's parroting White House talking points.  Flippy McSame.  If the name fits, use it.

But this week's winner, pulling it out at the very end of the week, is none other than our Buffoon In Chief, George W. Bush.  That's right, after going for weeks without winning even one BOW Award, ole George has now won two awards in a row.  And this week he and his Administration don't even have to share the award with John McCain or Congressional Republicans.  No, this week he has it all to himself.  Why, you ask?  Well, for months now the Bush Administration has been coming under fire out West for abandoning all pretext of environmental concern and vastly expanding the amount of public land open to oil drilling.  And as we all know, over the past couple of weeks, the President and his lackeys have been pushing for drilling in protected coastal regions and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  You might think it funny, then, to learn that the Administration has suspended all new solar energy projects out of concerns for their impact on the environment.  This is from the New York Times:

“Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years. The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states.”Has the Administration suddenly gone green?  Has the President finally figured out the meaning of the word "irony"?  Is this Administration so screwed-up that they actually don't see the inherent contradiction in destroying the land in pursuit of energy options that will further degrade the environment, while simultaneously seeking to protect the land from energy projects that have the potential to save our planet?  Or do they just not care anymore how obvious it is that they are doing the bidding of the world's giant oil companies?  Whatever the reason, this week's BOW Award goes to George W. Bush and his Administration for environmental policies that are breathtakingly insensitive AND mind-bogglingly incoherent.  Take a BOW there boys, you're earned it.

Is it January yet?

I'll begin by stating the obvious:  There was plenty of buffoonery this week -- the staffers with Barack Obama's Presidential campaign who refused to let two Muslim women sit behind the candidate during a campaign appearance because they were wearing hijabs (traditional head scarves) come to mind, as do the Republican operatives who have been pounding away at Michelle Obama for a remark she explained months ago.  And then there was Rep. Steven King (Wingnut from Iowa) who won the first or second BOW Award I gave out with his offensive comments about Obama.  This week, in questioning Scott McClellan, he asked, "Couldn’t you have taken this to the grave with you and done this country a favor?”  Apparently Rep. King doesn't understand that while McClellan's book might not have done any favors to the GOP or the Bush Administration, it has done a great service to our country.  But the man's an idiot, so it's not surprising that he doesn't get this.

But for this week we're going to look past the small incidents that are often so amusing to recount.  Because this week George Bush and John McCain and the Republicans in Congress have been guilty of rank demagoguery on the issue of increasing oil drilling as a response to high gas prices.  There's even some polling out there that indicates that the position is popular with the American public, and this frightens and bothers me for several reasons.  First, increased drilling in the sensitive marine environments off the coasts of California and Florida, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, could have severe and permanent ramifications for those ecosystems.  Second, any solution to our energy needs that perpetuates our dependence on fossil fuels rather than pointing us toward new technologies and fuel sources will undermine efforts to decrease carbon emissions, thus contributing further to global warming.  And third, drilling in any of the places Bush, McCain, and their oil company buddies want access to won't have any impact on the price of gas for twenty years.  On the other hand, legislation proposed in the House this week to end the speculative buying of oil and gas futures could have an immediate and profound impact on gas prices.  And putting an emphasis on energy conservation rather than drilling will do more in the long term to end our dependence of oil and gas.

Let me throw some numbers at you.  Here in the United States, we consume about 20.6 million barrels of oil per day.  That comes out to about 7.52 billion barrels of oil per year.  (By the way, the world consumes 86 million barrels a day, so we in this country account for nearly a quarter of the world's oil consumption.)  According to estimates (and these can be tricky and they do vary some by source -- my source is the McClatchy News Service) there is over 115 billion barrels of oil currently sitting in undeveloped or currently active off-shore drilling sites.  That's a good deal of oil.  BUT (and this is a big but) of that total, only 19 billion barrels is accessible from the protected areas President Bush referred to in his comments on Wednesday.  19 billion barrels.  So when we talk about the issue of offshore drilling as framed this week by Bush and McCain, we're talking about maybe two and a half years' worth of oil.  What about ANWR you ask?  Again, estimates vary widely.  Some industry analysts (the guys with the most to gain from opening up the refuge for oil exploration) say 16 billion barrels are there.  Some on the environmentalist side of the debate say it's only 4 or 5 billion barrels.  The United States Geological Service says 7.7 billion barrels.  Let's use that figure.  You might notice that this is remarkably close to our annual consumption.  So taking into account the protected drilling sites and ANWR, the oil Bush and his buddies want access to totals maybe three and a half years worth of consumption.  So if there were some way to get at that oil immediately (there's not) and bring it all to market at once (there's not), and if we could be certain that all that oil really is there and really is accessible (we can't be), this oil would see to our needs for forty-two months.  And then we'd be right back where we are now.

But it gets worse.  Let's take the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil as an example for this.  Again there's some debate on how much oil is there and how much will be flowing to the U.S. if drilling were allowed there.  The industry guys say they could supply as much as 1.45 million barrels a day when they reach peak production from the refuge.  Right.  That's the peak.  According to the industry.  7% of our current consumption.  Environmentalists say the peak would only reach 510,000 barrels a day.  Let's split the difference. (If you look at the USGS numbers above compared to the two extremes, you'll realize that splitting the difference is actually too generous to the oil industry, but that's okay -- they're already losing this debate.  We can throw 'em a bone...)  Let's say that at it's peak production, the refuge will give us an even million barrels a day.  5% of our usage.  Well, 5% on $4.00/gallon gas would be a savings of 20 cents per gallon.  That ain't a lot.  More to the point, everyone agrees (yes, the tree huggers, the robber barons, and the gov'r'mint all agree on this) that we won't reach that peak production until 2028.  And once we've reached that peak, it won't last that long.  And then the savings go down.  Ouch.  Makes you wonder why they want to drill there at all, doesn't it?

And there's more.  An alternative solution to our energy crisis, one that Bush and McSame and the GOP seem more than happy to ignore, is conservation.  And one way to conserve is to raise CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards on all automobiles from the current rate of 27 mpg for cars and 20 for light trucks and SUVs to 35 mpg.  (The European standard, though figured differently, comes to about 40 mpg, but we'll stick with this goal for now.)  If we raise CAFE standards to 35 mpg, we can save 1.2 million barrels of oil per day by 2020.  That's slightly more than we'll be getting from ANWR in 2028, and it comes eight years earlier.  That's important because with improved CAFE standards our savings keep going up.  We'll gradually be replacing older, less fuel efficient cars, so the overall fleet will be saving more and more gas.  How much more?  By 2030, two years after we'd finally reach that 1 million barrels a day from ANWR, we would be saving 2.4 million barrels a day.  And by that time, the technology will have improved.  Maybe we'll be approaching that European standard.  Maybe the savings will be even higher.  The best part is, we'll be putting less carbon into the air, and we'll still have a pristine wilderness in Alaska.

A few other points.  Back to the offshore drilling.  I kind of glossed over one of the numbers I gave you earlier.  Of 115 billion barrels available for offshore drilling, only 19 billion are in protected areas.  So why not drill in those other non-protected areas.  Well, in some areas we already are.  But there are other areas that the oil companies already have under lease but have yet to explore for oil.  Why?  Good question!  Why would they want these protected areas when they've yet to do anything with the unprotected ones?  Why would George Bush and Flippy McSame and their allies in Congress be so willing to give access to these protected areas to the oil companies when those same oil companies aren't drilling where they should be?  Could it be because the oil companies are keeping these other areas in reserve, so that they can later tap into a resource that is exploding in value?  Yeah, I think that's possible.  Could it also be that George and John and their buds are just looking to score cheap political points by presenting a solution that helps their donors AND resonates with voters who don't really understand the issues?  Yeah, I think that's possible, too.

Look, these are complicated issues.  When I say that voters don't understand them, I don't mean to be condescending.  I didn't understand them very well either until l did the research and learned about them.  But the fact is gas prices are high.  They're going to stay high.  Most other industrialized democracies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, all the EU nations) have been paying WAY more for gas than we have for a really long time.  The realities of the global energy markets have finally caught up with us.  We can't drill our way out of the problem, and I also know that we can't conserve our way out of the problem.  We'll have to drill some, but for goodness sake, before we let the oil companies into the most sensitive of our remaining wilderness areas, let's make them drill in the places to which they already have access.  And let's combine our concern over $4.00/gallon gas with our efforts to reduce carbon emissions and our search for alternate sources of fuel.  Let's make a real commitment to conservation by raising fuel standards on every car sold in this country.  Let's offer financial rewards to industry leaders who come up with promising alternatives to the internal combustion engine.  Think about it for a minute.  A century ago we were just learning to fly planes, there were no televisions, we were half a century away from space travel, and even farther from consumer level computers.  Think of the revolution in technology we've seen in the last 100 years.  And then consider this:  a century ago cars were using the internal cumbustion engine.  Just like we do today.  Are we to believe that this is the pinnacle of automotive technology?  Give me a break!  We can do so much better than this!

What bothers me about Republican efforts to make oil drilling an issue is that they have access to the same information I do.  They know all the stuff I've been writing about.  They just choose to ignore it.  John McCain understands that drilling in these protected areas won't do a damn thing for gas prices for another two decades, but he also knows that calling for more drilling polls well and that it's an easy soundbite to say "Let's drill" and a much more complicated one to explain why this is bad policy.  We've got a serious -- some would say critical -- energy situation on our hands.  We deserve serious policy initiatives.  This isn't one.  This is cheap, it's cynical, and ultimately it hurts us as a nation.  And so this week's BOW Award goes to George Bush, John McCain, and the Republicans in Congress for giving us the political smoke and mirrors of "More Oil Drilling" when what we need is a serious conversation about energy solutions.  Take a BOW guys.  You've earned it.  And here's hoping that eventually your cars are Smart, even if you're not.

And tune in tomorrow for a special BOW Award in response to this week's nonsense about oil drilling.

On the other hand, energy conservation (more efficient cars, better insulation in houses and buildings, lowering your thermostat 2 degrees in the winter and raising it 2 degrees in the summer, energy efficient light bulbs and appliances, etc.) will make those reserves we have right now last longer.  Conservation will lessen our imports of foreign oil.  Conservation will save you money and it will decrease the damage we do to our environment.  But conservation will also lower the profits that those big oil companies rake in every year.  And, sadly, that's why you didn't hear our President utter the word "conservation" even once today.

Expect to see more about this in the BOW Award posting this weekend.  I think we already have a winner....

January 20, 2009 cannot come soon enough.

But let's start with our befuddled President.  His buffoonery actually began with last week's Saturday radio address, in which he called on Congress to do more for American troops who are currently in harm's way by sending him a military funding bill he could sign.  Right.  Do more for the troops.  Thing is, the Senate has already passed a funding bill that he has threatened to veto.  Why?  Because it contains a pay raise for soldiers and an expanded GI Bill giving more educational benefits to returning soldiers.  That's right.  He wants Congress to do more for American troops, but only if it doesn't cost too much.  Funny that he's not worried about his tax breaks for wealthy Americans costing too much.

Then there was this blast from the past, which became especially relevant this week as average national gas prices topped $4.00/gallon.  Jon Stewart showed the clip on The Daily Show:  Bush was asked at a press conference in March what he intended to do about rising gas prices when analysts were predicting that gas would soon top the $4.00 mark.  Bush's response?  He said that he hadn't heard that analysts were predicting $4.00/gallon gas.  Is that really possible?   Could a journalist have access to economic analyses that the White House didn't have?  The way I see it, there are several possible explanations for this.  1) Someone did indeed tell the President that gas would soon be above $4.00, but having the attention span of a 4 year-old and the intellectual curiosity of a Cocker Spaniel, he didn't really pay any attention.  2) Someone did indeed tell him this, and he lied about it during the press conference.  Or 3) the White House is so out of touch and so disfunctional that he really didn't have access to the information.  None of these possibilities reflects well on Bush or his Administration.

And finally, this tidbit from www.crooksandliars.com.  The Department of Justice gives grants to many crime prevention programs that are targeted toward American youth.  These programs are prioritized and given a numerical ranking.  Don't get me wrong:  all of these programs have merit, but they have been ranked and you'd think that these rankings mean something.  The number two program on the list has been unable to secure funds.  The number 47 ranked program has gotten funding.  Why?  Funny you should ask.  The number 47 program is the World Golf Foundation's First Tee program.  And its honorary chairman is former President George H. W. Bush.  Draw your own conclusions.

So this is what I had on Tuesday, and I thought that this would finally be Dubya's week.

But then the Presidential contenders weighed in.  Barack Obama, in a moment of what appears to have been unbelievable carelessness, appointed former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson to his Vice Presidential vetting committee without properly vetting him.  Johnson, it turns out, had received favorable mortgage rates and, as a board member at several other corporations, had been in a position to approve the types of obscene golden parachute settlements for former CEOs that Obama himself has railed against.  Johnson did nothing illegal, but all of this looked bad, and after defending Johnson early in the week, Obama had little choice but to accept his resignation on Wednesday.  Very stupid.  The Obama campaign has been exceptionally well-run, but this episode could and should have been avoided.

Chances are that before long Obama's Johnson fiasco will be forgotten.  It's the type of inside-the-beltway stuff that rightly or wrongly fails to capture the public's attention.  On the other hand, John McCain's first big mistake of the week could well come back to haunt him later in the campaign.  Interviewed on NBC Wednesday morning, McCain said this in response to a question about whether he has any sense of when he might begin bringing troops home from Iraq:  "No, but that's not too important.  What's important is the casualties in Iraq."  He went on to make the point that he's looking at a long-term occupation with American troops no longer in immediate danger, kind of like American deployments in South Korea, Japan, and Germany.  Okay, I always hate it when my candidate's statements are ripped out of context and made into a big deal, and that's what Democrats have been doing with this one.  But this is entirely a problem of McCain's making.  This is campaign season.  He should know better.  There were several ways to make the same point -- "We all want to see the troops brought home as soon as possible, but there are other matters to consider..."  Something like that.  "That's not important"?  He really should have been more careful.  The DNC has already made an online ad using the quote, and you know we'll be seeing the clip for the next half year.

McCain had a couple of other moments of buffoonery.  At one point, while trumpeting his foreign policy experience, he talked about how he had met several times with Vladimir Putin, the President of (wait for it....) Germany!  Oops!  And when asked whether he would have room in his Administration for Dick Cheney, quite possibly the most unpopular politician in America, he said, "Hell, yeah."  Republicans must be pulling their hair out worrying about what stupid thing McCain is going to say next.

McCain also had a town hall meeting late this week. His campaign initially claimed it was a meeting with independents and Democrats disillusioned with their party's nominee.  Later the campaign had to admit that in fact the meeting hall was filled with Republican party loyalists.  Oops again!

Conservative commentator Ralph Reed was on the Daily Show earlier this week, talking to Jon Stewart about the evangelical vote in this year's election.  Stewart remarked that according to some polls, Obama could draw as much as 40% of the evangelical vote come November.  Reed responded this way:  "I don’t think that’s supported by the polling data. I think if you look at most of the general-election polls, McCain’s getting about 60 to 65 percent of the evangelical vote."   Hmmmm.  If McCain is getting about 60-65% of the vote, doesn't that leave Obama with, well, close to 40%?

But as I said at the beginning of this lengthy post, we have a dark horse winner this week.  This one took me by surprise this morning in my local paper.  Turns out my own Congressman, Blue Dog Democrat Lincoln Davis (TN-4), has yet to endorse Barack Obama.  When asked why this might be so, Fred Hobbs, a member of the Tennessee DEMOCRATIC PARTY Executive Committee, said, "I'm not sure we know enough about him. He's got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be."  THIS IS A DEMOCRAT SAYING THIS!!!  When the reporter to whom Hobbs made these remarks went to Beecher Frasier, Davis' Chief of Staff, for clarification, Frasier said that he "didn't know for sure" whether Obama was "terrorist connected" but that he assumed he wasn't!!!  Only a day later did the Congressman's office clarify again and make it clear that Rep. Davis will be supporting Obama and that the idea that Obama has any terrorist connections is ridiculous.  But it took three rounds of quotes to get there.  Quotes from Democrats.  We have enough trouble with Republican operatives and Fox News making these disgusting, baseless, and ludicrous suggestions.  Now we have Democrats doing it too?  Yes, Obama has dark skin.  Yes, he has a name that's a bit different from the norm for a Presidential candidate.  Yes, his father was raised Muslim.  He's different.  None of that makes him a terrorist.  Geez!  I can't believe that any of this actually needs to be said!

This week's BOW Award is given, I am deeply ashamed to say, to the Tennessee Democratic Party, which, it seems, remains mired in ignorance, racism, and fear of anyone who isn't a white Southerner.  Take a BOW there folks.  You've earned it.  And when you're ready, join us in the 21st Century.

Suffice it so say that I mentioned the McCain campaign worker, whoever it might have been, who allowed McCain to go on television Tuesday night without makeup and then had him stand before that horribly garish green backdrop.  McCain's delivery is bad enough -- wooden, boring, and that fake smile of his gives me the creeps -- but add in the venue and the lack of makeup and he looked awful.  When Fox News comments on how bad the Republican Presidential nominee's appearance went you know you've got problems.

I mentioned Fox News' E.D. Hill, who referred to a little fist pump Barack and Michelle Obama shared at Obama's speech that same night, as "a terrorist fist jab."  A terrorist fist jab?  Are you kidding me?

Right wing radio host Mike Gallagher interviewed disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, the other day, and the two of them agreed that Barack Obama is a Marxist.  Yep.  I blogged about this sort of thing the other day and there's a long discussion of it on my Wordpress blog for June 3 (http://davidbcoe.wordpress.com) so I won't go into it in much depth here, except to say that if this is the best the Right can do in their campaign against Obama, they don't have a prayer come November. 

Then of course, we have the McCain campaign advisor who, apparently tired of hearing a possible McCain Presidency referred to as "a third term for George Bush" suggested that actually Barack Obama's fiscal policies were much closer to George Bush's than are McCain's.  A couple of thoughts on this one:  Apparently this advisor is ignoring McCain's willingness to expand and make permanent the disastrous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as Obama's promise to end those tax cuts, which we can't afford.  This person is also ignoring the fact that while McCain wants to keep on spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq War, Obama has promised to end the war.  Also, I wonder how Delay, Gallagher, and others who are calling Obama a Marxist feel about this....

There were a couple of other nominees, too.  I've forgotten them.  I'm giving the award for this week to Republican Senator Pat Roberts (Kansas) who had been chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2006.  As chair of the committee, Roberts managed to exert influence over the committee's report on the Bush Adminstration's misuse of pre-war intelligence in the buildup to the Iraq War.  He never counted on the GOP losing control of the Senate though.  The second round of reports on pre-war intelligence has now come out, and it not only shows that the Bush Administration misused intelligence leading up to the war, and that the Administration embarked on a carefully orchestrated campaign to deceive the American public about Iraq (just as former WHite House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in his recently published memoir), but it also shows how much Roberts did to keep these facts from coming to light.  So this week's BOW Award goes to Senator Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, for his role in deceiving the nation about the Administration's Iraq policy.  Take a BOW there, Senator.  You've earned it.  And good luck with that reelection campaign.....

Back in February, Mark McKinnon, a member of John McCain's media team who also worked for George Bush's campaigns, stated that if Barack Obama wound up being the Democratic Presidential nominee, he (McKinnon) would quit McCain's campaign rather than be part of an effort to attack Obama.  Here's what he said at the time:

"I would simply be uncomfortable being in a campaign that would be inevitably attacking Barack Obama. I think it would be uncomfortable for me, and I think it would be bad for the McCain campaign."

This week, amazingly, McKinnon made good on his promise.  He announced that he would be leaving the McCain campaign, though he stated that he would still be an "informal advisor" to the presumptive GOP nominee.  A political operative who takes a principled stand and then follows through on it.  How refreshing.

A few people have recommended that Hillary Clinton be given this week's award for her awkward statement yesterday, in which she raised the 1968 assasination of Robert Kennedy, seeming to imply that she was remaining in the Democratic race just in case something terrible happens to Barack Obama.  Thing is, I really don't believe that's what she was saying.  Look, I'm an Obama supporter, and though I've liked Hillary Clinton for a long time, I feel that she has run a disappointing and at times ethically compromised campaign.  But this time I think she's getting a bum rap.  She was answering questions about why she remains in the race, and pointed out that campaigns in the past  have run into June.  She made the same point nearly word for word in March, and no one batted an eye.  With the health problems of Ted Kennedy fresh in everyone's mind, this time the comment seemed more jarring, but to suggest that she's hoping for a tragedy is, in my opinion, unfair and unfounded.

I posted about McCain's pastor problem yesterday, so I won't bring that up again.  But that doesn't eliminate McCain from BOW Award consideration!  No, sir!  This week, John McCain voted against the new GI Bill that passed the Senate by a veto-proof 75-22 margin.  Clinton and Obama voted for the bill, as did 29 of McCain's fellow Republicans.  The central provision of the bill provides for vastly expanded educational benefits for soldiers returning from overseas and leaving the armed forces.  It seems to me, and to three quarters of the Senate, a fitting reward for the men and women who are risking their lives in a war that John McCain supports.  But though McCain is willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to wage an immoral, illegal war, he felt that the extra educational funding for veterans was too much.  Unbelievable.  But that's not all.  The Bush Administration and the bill's opponents also feared that by making life after the armed services too attractive to American soldiers, it might undermine recruiting efforts.  That's right, guys.  You wouldn't want to make veterans' lives too easy.  Best to treat them like crap and keep them in line.

House Democrats nearly won the award this week for something so stupid it's almost embarrassing to write about.  The House and Senate passed a farm bill this week, again by veto-proof majorities.  (I guess when the President's approval rating is down around 28% you start to hear the phrase "veto-proof majority" a bit more often....)  Bush promptly vetoed the bill and the House voted to override.  But it turns out that the Democrats in the House passed the wrong version of the bill and sent it to the White House.  They had to have a re-vote on the "right" bill and restart the process.  Pretty embarrassing there, folks.  No wonder Congressional approval ratings are even lower than W's.

But today's winner is, believe it or not, even worse than that.  The account of what happened comes largely from a Media Matters talking point that was picked up by www.crooksandliars.com.  After it was made public that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, there was an outpouring of sympathy and well-wishes for the Senator, from the left and the right.  Senate Republicans were commendably gracious in wishing Kennedy a speedy recovery, and many of them spoke of how great a legislator Kennedy has been during his 46 years in the U.S. Senate.  They made a point as well, of saying that he is also a fine person, who repeatedly reaches across party lines on personal and professional matters alike.  Cal Thomas, one of the most conservative columnists in America wrote a moving piece about his close friendship with Kennedy.  Everyone in the country, it seems, has been united in wishing Senator Kennedy the best.

And then there's conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage, who responded to the news of Kennedy's illness this way:  (Again, the quote comes from Media Matters and is repeated on crooksandliars)

"Following the announcement that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage opened his May 20 show by interspersing audio of Kennedy singing “Ay Jalisco No Te Rajes” with clips of news reporters discussing Kennedy’s diagnosis and audio from the 1990 film Kindergarten Cop in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character says, “It’s not a tumor.” Later, Savage played the Dead Kennedys song “California Über Alles” after stating: “The poor guy’s been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he’s been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here’s a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please."

And so, for his mind-boggling insensitivity, this week's BOW Award goes to syndicated radio talk-show host Michael Savage.  Take a BOW there, Michael.  And then please, taking a flying leap off the nearest cliff.

It started early, with something you may have heard about on The Daily Show the other night.  As many of you know, the Republicans lost a special election in Mississippi this past Tuesday, failing to hold a seat that had been in GOP hands for more than a decade in a district that George Bush carried in 2004 by a double digit margin.  This was the third time this spring the Republicans have lost special Congressional elections in strongly red districts (the other two races were in Louisiana and Dennis Hastert's old district in Illinois).  In the wake of yet another special election disaster, the Republicans decided that they needed to change their image and fast.  So they unveiled a new party slogan:  "The Change You Deserve"  Okay, never mind the ridiculousness of touting yourself as the party of change when you've been running the Federal Government for the past seven years.  Turns out the slogan is already taken.  The good people at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals have used that slogan for their powerful prescription anti-depressant, Effexor (TM).  It also turns out that some users of the drug have been experiencing severe and unpleasant side-effects, including nightmares, anxiety, insomnia, and memory loss.  Actually, the GOP's new slogan might be appropriate after all....

Then there was the bizarre interview that President Bush gave  earlier this week on Politico, during which interviewer Mike Allen asked too many stupid questions to count.  One of them, though, concerned the fact that the President hasn't been playing much golf lately.  Allen asked if this was because of the war.  The president's response:

“Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” 

Really?!  Okay, where do we start with this one?  Is he really saying that by giving up golf he's relating better to the soldiers in Iraq and their families?  Is he really equating his "sacrifice" with theirs?  Or is he just saying that from a PR standpoint it would be bad form?  By the way, the President claimed to have made his decision to give up golf after the August 2003 bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad, but there is news footage of him playing in October '03, just as there is footage of him fishing, biking, and doing all sorts of other recreational stuff.  Now, he has every right to do these things.  He can't be expected to live a life of total deprivation; I don't care who he is.  But let's skip the patronizing BS about giving up golf because he's worried about being in solidarity with the soldiers.

Ah, but our witless leader wasn't done yet!  On Thursday, while in Israel to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state, our President accused those in the U.S. who oppose his confrontational approach to dealing with Iran and other rogue nations of "appeasement", in effect likening his political opponents to those who allowed Nazi Germany to take Poland in 1938.  Let me say for the record that there are legitimate policy points to be made on both sides of this argument:  some feel that confronting our enemies and refusing to negotiate with them is the right approach; others believe that negotiation is the right path.  That is a legitimate difference of opinion on foreign policy and it ought to be debated.  But to equate negotiation with the appeasement of Hitler is offensive and inappropriate.  More to the point, for an American leader to go before the parliament of a foreign ally and attack his political opponents at home is such terms is so out of bounds I haven't the words to describe it.  To my Republican friends who think I'm overreacting, let me ask you this:  (And please, be honest with yourselves)  If Bill Clinton had done the same thing when he was President, how would you have reacted?  Bush's comments were out of line; making them in such a venue -- particularly in Israel, and particularly during this anniversary week -- was cowardly.

There were more acts of buffoonery, of course.  John McCain picked up on Bush's comments and accused Barack Obama of wanting to sit down and negotiate with the terrorist group Hamas.  Obama's position on this is identical to McCain's:  he would refuse to speak with Hamas until they have repudiated terrorism as a means to achieving their political goals and until they have retracted their calls for Israel's annihilation.  Of course, since McCain started these attacks, video has surfaced from 2006 in which McCain calls for unconditional discussions with Hamas.  Yet another flip flop for Flippy McSame.

But this week's winning act of buffoonery comes from an unlikely source.  On Friday, while speaking to the National Rifle Association in Louisville, Kentucky, former Arkansas Governor and unsuccessful candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination Mike Huckabee heard a strange sound offstage -- a chair falling, or something of the sort -- and made the following joke:

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak.  Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

I don't know which is worse:  the fact that Huckabee said this, or the fact that the NRA attendees laughed.  Nobody should be making jokes about any Presidential candidate getting shot.  It's just not funny.  But in this case, given the history of violence against prominent African American leaders in this country, the joke seems especially tasteless.  Let's be honest, most of us have already considered the posibility that Obama might be targeted if he wins the nomination. There are a lot of racist wack-jobs out there who will be tempted to take a shot at him.  And Huckabee is making jokes about this?  Is this really an idea we want to be putting in people's heads?  To his credit, Governor Huckabee issued the following apology this morning:

“During my speech at the N.R.A., a loud noise backstage, that sounded like a chair falling, distracted the crowd and interrupted my speech. I made an off hand remark that was in no way intended to offend or disparage Sen. Obama. I apologize that my comments were offensive. That was never my intention.” 

But still, I have to give this week's BOW Award to Mike Huckabee.  Take a BOW, Mike.  You've earned it.  And next time you open your mouth, give a little thought to what it is you're about to say.  We don't need stuff like this floating around this year.

As usual, we have no shortage of nominees.  There's John McCain, who during several appearances this week repeated his claim that Hamas, the Middle East terrorist organization, had "endorsed" Barack Obama for President.  There's Hillary Clinton, who spent the latter half of the week talking about how Obama won't get the votes of "hard-working Americans, white Americans" come the fall.  How is it that she isn't accused of being an elitist and a racist?  Does "hard-working American" equal "white American"?  Do African Americans not count as "hard-working"?  And does she think so poorly of her low income white supporters that she thinks they're incapable of voting for an African American candidate?  She should know better.

Then there's the voter in Greenwood, Indiana who happened to be at an Obama campaign stop a day or two before the Indiana primary.  This was in a restaurant, and as the candidate approached his table, the man waved him away, saying, "I can't stand him. He's a Muslim. He's not even pro-American as far as I'm concerned.''  News flash, dude:  He's NOT Islamic.  He's a Christian.  I mean, come on!  Did you totally miss the Reverend Wright craziness?  And while we're at, did it ever occur to you that there are millions of Americans who are both Muslim and PRO-America?  Idiot.

But for all my griping about the stupidity of American politicians and pundits, the ridiculous tone of our political campaigns, and all the other buffoonery that I've described in this space on Saturday mornings, this week's award winner makes most of our leaders look like geniuses.

If you've seen a newspaper or newscast this week, then you know that the Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma to everyone in the world except the United States government, which continues to insist on using the old name, was struck by a devastating cyclone on May 3.  Myanmar is desperately poor.  It's also ruled by a brutally repressive and utterly paranoid military dictatorship.  Think North Korea without the quirky charm....  This week, as the United Nations, the United States, other Western powers, and countless NGOs tried to rush medical supplies, food, and other aid to the victims of the storm, the government of Myanmar refused to allow any outside assistance to reach the literally millions of people who have been displaced by this tragedy.  Tens of thousands are dead.  Villages have been flooded.  Drinking water is contaminated and food is scarce.  Soon the physical toll from the storm will be dwarfed by the humanitarian nightmare caused by disease and starvation.  And still the government is dragging its feet.  A few days ago it seized supplies intended for victims.

The Bush Administration's response to Katrina was a travesty, caused by incompetence and negligence.  Some would claim (and I'd find it hard to argue the point) that had that storm flooded neighborhoods inhabited by wealthy whites rather than poor blacks, the Administration's response would have been completely different.

But what the leaders of Myanmar have done to their people in the last week makes even that shameful episode in our nation's history seem a minor offense.  I get absolutely no joy or satisfaction from this, but this week's BOW Award goes to the government of Myanmar.  Take a BOW, assholes.  You've earned it.

I offer the definition because for some weeks the BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award goes to someone (or someones) who is not so much a clown as a insensitive lout or a partisan hack.  And there are examples of this among this week's nominees. (I should note here that the list of nominees is thinner than usual this week.  Not sure why.)  Certainly I was tempted to give retroactive BOW Awards to George W. Bush and John McCain to commemorate the five year anniversary of Bush's speech given aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln beneath the now imfamous "MIssion Accomplished" banner, during which he announced that major combat activities in Iraq had ended and that the U.S. and its allies had prevailed.  Of course, the mission has yet to be accomplished and the U.S. has not prevailed, and our world is a more dangerous place because of this Administration's illegal, immoral, and ill-conceived war.  So why nominate McCain for this?  Because just a month after Bush's speech on the aircraft carrier, as it began to become clear to people that the mission had not been accomplished after all, McCain said that it had.  Here's the exchange, in which McCain is challenged on the point by Fox News host Neil Cavuto (I know, I couldn't believe it either):
NEIL CAVUTO: "Senator — after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn’t over.

McCAIN: "Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it’s very appropriate."

Now, of course, McCain claims that he always thought that the banner had been inappropriate, yet another McCain flipflop which is almost cause enough to give him this week's award.  But there will be no award for Flippy McSame this week.

Back to that definition of "buffoon."  You want clowns?  I present to you the crew at "Fox and Friends", Fox's morning "news" program.  Remember earlier in the week when Hillary Clinton was challenging Barack Obama to a "Lincoln-Douglas" style debate?  This phrase -- "Lincoln-Douglas style" refers to a series of seven unmoderated, unscripted debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race, in which Lincoln, the Republican, lost to Douglas, the Democrat.  The debates are still viewed by historians as a high-point in American political discourse, an example of what might happen when two public servants possessing keen intellects and uncommon speaking talent presented their divergent views on crucial issues of the day, unfiltered.

Sounds nice, doesn't it?

Anyway, the idiots at Fox and Friends thought it would be funny to tell one of their interns to dig up video of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Of course there is no video, and the Fox and Friends anchors yukked it up on TV the other day, at the expense of the hapless intern who didn't know that the video he was searching for didn't exist.  (We can save for another day the discussion of what this story says about the way our schools teach history.)  But what happened next is truly remarkable.  The Fox and Friends folks put up a graphic with pictures of Lincoln and Douglas.  Except they didn't put up a picture of white politician Stephen Douglas.  They put up a picture of former-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Here they were making fun of their intern for not knowing that there wouldn't be video of a debate held in 1858, but they didn't know which Douglas(s) Lincoln debated.  Apparently it never occurred to them that there weren't any African-Americans, former slaves at that, running for the U.S. Senate two years before the Civil War.   Apparently it never occurred to them that even if a former slave had been running for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he wouldn't have been running as a Democrat, since at the time the Democratic Party was the pro-slavery party.  The Republicans, of which Lincoln was one, were the abolitionist party.

For managing to screw up so royally, I present this week's BOW Award to the people at Fox and Friends.  Take a BOW guys; you've earned it.  And then I'd suggest you take a quick look at your kids' sixth grade history textbooks....

Good morning from Richmond and RavenCon.  Fun Friday night, though very busy.  I was on panels at 4:00, 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00, and moderated three out of the four.  Plus we had Opening Ceremonies at 8:00.  Today is slightly less crazy.

Without further ado...

Today's BOW Award nominees include Bill Clinton, who actually receives two nominations:  One from me, for suggesting earlier this week that during the lead-up to the South Carolina primary Barack Obama and the Senator's campaign had "played the race card" against Bill.  First of all, at the time Obama was up in the polls in South Carolina by double digits -- he didn't need to bring up race, and in fact might well have been hurt by doing so.  Second, someone needs to remind Bill (who I used to like very much) that he's not running for President.  It's Hillary's campaign, Bill.  Please be quiet.  Bill was also nominated by my friend Mark Wise for (to quote Mark) "his claiming that since his office is in Harlem that he could not possibly ever be accused of being racist."  Didn't see the quote, Mark.  But it's definitely BOW worthy.  Thanks for the nomination.

To be honest, I thought that the McCain Campaign had this thing sewn up earlier this week -- actually last weekend, when it came out that they were claiming in a fundraising letter that Hamas (yes, that Hamas -- the Middle East terror organization) wants Barack Obama to be President and that this was why recipients of the letter should send money to John McCain.  McCain often claims that he wants to run a different kind of campaign, that he won't resort to smears.  But he's basically saying here, "Vote for me, because the terrorists support my opponent."  Lovely.

But while I had been prepared to give the award away, I should have known better.  It's never over, til it's over.

On Wednesday, www.crooksandliars.com reported that Tony Zirkle, a Republican candidate in Indiana's 2nd Congressional district, showed up at a Neo-Nazi celebration marking Adolph Hitler's 119th birthday.  I'm not even sure what to say here.  This is so breathtakingly stupid, not to mention offensive, that you'd think that it would be a shoe-in for the award.  It's also very much in keeping with other aspects of Zirkle's . . . let's say "quixotic" campaign for Congress.  He has also proposed a new segregation plan that would give African Americans six states to live in, apart from white America.  According to Zirkle this would help everyone, since blacks would then have twelve U.S. Senators rather than just one.  Republicans in Indiana would rather one of the other Republican candidates got the nomination.  Democrats, not so much....

But as much as I wanted to give this award to Herr Zirkle, something happened yesterday that was far more serious and disturbing and thus worthy of this week's award.  Again, I refer you to www.crooksandliars.com for details, but basically, in the wake of the election problems our nation encountered during the 2000 and 2004 elections, Congress has been trying to pass a bill that would address some of the more egregious issues and, perhaps most importantly, help local governments pay for voting audits and paper records of all votes cast in Federal elections.  Republican members of Congress on the House Administration Committee voted unanimously in favor of this bill in early April.  But yesterday those same members, along with the vast majority of Republican House members at large voted against sending the same bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote.  The elections of 2000 and 2004, regardless of whether you believe that the final results were skewed or not, left a good many Americans feeling that they had been disenfranchised and many more wondering whether our democracy is working as well as it should be.  Congress had an opportunity here to put many of those doubts to rest.  By voting against this bill, House Republicans leave themselves open, at best, to charges of insensitivity to these legitimate concerns.  At worst, this vote smacks of crass partisanship.  It's as if they're saying, "The system may be broken, but it's working to our advantage, so let's not fix it."  Shame on them.  For those committee members, this a flip-flop for the ages, and I hope their constituents hold them accountable come November.

In the meantime, this week's BOW Award goes to Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Take a BOW there guys.  You've earned it.

I leave tonight for Richmond, Virginia where I'll be attending RavenCon.  I have a panel tomorrow at 4:00 pm and I lose an hour to a time change along the way.  So it's either leave tomorrow morning at about 5:00 am, or I get part of the drive out of the way this evening.  I don't like waking up that early....

Tune in to http://magicalwords.net tomorrow for a guest post by Alethea Kontis, Ingram buyer by day, New York Times bestselling author by night!

And, yes, I will be giving away a BOW Award on Saturday.

First on our list of possible winners is Bob Johnson, founder of BET (Black Entertainment Television) and a Hillary Clinton supporter, who said this week that Geraldine Ferraro was right in saying that Barack Obama had an easy path to the White House because he's black.  (Some of you may remember that Ferraro won a BOW Award for her comments.)  Here's what Johnson said: 

"What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called 'Jerry Smith' and he says I'm going to run for president, would he start off with 90% of the black vote? And the answer is, probably not."

What's wrong with this you ask?  Well, first of all, I don't care who you are or what color your skin is, making broad race-based generalizations is just a bad idea.  But it's a particularly bad idea when you have your facts wrong.  If you'll remember, Obama didn't start with 90% of the black vote.  He didn't even start with 50% of the black vote.  Early on, Hillary Clinton was attracting overwhelming support from the African-American community, which still thought of Bill Clinton's Presidency as a high water mark for racial enlightenment in the White House.  (One has to wonder if Bill's legacy has survived this campaign.)  People were asking (ridiculous though this might seem) whether Obama was "black enough" to win over African American voters.  It took his victory in Iowa and his strong finish in New Hampshire (both of which are overwhelmingly white) to convince black voters that he could win.  That's when African American voters started supporting Obama in big numbers.

Our second nominee is none other than George W. Bush, who admitted in an interview given last Friday that the next attack on the United States was probably being planned by ter