I went to bed after John McCain's exceptionally gracious, unusually eloquent concession speech, not having much interest in watching jubilant crowds celebrating their win. That speech touched all the grace notes, and went the extra mile in speaking about the wonders of a country that elected it's [sic] first black leader, just so many years after all those bad things that used to happen to African Americans, on the grounds of race.
"All those bad things"? "All those bad things"? You mean like slavery, degradation, physical assault, rape, murder, rending of families? And the war that it took to end slavery that killed hundreds of thousands? Then the decade upon decade of oppression and continuation of abuse? And the routine if much more covert abusive behavior blacks have to tolerate today? Those bad things?
You're a loser, lady. In more ways than one. Which means that she's not done yet.
The Fox News reporter who had covered the campaign, whose name escapes me,
reported, forthrightly, that some McCain aides had felt for a while that their
candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation's first
African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to
strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good. The report
was infuriating, since more depended on the election than changing the race
dynamic — which, it must be said, has been changed for some time, and did not
require this particular symbol to validate it. To be sure, McCain must have
known that his campaign was losing — and did not want to swing blindly. And
maybe he didn't like being called "erratic," "desperate", and a "racist" every
time the inconvenient facts of Barack Obama's short past came up for discussion.
But all Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months,
must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back. I
wondered, too often, how it could be that no one at the campaign could frame and
muster the arguments that were clear to all conservative writers here and at the
other publications and blogs that share our view. When the arguments were made,
they were too little, too late, and garbled enough to drain their force. The
campaign had it's [sic] (very serious) flaws, but it seems that the reluctance to aim
and shoot cleanly, was due to the candidate's internal conflict here. Contrast
that with the campaign style of the Vice Presidential candidate, who seemed
quite interested in winning, and was willing to call things by name to make the
case against the opposition.
The only lesson Schiffren gleaned from this election is that they should have called Obama worse names. It will be very entertaining to watch conservatives throw themselves further down the rabbit hole, into an upside-down world of hate and self-pity, where they can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
3 comments:
Yes, all those months of holding back. I saw nothing but restraint when it came to questioning the character and past of Barack Obama during the course of this election. Is every magazine in the world scraping the bottom of the barrel for their pundits these days? Never mind her stupid ideas, if she doesn't even know the difference between "its" and "it's," she should not be getting paid for her writing.
Fortunately, we have a record of everything they said, and I plan on repeating it as often as possible.
When K-Lo is your editor, shit happens.
That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good.
Clearly McCain handed the presidency to Obama as a gesture of magnanimity, since in Schiffren's world it would not have been possible for the dark-skinned dude to win it by himself.
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