What Stood Out This Week - 7/6-7/12

How many screw-ups does it take to sink a presidential candidate? Well, that depends. Is your name John McCain? Let's see What Stood Out This Week...

The Democrat

Barack and Hillary are raising money for each other, and nothing unifies like money.

Of course the big story this week--in all of its campaign relevancy--was that Jesse Jackson expressed interest in castrating Obama. Well, that doesn't sound very Christian, Reverend.

Apparently, Reverend JJ thinks Obama's getting a little condescending with his talk about responsible fatherhood within the black community. And Reverend JJ believes that the best way to handle it is to remove Barack's testicles.

Castration is a very controversial subject. There are some in the criminal justice system who want to see if it helps keep serial rapists and child sexual abusers from committing their heinous acts. But this is the first time I've heard it suggested for condescension. Boy, that Reverend Jesse Jackson has bold solutions. This is probably why he won the South Carolina primaries in 1984 and 1988.

I was most surprised by his use of nuts, as slang for testicles. Balls certainly would've been more predictable. And I've always been partial to cohones.

But at some point this week, nuts became one of the so-called "seven dirty words." They wouldn't even print nuts in the Associated Press article about it.

I find this very disconcerting, as I'll now have to censor myself when writing about n***s, whether discussing the p****t, a****d, w****t, p***n, h******t, or b****l n*t.

Other than that, I'm convinced that Obama is, in fact, another centrist, and that the progressive movement projected everything onto his blank-slate (and lovely) rhetoric. Still, it's up to progressives to push (pull?) him further to the left on a few key issues. They certainly have a better chance of doing that with Obama than with McCain.

The Republican

John McCain had a very, very bad week, but mostly it seemed like a normal week because he got away with everything. (I read a Ten Things That Should've Sunk the McCain Campaign article on the Huffington Post, so the overarching theme for that sentence is not original. This article confirms the one I linked to from The Nation last week or week before about how much the media loves John McCain.)

Just in this past week...

- John McCain called Social Security an absolute disgrace.

- One of his top advisers said that we're a country of whiners (yes, he insulted the entire country) and that the poor economy is purely psychological (no, his campaign's not out of touch with those actual high gas prices and food costs).

- McCain made the absurd claim that he'd balance the budget, somehow linking it to a victory in Iraq. His own economic team thinks that's a load of crap.

- Upon hearing that Iran's biggest export from the United States is cigarettes, McCain cracked something along the lines of "Great, maybe cigarettes will kill the Iranians." John's wife demonstrated some self-control on his behalf and gave him a poke in the back for that one. McCain consistently dehumanizes the Iranian people, and it disturbs the shit out of me, and he never gets called on it.

Those are a just a few examples of seemingly major campaign fuck-ups that the media is letting slide. If Obama had done any one of those things, the media would've eaten him alive.

And then there was an LA Times article that revisited John McCain John-McCaining his first wife. Um... He had his wedding license with Cindy before he was full divorced from Carol. Go figure that John McCain would have two wives but Mitt Romney only ever had the one.

This Week's Argument

Nothing Stood Out argument-wise this week. They traded some barbs about economics, but the media didn't much care about that. It is, after all, an actual issue of substance, and who wants to hear about that crap?

Well, that's quite a lot for What Stood Out This Week. It's summertime, B&E readers, so go out to the ballpark and eat some p*****s and Cracker Jacks, while in the dugouts, the players and coaches munch on some s*******r s***s.