Calling John McCain a "maverick" for his latest move might seem a little overblown. But "decent"? Sounds right to me.
After the ugliness of the past day-and-a-half--Obama wears turban! Obama is Somali 'native'!--I was starting to worry that I'd be forced by mid-March to opine on Photoshopped
images of the candidate playing poker and smoking cigars with Ayman
al-Zawahri, Khalil Sheikh Mohammed and Cat Stevens. But the presumptive Republican nominee's behavior at a campaign
stop today in snowy Cincinnati hinted that my future won't necessarily be quite so bleak.
As
a presidential candidate, you don't always know in advance who's going
to introduce you at a rally. Most of the time, the opening acts are
innocuous; a Lindsey Graham here, a local alderman there. But recently,
a few of these folks--like union president Thomas Buffenbarger, who
prefaced Hillary Clinton's Feb. 19 remarks in Youngstown, Ohio by
comparing Obama to “Janus, the two-faced Roman god of ancient
times"--have been less than helpful. Enter Bill Cunningham. Tapped to
introduce McCain at today's event, the local conservative radio host
dedicated most of his allotted time to--you guessed it--slamming the
senator from Illinois. "At some point in the near future the media...
is going to peel the bark off Barack Hussein
Obama," Cunningham said. "Maybe
[they'll] start covering Barack Hussein Obama the same way they covered
Bush." Later, he repeated Obama's middle name yet again. Because when
it comes to linking your political rival to a bloodthirsty dictator--you don't hear a lot of "John Sidney McCain" on right-wing radio--nothing does the trick like mindless repetition.
Frankly, I've long expected
that "Hussein" would be a staple of Republican rhetoric between now and
November--i.e., a word that the candidate himself would never say, but
also never condemn. So I didn't expect McCain to do what he did next:
apologize, and apologize profusely. According to First Read, "before
reporters could even ask about the
provocative speaker, McCain addressed the issue, saying he repudiated
the comments and has respect for his Democratic opponents." "I never
met Mr. Cunningham," said McCain, "but I will make sure nothing like
that ever happens again." He apologized three times in all.
So there you have it. McCain says that using "Hussein" as a political jab is out-of-bounds. Now if only Hussein-mongers Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill Bennett would agree.
I'm not holding my breath.
