Guess We Shouldn’t Have Fired The Spellchecker…

I’m not sure if that last word up there is real, but regardless, you may or may not have heard that the folks over at the Washington Times had to let some people go due to financial difficulties.  I don’t want to engage in too much schadenfreude, but apparently it’s already had an impact on the quality of their paper:

I believe it's spelled "Newark"

Why I Hate the Washington Times

I’ll let this picture with my drawn in comments speak for me:

Insinuation at its clumsiest!

Wes Pruden–Asshole

Sometimes, for a dose of the other side, it is helpful to read The Washington Times.  This is not a source I would recommend for well reasoned, thoughtful commentary from the political right.  There are far better places to go that have few if any typos on their web copy.  That being said The Washington Times, noted for being a mouthpiece of the George W. Bush administration, gives quite an insight into the minds of the “angry right,” that is the folks that tend to mobilize for town halls and tea parties.

Sometimes, like the readers they represent, the Times gets itself in trouble.  Recently, editor emeritus Wes Pruden led the foot march to the mouth when he stated that Obama had no blood knowledge about the traditions of the United States.  Ok, like a lot of other people, I don’t think presidents, standing or not, should bow to any foreign leader regardless of their pedigree.  US presidents represent the republic, whose people do not bow before any foreign leader.  That may be arrogant on our part, but it is an integral part of our national mythology that ought to be preserved.  That doesn’t mean we have to be rude, but there needs to be a compromise between what is polite and kowtowing.

So on this one point, Pruden and I meet in agreement, and I don’t think the president was above recrimination for the protocol error.  Yes, it was blown out of proportion, but then again, when have we seen a measured reaction in the media?  It’s either nothing at all or a 24 hour (insert issue here)gate.  But beyond that original sentiment, Pruden takes a right exit onto crazy highway.

Let’s start with the obvious here–his op-ed is laced with half truths, ignorance, and off topic ad hominem because I guess he’s still mad that Bill Clinton was president.  My favorite line is that the US was founded on the ideal of not bowing to foreign potentates–really, Wes?  Can you really call King George foreign when most of our founding father’s were men of English extraction?  It of course was not a revolution of a creole elite looking to secure their political and economic interests against a higher social class.  But we’re splitting hairs here, and as I said: mythology is important.

You might have heard that a lot of people were mad about the article, specifically where Pruden states that Obama can’t be faulted for not knowing how to be American, because he’s the son of a Kenyan and a woman attracted to the Third World and raised in Hawaii, all of which mean that he doesn’t know spit about being American.

Wow.  Well, a lot of people have taken issue with this, so I see no need to revisit it.  But I would like to take a look at his response.

You see, Wes Pruden heard that people were angry too–and he doesn’t get why.  All he said was that Obama’s dad was Kenyan (and now Marxist!) and that his mom liked people from the Third World (rather than Americans?).  And if you think that comment is racist, well don’t worry, he’s hiding behind the oft-used shield of “if you think it’s racist that means that you’re probably racist yourself.”  Kind of turns the idea of the editorial opinion on its head–he’s not responsible for the implications of the opinions expressed in his piece, you are for reading them in there.

Nor does he seem to pick up on the fact that one “likely” in the previous sentence doesn’t mean that he’s surmising when he says “It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about.”  Nope.  In fact, that’s not a guess at all, that’s an unequivocal statement suggesting the president is not at fault for not instinctively knowing what American is all about, like Wes Pruden does.  Because in no way in the past three years has the kind of conservatism championed by Pruden or his paper been repudiated at the polls.  It was never voted on because when conservative politicians lose, it’s because they were not conservative enough.  Or it’s because Americans, like so many rats and little children, have been lured away by the pied piper.

Of all the delicious ironies and purposeful blindness here, the best is Pruden’s charge at the “laptop cops” who are holding him responsible for his words.  These “nuts with laptops” (I am guessing they’re also Americans who lack the blood instinct to understand what real America is about) might just be anywhere to take issue with anything a person says or writes or does.  And that is completely unlike what the former editor of a second rate newspaper does in his column.

I suppose that last part is a bit juvenile, as is the title.  But coming from a guy who insists that Barack Obama is not a citizen and who takes to calling Bill Clinton “Bubba,” I don’t really see where he gets off by being mad about it.  But I’m glad he does, because if he some how lands here by Googling himself, I’d like share with him my thoughts as I would on the school yard.

Hey, Pruden: Fuck you.