William Safire Sounds Kind of Racist

I, unfortunately, opened the day by reading Safire's ultimately silly op-ed on my iPhone, which left me with a terribly bad taste in my mouth. Mr. Palermo speaks for me.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/william-safire-sounds-kin_b_122786.html

With his wet-blanket op-ed in today's New York Times cutely titled "The Audacity of Hype," William Safire -- who is yet to apologize to the American people for lying about the false story of Saddam Hussein's henchmen meeting in Prague with Al Qaeda operatives -- tries to deflect the acclaim and enthusiasm of Barack Obama's historic acceptance speech. Safire only succeeds in telegraphing his own cluelessness about the most important political movement to emerge in decades in this country. He actually argues that holding the speech at Mile High stadium where 84,000 filled the place was a political error. I never thought I'd see the day when esteemed pundits criticize a political figure for generating so much excitement that he can fill a stadium with 84,000 people. Safire seems to be saying that we should diminish Obama's accomplishment because, after all, he's just a black guy.

"In this day and age," Safire writes, "it is not a huge throng wildly cheering on cue" that matters; "On the contrary, the target is the individual American voter watching a TV or computer screen at home." According to Safire, Obama's speech was a failure because it was "all too like the collectivist fantasy that opened and closed the Beijing Olympics." Memo to Bill Safire: The Obama campaign is networking via the Internet with the "individual American voter" with more skill and dexterity than any presidential campaign in American history.

Safire then matter-of-factly informs his readers that Obama's promise to end the war in Iraq is moot because "it is already ending responsibly." Oh really Bill? I haven't seen American soldiers embracing their families on the tarmac as waves of them come home. Safire, the self-proclaimed wordsmith, doesn't bother to define what he means by the word "end." I guess in Bill's view the car bombings and suicide bombings that took place in Iraq last week signal an "end" to the war.

MORE AT LINK

At least from a whore like Safire, it's expected.

Daily Show more than actually watching it (or cancelling the 11:00 recording when something else looks better). I still love Stewart, but I may just take a break from the show for a while.

This week they will go after the republicans

He asked Dean about the columns, and it didn't appear to be satire. He seemed to be genuinely on board with the whole "COLUMNS OMG!" crap.

More than a little disappointing.

who were dissing our Convention until the last day

He made jokes at the DNC in 2004 as well. I remember him airing Teresa Heinz Kerry's opening welcome in five languages and adding, "and to all our dolphin friends out there, 'Eeeeee, eeeee, eeeee". Colbert (who was on the Daily Show at the time) also made fun of the "humble origins" theme by showing Edwards saying "my father was a mill worker" and Obama saying "my grandfather was a goat herder" then adding that his father was a "turd farmer". It was funny as hell, but it didn't attack at the heart of anything substantial.

They're comedians, so they are going to make jokes. The barbs aimed at the RNC will be a little sharper, because there will be more substance behind them.

The column is terrible but I don't quite follow your charge of racism. What paragraph prompted you to believe this?