Day: June 6, 2008

Like that real cold beer train that flies by . . .

This fellow read carefully where it says Obama “batted down rumors . . .  of a video of his wife using a derogatory term for white people” and picked out a key paragraph:

“We have seen this before. There is [sic] dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks [sic] me about it,” Obama said to the McClatchy reporter during a press conference aboard his campaign plane. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody [else] has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”

Asked whether he knew it not to be true, Obama said he had answered the question.

He did?

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Stick it in your pipe and smoke it

Spike Lee, criticizing Clint Eastwood for not putting black soldiers on Iwo Jima for his “Flags of Our Fathers,” wants him to rewrite history, says Eastwood.  Neither should Lee

be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood’s next picture [reports UK Guardian in an interview]. “Changeling” is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city’s make-up was changed by the large black influx.

“What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin’ story about that?” he growls. “Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like “Bird,” I use 90% black people.”

He has “a last word of advice” for Lee:

“A guy like him should shut his face.”

Later:

Lee responds, denying he wanted a black Marine in the flag scene and claiming backup to his critique (UK Telegraph cites other sources) but not helping his cause by tossing “not on a plantation” chestnut and “angry old man” accusation.

Cripes, he’s only 78.

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News that fits

Telling:

“The New York Times won the Pulitzer for revealing the fact of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Now, with all due respect to being here in the National Press Club with a lot of my friends in the press, I thought the idea that The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize, one of the highest awards in journalism, for revealing one of the nation’s most important secrets and telling the enemy how it was we were intercepting their communications, frankly was less than honorable. It bothered me, greatly” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking Monday at the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize Luncheon.

It’s the narrative, you see: U.S. bad, we citizens of the world, comfy except when Spider Man climbs on our aerie roost.

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