As you may have heard, some wacky Harvard professor whose title is "Social linguist" wrote an
op-ed today in the NY Times saying that those girls you see in the Hillary 3 AM ad are about to be haunted down by scary black Barack Obama, according to his reading of the "subliminal" message that none of us saw before today. The Hillary camp probably engaged in racism, he says.
Plus the main is blonde, which equals Ku Klux Klan.
Kevin Drum, an Obama supporter from the Washington Monthly magazine, had
this to say:
The online feeding frenzy against Hillary Clinton is driving me crazy. And that's despite the fact that I support Obama and, all things considered, think Hillary should probably withdraw from the race.
More on that later — maybe — but for now I just want to make one comment: the current attempts to tar Hillary as a racist have gone way, way over the top. They're revolting. Back before the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign and its surrogates really did seem to be making a few too many racially charged comments for it to be just a coincidence (though even then some of the accusations were bogus), but after South Carolina it pretty much stopped. I can't say whether it stopped for reasons of politics or reasons of principle, but it stopped.
The Daily Howler, in its unique style, went further:
Harvard professor Orlando Patterson had suffered a troubling experience. In the opening sentence of his Times op-ed piece—one of the dumbest such pieces ever written—the deeply-troubled “social linguist” begins to describe his ennui:
PATTERSON (3/11/08): On first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right—something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative.
Poor Patterson! The good professor had been “left with an uneasy feeling”—a feeling “that something was not quite right.” Unfortunately, the professor continued to ponder these matters—and he soon found himself thinking thoughts he says he “couldn’t help but think.” Result? Despite his disappointment with Clinton for having gone negative, the professor decided to go remarkably negative himself—in this, perhaps the dumbest op-ed piece ever committed to paper.
(my emphasis)
He also says that the other two girls are "vaguely Latina". (don't ask me what that means).
Just read the articles.
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