True North

Molly “Ms. Sensitivity” Priesmeyer responds to Michael Brodkorb (I’m gonna pull an Eva and link to a comment) about the furor over her “McCain’s teeth” post. About the fact that Mac had his teeth bashed out by North Vietnamese goons…:

I was not aware of the fact. I simply was linking to a post that revealed “his teeth” had become a topic of discussion on the blogosphere. Buzzfeed.com is an aggregator site that collects trends of the day.

It beggars my imagination that someone - especially someone whose MNPost profile claims she writes about “veterans”, especially someone who claims to be a journalist with an interest in covering politics - can possibly not know that McCain was tortured to and beyond the limits of human endurance during his five years of captivity. Or, for that matter, that he’s a cancer survivor - and some cancer treatments play hob on a guy’s teeth.

At it beggars it even more to think she’s going to try to slink away by saying “I was just linking…”. Yesterday she said:

…it’s at least refreshing to see McCain’s teeth get a razzing (though, unfortunately, not a cleaning). It gets a little tiring listening to the same sexist cries that Hillary Clinton is just too ugly to be president. Hatin’ on the looks of all the candidates? Now that’s equality!

That’s not a “link”, Molly. That’s an endorsement.

UPDATE: Charlie Quimby leaps to the defense, with a post that basically quibbles (Quimbles?) about how many teeth McCain lost in captivity, and how they were lost (was it bad nutrition?) - and, like any good leftyblogger, finds a Bush anecdote:

One of McCain’s aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really “work out,” Bush replied, “What do you mean?”

Which might have been a little more germane had the President then followed his ignorant statement with “those broken old-man arms sure do look icky, don’t they?”

Quimby also dredges up a photo of a woman at the ‘04 GOP Convention wearing a Purple Heart bandaid - a tacky mockery of the wound that led to John Kerry’s Purple Heart - and asks:

And of course, today’s critics would never stoop to mocking a candidate’s war wounds.

I’m not sure when “I know Molly is, but what are you?” became an accepted debate tactic - but as a matter of fact, no. This critic never did; I roundly condemned that particular stunt on the air and, if memory serves, in my blog. I treated Kerry’s war service and decorations as off-limits.
Look - it’s not a the end of the world that Molly Priesmeyer was ignorant about John McCain. It’s even forgiveable (if dumb) that she mocked the candidate’s teeth; she’s built a career out of shallow, ill-informed mockery.

It’s just interesting to point out that snide, trite, shallow mockery is what passes for coverage of politics these days at the Monitor. Why, it’s like they’re just another Kos diary, or a cheap lavishly-paid version of Cucking Stool.

Quimby also allows…:

Priesmeyer’s piece was dumb and insensitive, of course, and now it belongs to the polemicists like Berg and Brodkorb, who will make much more of it than it deserves.

This sentence is worth a post on its own.

We’ll come back to that.

UPDATE AND BUMP: Someone at the Monitor (I’m gonna guess Paul Schmelzer, but it’s just a guess) gets i Steve Perry notes that the MNMon got the message; they’ve pulled the infamous “Presidential Teeth” story from the front page:

To answer the question from GOP blogger Michael Brodkorb that kicked off the controversy about this post yesterday: No, neither Molly Priesmeyer nor I was aware that McCain had had his teeth broken as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war. No, we would not have piled on with further aspersions on the appearance of his teeth if we had known.

The item was not intended to make a serious point of any sort, as we thought the headline suggested right off the bat (”The dental gap: Does McCain have presidential teeth?”). It was a bit of web ephemera that we found funny mainly for its absurdity–sort of like the videos we’ve posted from Obama Girl, the McCain Girls, and La Pequena, and items we’ve written about phenomena such as social media sites obsessed with Barack Obama. The POW backstory turns a joke noted in passing into a lousy joke. And we’re sorry for that.

Fair enough. Although the fact that this is “Web Ephemera” in the first place is sort of disturbing.

We’re also sorry that this dust-up has inadvertently provided yet another sideshow in which genuinely important questions about the candidate and his campaign are circumvented. There’s far too much of that going around.

Well, let’s be honest, here: it’s conservatives - like Michael and, incidentally, I - who’ve been holding Mac’s feet in the fire (figuratively speaking) for most of a decade now, while the media and the center-left uncritically lionized him as the “acceptable Republican”. Many of us have been asking questions about the “candidate and his campaign” since before the beginning.

But that’s another whole issue.