You know, maybe I am just dimwitted, as we have discussed the Republican attempts to portray Obama as an elitist and out of touch multiple times, and we have John McCain’s inability to use the internet endlessly, but I never put the two together until I saw a Jeanne Moos piece on CNN.
It just makes the attempts to portray Obama as elitist and out of touch all the more brazen, doesn’t it? They are trying to portray him as out of touch, when their guy, John McCain, can’t even use a computer. John McCain can’t use an instrument most of use every day. Who is it who is out of touch?
cleek
the entire GOP
over_educated
Fortunately though, he is aware of all internet traditions.
Blue Raven
My mother is only three years younger than McCain, and it’s all I can do to get her to stop forwarding me that blasted “pass this on to 10 friends” and “Jesus loves you” bulk email. Her accounting clerk career started in the pen-and-ink days, but when it computerized, she followed along with it and remained adept at her job until she was old enough to take her pension and run. Someone McCain’s age has no excuse to be this uneducated.
El Cid
It is perfectly within the rightwing / mainstream nexus of culture if a millionaire executive on his way back from golfing at an exclusive resort leans out of the window of his custom Cadillac Escalade or what have you and yell at some broke hippie dirty fringe protester as an “elitist”. There is no contradiction. There is no irony. There is no hypocrisy.
For the last 30 years brazen kissing up to the absolute wealthiest, most powerful people and corporations has been portrayed in the rightwing / mainstream nexus as gutsy rebellion against those stuffy ivory tower fringe types, and precious few in pundit positions seems to notice that it’s not gutsy rebellion but brazen kissing up.
Gus
That is never going to get old.
John Cole
FWIW, I grew up in a college town, and but for a few years overseas in the military and a couple years after undergrad while I ran a store, I have lived in a college town my entire life, and I have never seen an ivory tower.
Gus
My dad is 84, and he sends me all the “Is Obama the Antichrist?” emails he gets sent to him by his wingnut pals. I sometimes wish he didn’t know how to use a computer.
Zifnab
That’s because you’re too busy looking down your nose at us from your cushy Starbucks coffee house.
Zifnab
Also, I would argue that a lack of computer expertise by definition disqualifies you from being l33+. McCain probably wouldn’t even make +0+41 n3\/\/b status.
jake
Because the GOP still operates under the premise that computers take up a large room and are only used by egg-head Al Gore types.
Duh. The PETAphiles made the other elitists take them down! /fRightWingNut.
khead
There are ivory towers @ WVU. They are just disguised by the layers of coal dust.
ThymeZone
When my mother was McCain’s age she started unplugging kitchen appliances because she feared that electricity was leaking out of them and getting into the house.
She insisted that a replacement tv set NOT have a remote control, because she hated remote controls, even after I explained that they don’t make tv’s any more without them.
She had the windows in her house painted shut, to keep bugs out.
But I swear, she would have made a great president.
smiley
My mid 70’s father really tries but just doesn’t understand computers. He does email, however, and has minimal internets capabilities. My mother stopped trying.
All of these are pretty much all I get from my father. And he believes everything he reads on the internet, which makes matters worse. In ’04 he sent all the anti Kerry swift boat stuff which I immediately debunked. This year he’s not sending any of the anti Obama stuff though I’m opsitive he’s getting it. I kinda miss it.
El Cid
Oh, c’mon — sometimes those bell towers are made out of fairly light colored stone or brick, and even though professors don’t hang out there (especially when shooters haven’t nested there), they pass by them and look up at them, so, you know, they mentally look down on other people.
And having a professor think he or she is smarter than you is like 50 million times worse than a billion Cambodian killing fields combined with the death of the Sun, and I only say that because I despise hyperbole more than time itself could contain.
ThymeZone
That explains the hyperbole you write.
Heh.
Incertus
My parents are also fairly technophobic, but they have the internet as well and come by the blog–they never comment because they don’t talk to me as I am an unrepentant sinner, but I see their IP address on the old Sitemeter and my sister confirmed that they pop by.
You have to realize that they are not quite young-earth-creationists–that level of science-dumb–and yet they have internet usage capability. They’re nearly McCain’s age too, so there’s no freaking excuse.
Shinobi
John, haven’t you been to Pittsburgh and viewed the Cathedral of Learning at UPitt? Or as us CMU students called in the Phallic Symbol of Ejucashun. It might have been ivory once, but nothing in Pittsburgh stays white for long.
Just Some Fuckhead
My mom is old, rightwing and computer-illiterate but she managed to forward along every Kerry smear in 2004. This time around, not so much. Once a week, I forward her a virus attachment disguised as a picture of the grandkids. She loves those attachments but she says she has a hard time doing anything nowadays with the computer because it runs so poorly.
El Cid
I am aware of my internet traditions.
ThymeZone
So, that’s how you are?
Note to self, redirect JSF mail to spam folder ….
RSA
If this were translated into English, I’d agree. While “elite” is “out of touch”, it’s not the only way to be out of touch. When even homeless people are going into public libraries to use computers, McCain’s not knowing how to use a computer, given his job, is pretty pathetic.
Chuck T
John, you didn’t see The Neverending Story? There’s a big hackin’ Ivory Tower in that movie. And since most Conservative foreign policy is dictated by 24, it’s probably safe to assume they believe Liberal FP is based in fantasy films as well.
I just wonder when they’ll get around to claiming the big flying dog is a biological WMD and must be shot down.
From the Moos piece, I did like the businessman on the street’s insistence that McCain “has people for that.” Yes. Because the past eight years have taught us the value of someone having things read for them. Works friggin’ wonders for the whole damn country.
SpotWeld
McCain.. available to answer the 3:00am phone call, as long as it isn’t to his cell phone.
rawshark
I remember a past president being amazed by supermarket scanners.
jenniebee
John McCain is a non-elitist Average American(tm) and like other Average Americans(tm) he doesn’t need to use a computer because he has people for that.
Obama is Elitist and out of touch because, well come on. Average Americans(tm) don’t have names like “Barack Obama.” He thinks he’s so smart and better than us and stuff, donchaknow.
Gawd. I have serious reservations about Obama, but this shit is ridiculous. There was a ready-made character attack suit waiting to be slapped on whatever Democrat emerged as victor – you would think they’d at least have to make a few alterations, do a teensy bit of custom tailoring before they tried this one on him. They’re running out of ideas and getting sloppy, not just on policy, but also on their character attacks. Weak.
The Thinking Man's Mel Torme
Wrong, he has hot and cold running flunkies. Much like Marie Antionette could play at being a dairy maid, McC needn’t do any actual legwork in
enrichingfilling his beautiful mind.And, good God, but am I the only one with left-leaning, senior-citizen parents? My late father couldn’t grasp the mechanics of using the computor, but found the internets aces. He especially liked the prints I would run off of profane screeds from Kos and the like. My mother still reads them online, and bats back the multi-forwarded e-mail tripe from her friends with vigor.
John Cole
****SCREAM******
That is an urban legend, started by a bullshit hit piece by the NY Times.
rawshark
The suit is fashioned according to whoever is the republican candidate not the democrat. Its based on projection. McCain is the grandson and son of admirals, he married rich, can’t work a computer…Obama is an elitist!!
rawshark
Settle down. It doesn’t have to be true for me to remember it.
Batocchio
Well put. When will the Democratic Party or Obama campaign start paying you for ad advice? ;-)
JGabriel
John Cole:
I think your missing the point, John. You’re assuming that the GOP is simply recycling the same ‘elitist’ meme that they used against Kerry in ’04. They are not. ‘Elitist’ has a fairly different meaning when applied to a scion of the Forbes fortune than it does when applied to biracial man of middle-class upbringing.
Against Obama, ‘elitist’ is GOP code for ‘uppity’.
.
Original Lee
C’mon, John, you know Obama is an elitist – he’s got an iPod, while McCain shows he’s a man of the people by sticking to his transistor radio.
Andrew
The fact that this story (which has been kicking around the web for the past few weeks) s getting this amount of air-play on CNN says to me that the media tide has turned. Makes me feel pretty good about Obama’s chances. I can’t recall any news stories that took this type of mocking tone against GWB in 2000 or 2004.
rawshark
And I voted for him.
Stooleo
So everybody has heard what Rove said about Obama and the country club stuff. What really blew me away was how he packaged it for the British press. This from Dan Abrams.
“you have probably seen this guy a London parties, trailing ash from a fashionable cigarette into the carpet and making snide remarks about someone ‘being and abominable bore'”
about 3:15 on the video.
lutton
um, yeah, that snopes article is pretty vapid; between the he said-she said tone of it and the editorial side trip to an amazing imaginary behind the scense look at disneyland, it doesn’t really convince me one way or the other
the quote “This is for checking out?” attributed to GHW Bush certainly seems like he was somewhat unfamiliar with the technology
Kevin
Are you sure it doesn’t have a series of vacuum tubes?
J. Michael Neal
My father is 66, and was taking me to the computer lab in 1974. Granted, that was while he was teaching at Harvard, so he is a pointy headed elitist, albeit not terribly liberal.
I did get to have fun playing with the punch cards, though. Nothing like the era where you could ruin your computer program by dropping it and getting it out of order.
John Cole
Some of my favorite memories as a kid were running around the psych lab at Bethany college, doing experiments in the rat lab, and playing at the computer center. the old teletypes, the punch cards, and we even had a robot in the early 80’s. I remember the Pr1me mainframe with the dummy monitors were awesome, too. SSTREK and ADVENTURE FTW.
I think I knew basic, pascal, fortran, and dabbled in machine language by the age of 13. It was a lot of fun.
XYZZY.
bago
Gratuitous lap-dance footage FTW!
gopher2b
Apparently Obama said this yesterday:
“I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution,” \
He’s fading fast in my mind. Someone needs to tell him that if he doesn’t win West Virginia and Kentucky, he can still win the election. At some point, being “political” just becomes “politics of old.”
This has not been a good week for him.
J. Michael Neal
Yeah, it’s a damned shame when a Constitutional scholar gets it right on a question about the Constitution. I agree that the death penalty for child rape is bad policy, but the idea that it’s unconstitutional strikes me as ludicrous.
smiley
Cool. But did you publish the results?
Mazes? Lever pressing? Shuttle box? Other?
lethargytartare
too bad the snopes’ article doesn’t actually prove that.
Brachiator
McCain doesn’t use a cell phone. He is so old he uses a Morse Key to receive telegraph messages.
He’s planning on replacing this with a Telex machine any day now.
Interesting. But the GOP has already lost this one. David Letterman has a new riff called “Cool” vs “Not Cool.”
Obama is the epitome of cool.
McCain, not so much.
And that women want to buy the dress that Michelle Obama wore on an episode of The View suggests that she has passed the Jackie Kennedy trendsetter threshold.
Meanwhile, Cindy McCain gets mocked for the recipes she appropriates from other sources.
The wheels are coming off the GOP smear machine and they don’t even realize it.
gopher2b
First, who said he was wrong? I was just noting that I don’t believe him and he is doing and saying a lot of things lately to appeal to rednecks.
Second, Constitutional law is almost always about policy. It doesn’t take a Constitutional scholar to figure that out.
Cyrus
My grandmother died in 2000, but she would be older than McCain if she were alive now. She made a hobby/part-time job of doing her neighbors’ taxes, I think, and there were several books around her home on using DOS and early versions of Windows and Windows software. No, age really isn’t a good explanation for not knowing how to use a computer.
Echo without Bunnies or Men
The video is bad, but here is GHW Bush and the checkout scanner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0fIhnboptk
Tim (The Other One)
“And, good God, but am I the only one with left-leaning, senior-citizen parents?”
Well, I’m down to one and she mostly sleeps but to coin a phrase the kid’s like to use: I can dig where you’re hipping me from.
(nice handle BTW)
Just Some Fuckhead
Hey Goph, 1st rule of hole digging, stop. Obama isn’t saying a lot of things lately to appeal to rednecks, whatever the fuck that means. He expressed a similar view about child rape in a 2004 debate with Keyes.
Jon H
“John McCain can’t use an instrument most of use every day.”
Not only that, McCain is so elite *he has people to do it for him*, whereas for most people it’s a required skill to be able to hold a job.
b. hussein canuckistani
Of course you haven’t. You’re on the inside looking out.
gopher2b
You don’t know what it means, but you’re sure he’s not doing it. Thanks for the help. Baaahhh.
Wait, you mean, while he was running for elected office, he came out against child rapists. SHUT UP!! Color me persuaded.
Saying that because someone is a Constitutional scholar he must be right about the Constitution is not an argument. It’s a stupid statement.
Obama’s position on this is nonsense. Its nonsense because he is for a system that does not, and cannot exist. “Narrowly applied” in “limited circumstances”….means nothing. Obama wants to take a position where he can say he’s for the death penalty fully knowing you could never meet his criteria. Its a bullshit political position. Fine. Whatever. My point, for the slower set here, is that he is increasing taking political positions meant to appeal to the people he could not attract in the primary (non-elitists). I think its a dumb strategy because he’s selling his principles for votes he does not need.
Just Some Fuckhead
And since he held the same “appealing” position in 2004, it is clear he is not taking it now to be appealing. Get it? You tried to bust him and imply the worst motives. Instead, you got busted and exposed yer own motives. A better person would slink off in shame.
Blue Raven
My mother forwards “Jesus loves you” spam, but it doesn’t make her a conservative. She’s a yellow-dog Democrat. I know she’s voting for Obama like I know her eye color. And she managed to become a Unitarian in religious philosophy without knowing what the word meant until I brought home a brochure from a UU church I sang at in high school. So, no. Not all senior parents are right-wingers. My in-laws are another matter, but they keep staying in Bakersfield. The heat is never good for aging brain cells.
gopher2b
Okay, I’m seriously going to restrain myself and not call you names even though you deserve each one. Besides, you already appropriately named yourself.
I didn’t try to “bust him.” I never said he “flip-flopped” or anything along those lines. His position is unprincipled because its not a position at all. It wasn’t in 2004, and its not now. I should have spelled that out for you earlier. Obama’s pulling a little magic trick on you and KAZAAM its working. He might as well say he is for all taxes that are fair. Its equally uninformative.
Anyone who has lived in Illinois for the past fifteen years, and certainly anyone who is remotely interested in the law, knows that the procedure for doling out the death penalty is seriously flawed (there have been at least 10 innocent people on death row that were released from prison because they could show they were innocent). Obama knows this. His position on the death penalty is a philosophical one, not a legal one. Its the same position I have: kill the criminal when we KNOW for a FACT that he did it. The problem is we will never Know whether the accused is actually guilty. Indeed, juries are notoriously bad at this; especially when it comes to sex crimes. (R. Kelly got off and there was tape for Christ’s sake).
Now, do I really care what Obama position on Kennedy v. Lousiana is? No. My issue is that this is another example of Obama taking an unprincipled position (see also FISA, campaign finance, additional “social security” taxes) for his own political advantage. Honestly, though, your underwhelming effort to prove that I have it out for Obama says more about your poor reading comprehension and fragile ego than anything about me (biographical note: I support Obama for President, I’ve given him money; and I’ve persuaded a few of my Republican friends to vote for him).
None of this surprising for a Presidential nominee; I just thought this election was about change in Washington politics.
Thepanzer
Mages live in ivory towers, locks may live in ivory towers too. Both should be nerfed.
Thepanzer
However rogues do not live in ivory towers but should be nerfed anyway…
Loquacious Mute
There goes John McCain married to a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars and flying around in the family private jet and yet Obama is the elitist. Whenever I hear his creepy little voice eek out the same ole refrain I just want to scream. John McCain is an aging out of touch luddite, who needs to be constantly reminded that the cold war is over. Everytime I see him I hear the Rolling Stones singing:
You’re obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said baby, baby, baby you’re out of time
Well, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time
I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time
Yes, you are left out
Out of there without a doubt
’cause baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time
This should be his theme song.
HyperIon
I will vote for the Democratic nominee. However, I guess I am going to have to acquire a “Get Disappointed by Someone New–Obama 08” bumper sticker.
gershon
My mother and step father are 74 and 77, both are retired and have been computer literate since their sixties. Mom started using them in the last decade of her work life and took to the technology quickly. My stepfather has a rich internet life, conferring with friends and acquaintances via the web over many topics that interest him. I can’t understand why McCain would not wish to use this tool. It has been indispensable for at least a decade
rawshark
8 years as VP, 4 years as president. Probably hasn’t set foot in a supermarket for at least 12 years. Since he’s from a wealthy family its probably longer. Maybe its a hit piece but the fact is he was amazed by the technology. Why wouldn’t he? Its stupid to pretend this somehow disqualifies someone from office but it’s not a myth. He was out of touch and it squares exactly with McCain being out of touch. Just because you love the guy and feel it’s an attack doesn’t mean its not true. That’s how a republican thinks.