The WashPost today delivers an astonishingly excellent editorial in support of the scholar Rashid Khalidi. It is harshly critical of McCain's reprehensible attacks:
For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear.
One thing to be hoped for in a putative Obama era is that under morally decent leadership, this country and its political/media establishment will grow out of the habit of assuming the worst about anyone with an Arab-sounding name, itself part of a broader nativism that is driven by conservative definitions of what constitutes a real or good American. Khalidi was born in this country, as the Post points out, and is as American as Joe the Unlicensed Repairman and AWOL Country Singer. We desperately need political leadership that asserts that sort of thing plainly and without apology.
OK, now Mike the Pundit has to write a column for the Saturday print paper, expressing his down-home pundit values -- his taste for a complex pinot noir, some crisp arugula, gruyere imported from France (natch) and various alien ideologies. Later today I have to catch my flight back home (again, naturally, merely flying over middle America rather than setting foot in it). But I'll try to put up a few more posts and do a video in between. Cheers.
