The closing days of this election will be remembered, of course, for the way in which John McCain plucked one man from relative obscurity, setting him before the American public as a symbol of all the reasons you should vote Republican, not Democratic, this Tuesday. I'm talking, of course, of "Rashid the Respected Palestinian Scholar", aka Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia university professor who, I can exclusively reveal, does not hold an Ohio plumbing license. (But who did, we learned, co-found an organisation that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money from a foundation chaired by John McCain.) Awkwardly, however, McCain's use of Khalidi in his campaigning seems to have triggered a concerted effort to purchase copies of the professor's largely well-received book, The Iron Cage: The Story Of The Palestinian Struggle For Statehood, which is now at 122 in Amazon.com's ranking of all books sold. The election-season re-release of McCain's Faith of My Fathers, by contrast, is at 2,600. This is amusing.
