I’m not an expert on Adolf Hitler but it is my understanding that he refrained from using alcohol and tobacco, and was a strict vegetarian. That didn’t prevent him from destroying his health by use of various medications, but it does indicate that he may have been somewhat health conscious. I’m not sure what Hitler knew about the deleterious effects of tobacco, but I can imagine him encouraging Jews to smoke more as a cost-effective way of exterminating them. Even more, I can imagine him joking about such a concept. Hitler was a rotten person, and dehumanizing humor was probably about the only humor he truly enjoyed. With that in mind, I want you to watch John McCain’s response to learning today that American exports to Iran have gone up significantly during the Bush years, and that tobacco is one of our main exports that Iran is receiving.
For those of you that can’t run video, McCain’s response to learning that we ship a lot of tobacco to Iran was:
“Maybe that is a way of killing them.”
McCain followed that up immediately by saying that his response was ‘obviously a joke’. But it’s not a joke. It wasn’t a joke when he said, “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” And it isn’t a joke when he kids about ‘killing’ Iranians as a matter of official U.S. policy.
John McCain should appreciate that the Iranians have the capacity to kill American soldiers in Iraq since he accuses them of doing just that all the time. You want to give them an incentive to kill our soldiers? Keep cracking lame jokes about killing Iranians with our tobacco products.
This is a recurring theme with McCain, who famously joked about bombing Iran.
At a town hall meeting in South Carolina Wednesday, Arizona Sen. John McCain was asked if there is a plan to attack Iran. McCain began his answer by changing the words to a classic Beach Boys’ song.
“You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?” the Republican presidential candidate said. Then, he sang. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
His campaign’s defense was pathetic.
“The senator was adding levity to the discussion and the crowd reacted with laughter,” campaign spokesman Kevin McLaughlin said. “He went on to discuss the seriousness of issue.”
This isn’t a matter of whether someone has a sense of humor or not. These jokes aren’t funny. Whatever laughter they produce is strictly of the ‘uneasy’ or ‘awkward’ variety. In no universe is it appropriate to describe discussion of the bombing of foreign nations as ‘levity’. That even applies to countries with which we are actually at war. But we aren’t at war with Iran. This isn’t some bombardier’s jocularity we are talking about. This is just plain immorality masked as something unserious.
John McCain is harming our foreign relations with not only Iran but the entire international community. He’s actively endangering our troops. And he’s not making anyone other than a few egregious morons and assholes laugh with these jokes.
Dehumanizing ordinary Iranians in this way is a precursor to making war on them. It’s exterminationist talk. Maybe Hitler would understand. I don’t.
Its what separates Man from the other animals.
Huckabee admitted that his joke to the NRA was lame and offensive and apologized for it.
I heard Huckabee make this apology (when he also admitted it was lame) on the air too. He seemed genuinely contrite. The key word is “genuine.” In comparison, the only time we see the genuine McCain is when he makes spontaneous and embarrassing statements; then he’s the real McCoy (with apologies the actual real McCoy).
Muslims. They want to kill us. And what do they produce? Nothing. We should kill them all.
Words I’ve heard personally.
Half this country would blindly engage in genocide, and much more than half won’t see any problem with these remarks.
I’m digressing here, but this is why Obama has to move to the center. Half the country is, or is potentially, batshit, and that’s why McCainiac is in the low to mid 40s having not done much of anything except get associated with Bush. And McCain must be stopped at all costs.
Me, too. Many times, and not just muslims. The whole rest of the world is a candidate for extermination if it gets in the way of these people’s vision of the United States.
I think we are cursed because we made our nation by exterminating the Native Americans. It worked and set a terrible example. Even Hitler drew from it.
Is this story going big? It should.
This sparks of passive aggressive humor…the kind one learns as a POW when you want to bait your captors, but never cross into retalliation. I never get the sense we’re dealing with a healthy mind when McCain speaks.
This is just another insidious way to make it acceptable discourse to advocate killing Iranians.
Some of the people who laughed, will be repeating that joke around the water cooler.
It`s almost obvious, that when he was listening to the person speak about the amount of cigarettes, he was formulating that “joke” for his base, who were mostly all in that room, except for at least the questioner, who I hope was not part of a set-up to McAnus` guffaw inducing comic repartee. It seemed like he was waiting for his line.
How infantile is that old fool, or is this his second go-round?
does a comment like this surprise anyone? as you listed, this is just the latest. is there anyone out there that really thinks that this person is not
damaged goods”?
he has displayed his damage on numerous occasion. as to whether this comment will make its way onto the news networks-puhleeze.
It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.
The extreme corporatists have once again chosen an ass to run against a human being for president.
It’s not civil to call someone an ass, so we’re right back where we’ve been before, following the soul-less media to the slaughter.
Death is Americ’s #1 export. What better represents that than a bomber pilot who dares to appear less than civil?
Another bush indeed. Will everybody forgive that new joke?
Clearly he is a very religious person. /snark
OT: I happened to wake up with the Cokie Roberts radio network on and they had a story about how Al Franken is running ten points behind Norm Coleman and twenty points behind Obama.
I had a suspicion that it wouldn’t be as easy as it first appeared, but eight year-old irony and snark is easily misquoted and there is a large segment of the population without much of a sense of humor. Still, another six years of Norm Coleman?
Presidential material not. McSame.
McSame reads Ann Coulter, obviously, or she reads him.
I believe the term used in the left blogosphere is “eliminationist talk,” courtesy of Orcinus.
I think it was the cartoonist Tom Toles who did a piece back during the first Gulf War where a reporter asks “How many Iraqis are you willing to see die so that gas will be so cheap that you can wear nothing but your underwear in your living room?” The answer was immediate and unblinking “All of them.”
I got an idea, let’s ship GMO food and aspartame and pesticides and nuclear waste and smog and a crippled, failing economy propped up by a rotten, shit currency to kill all those Americans!
Ooops, tee hee, they already have it! JUST JOKING!
Pax
McCain is just another “kill happy” republican. It’s shameful that killing seems to be the Gop’s solution for every problem there is in the world.
Talk about a political party that has so little to offer; killing and dropping bombs is their response to everything. Surely as a country, the United States can do better than this?
“a few egregious morons and assholes” defines McCain’s market: the morons and assholes who follow the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Dobson, Oreilly, and the rest of the Rove whores.
I was trying to think of an analogy to what would happen if Obama said something parallel, only to realize anew that there is no parallel. It is unthinkable that Obama would stoop to anything resembling this. McCain and the GOP are a whole nother universe. It’s called the Dark Side. Which is why I find crap like “reaching out” and “compromise” so disgusting.
Yeah, Hitler didn’t smoke, drink alcohol or caffeine, or eat meat. And he loved dogs and he loved his mother, too. And BTW, German medical scientists during those years were the first to establish a correlation between lung cancer and tobacco use. The tobacco industry has tried to make use of that fact. So life is complicated. so what else is new?
But yeah. The important thing is: here’s good ol’ mavericky war hero John McCain facing a populace that’s really leery about one more war when it knows we’re already losing two in places where we don’t belong. So what’s he do? He tries to loosen everybody up by desensitizing them with a tasteless joke about killing people. It’s okay, John-boy, it’s them and not us. Har har. Tell us a few more. Maybe we’ll start thinking of them as inhuman demons if you keep it up. After all, it’s against the rules to question your integrity.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/294716
The above is a BitTorrent link.
And see for yourselves how ‘healthy’ Hitler turned out to be at the end of his unnatural life.
That didn’t stop him from periodically asking that physician leech him for impurities in his blood and to be reassured as to its normality.
Those ‘impurities’ may have been the genesis his own obsession with his forebears, who may have been Jewish.
Getting back to McLie–this guy has some unnatural grudges and prejudices…against Vietnamese for one. He calls them gooks years after the fact. Never mind that only some of them may have tortured him. The whole country is the locus of his contempt. So now its Iraq, too? Just what have they done to him?