McCain's MIddle Name

Throughout the year, and amidst election fever in particular, I enormously enjoy listening to rightwing talk radio on my dial. The content is typically so comedic that I find it impossible to pass on the delight of listening to the likes of Hannity, Limbaugh and Levin (by the far the most entertaining). These characters spin the most outlandish of notions so fluently that listening to the scripted anecdotes by Jon Stewart feels utterly boring. Of course, these folks do not engage in their insanity to entertain me but to mislead millions of people, the kind of folks who take their info at its face value and run with it all the way to the slaughterhouse of rightwing politics.

The great meaty press never gives out, churning, among a myriad of others, the need to fixate on Hussein, Obama’s middle name. It is just a middle name of course. The name given to the infant Barack some forty seven years ago – what could be less consequential than that? Anything more can only be interpreted as sheer bigotry and nonsense. To conceal this fact, the Hannity and Co. resort to the oldest pandering trick in the book by calling their audience the most intelligent and informed.

This is not true, of course. So to test it, ask anybody who imbibes their on-air gibberish a simple question “What is John McCain’s middle name?” I bet nine out of ten will just blanch in response. And this is the joke I would not want to miss.

By the way, the name is Sidney, John Sidney McCain.