Opinion: In today’s pages: John McCain, satanic Democrats, bribed children
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Tired of the political conventions? Thankfully, they’re over! Still, there’s time for one more day of thoughtful commentary, or in columnist Joel Stein‘s case, mindless mischief-making. Stein, eager to create the kind of ‘faux scandal’ that resonates with the media and the public, attended a party thrown by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom at the Democratic National Convention -- clearly, a fallow field for faux scandal. He came back with a snippet of video of the evening’s entertainers, the indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, chanting ‘Satan, Satan, Satan’ in a nearly audible manner. Score!
So I’m putting the video on YouTube as an experiment to see if it, too, can be lifted from its context and used to rally the Republican base. I hope it gets ludicrously e-mailed around by the far right as proof that Obama is the antichrist, or winds up on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ or, at the very least, it merits a footnote in the next book by Jerome Corsi.
The Times’ editorial board, meanwhile, offers a mixture of praise and criticism for John McCain’s keynote at the Republican National Convention. The board liked his commitment to free trade, and credited him for ‘infusing what could have been a purely rhetorical exercise with policy prescriptions.’ But it lamented his silence on issues that he’d demonstrated his independence on, such as comprehensive immigration reform.
Elsewhere in the editorial stack, the board criticizes the world’s most powerful nations for not keeping the pledges they made to aid developing countries, and it hails Google’s Chrome browser as a sign of the growing irrelevance of Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, on the Op-Ed page, authors Wendy Grolnick and Kathy Seal blast the rapidly spreading practice of paying kids for their achievements in school:
True enough, financial incentives can elicit an initial burst of effort. But when people get paid for an activity, they start to calculate its monetary worth and other motivations -- its inherent value, fun, camaraderie or the satisfaction it provides -- fade away.
Here’s Stein’s video, by the way. Spread the word, if you can make it out:
The photo of John McCain leaving the stage at the Republican National Convention last night is by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images.