2008 Flashback—What You Never Read About in the MSM: Obama Mockingly Imitates a Handicapped Man

A look back: Back during the 2008 campaign, one of the two contestants was not taken to account by the media for imitating, for mocking, a handicapped man — indeed, the wounded war veteran who proved to be his opponent.

From a September 2008 post:

It's one thing (one which is bad enough), as Jonah Goldberg points out, that Barack Obama and his campaign staff do not realize that

One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious.

(Jonah Goldberg goes on to ask: "what does it say about his supposedly 'cybersavvy' staffers that they don't know how to conduct a five-minute Google search?", adding that "by this logic [incidentally], Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.")

It's another thing, as Christopher Cook points out, that Barack Obama seems to intentionally mock McCain's war wounds (at 12:20 in the video).

At a moment when describing a McCain ad, Obama adds a somatic gesture to create an image of John McCain. That gesture involves changing his stance and arm position to imitate the way McCain stands—a stance the Senator developed as a result of the injuries he suffered while he was a "guest" at the Hanoi Hilton.

…The gesture was clearly an imitation of McCain—the context makes that plain. Obama makes no other such bodily gestures EXCEPT when he's creating a picture of McCain in the windmill commercial.

Obama may not have been directly saying "ha, ha, you got your arms broken and a bayonet plunged into your groin and I didn't." It doesn't matter. His way of imitating John McCain is by imitating the man's physical stance.

Barack Obama is a puerile, emotionally under-developed little man. It's appalling to think that he could be this close to the presidency.

And by the way… Let's not even go into the subject about what this says about the left's alleged undying respect for servicemen and veterans…

Oh, and by the way: while we're wallowing in the past and the good ol' times, do you remember this one?

You have heard about the Republican candidate's stooping to negative ads and hateful campaigns, haven't you? Disgusting, scandalous, going down into the gutter, etc… Well, it so turns out that the McCain campaign was doing little more than using Obama's own comparison to Paris Hilton! And that, from a Washingon Post article of three and a half years ago (merci à Arnaud) [from February… 2005!]…

"Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame," [quipped Barack Obama in February 2005]. "I've already had an hour and a half. I mean, I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse."