Redistribute-Gate: McCain Knocks Equality?

John McCain's latest attempt to paint Barack Obama as the second coming of Chairman Mao (sorry, the 3rd. Wasn't John Kerry the 2nd?) relies heavily on an out of context (of coooourse!) quote from a 2001 radio interview. In the interview, Obama utters the phrase "redistribution of wealth," and the McCain campaign collectively soiled themselves with glee. The McCain campaign is using the interview to say that Obama favors socialism.

Of course, the lie is halfway around the world already, but I'll do my best to break this down to its simplest element. Politico and Anrew Sullivan go into much greater detail on this, but I want to boil it down to something you can repeat at the watercooler.

The WBEZ radio interview was a scholarly discussion of civil rights and Constitutional law (and this was their "Morning Zoo," for crying out loud), and what he was actually saying is that the courts, or "judicial activism", are the wrong vehicle for "redistributive change." The changes he was talking about were remedial, things like education inequality, changes to correct an acknowledged injustice. McCain is criticizing him for it, so I guess, by McCain rules, he opposes education equality.

See, folks, context matters. John McCain implied, once, that women enjoy being raped by apes. Now, I could quote him out of context, but that would be wrong. His remarks were in the context of a joke, so what he was really saying is, "Wouldn't it be funny if women enjoyed being raped by apes?"

Maybe that's a bad example. Here's a more well-known one. McCain said we should stay in Iraq for 100 years. The context, though, was only in a Spock-with-a-beard, Superman's-a-jerk, bizarro Iraq where no Americans die. See? Context is everything.

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" , on BlogTalkRadio Tues - Thur at 9pm, and Fri, & Sat at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.