McCain told a RAPE APE joke back in 1986. This campaign is going to break the concept humor entirely by the end.
That is a fucking crappy-ass joke. I don’t even know if it qualifies as humor.
“This lady got RAPED, and she liked it! HAW HAW HAW!”
Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
Sharing twenty year old and hurtful yet unsubstantiated rumors about the opposition party’s candidate? You’re making Obama cry.
I liked, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”
Class act.
Very Presidential.
Even I, an obsessed Obama fan, don’t give a rat’s ass about what McCain said 20 years ago. I’ve moved on in twenty years, so can he.
We’re not exactly seeing signs pointing towards his sense of humor having evolved, though.
Obviously the youthful indiscretion of a 49-year-old man.
Except for the whole bit about it being unsubstantiated rumor at the time:
“It’s pretty obvious to us that this is a politically motivated sideshow,” Torrie Clarke, McCain’s spokeswoman at the time, said back in 1986. Till this day it has never been proven definitively true or false whether the Senator ever said the line.
It is the 22-years-ago equivalent of “I heard it on the internet, so it must be true.”
This is not what makes this story completely and utterly fucking stupid. What really makes this digging deep into the realm of psychotic dumbassery is the fact that McCain has said, says and will continue to say – and on the record, no less – plenty enough things to damn him from ever winning the presidency. But by trying to oversell the case by repeating a 22-year-old rumor that no one, even those who reported it, seems to have actually heard him say, it reeks of the sick desperation of a lost cause. It makes Obama supporters look like a bunch of loonies. And now McCain supporters can point to this and say, “What, you support Obama? What’s wrong with you?” and have a legitimate point.
The moral of the story is, being right doesn’t give you a License To Stupid. It is not a Get Out Of Dumbfuck Free card.
Rimbo, did you read the article?
The Huffington Post reached out to the original reporter in that story, Norma Coile (who after talking to multiple sources months after it was told wrote about the response to the rape joke in the Tuscon Citizen) to find out if she thought it was true.
“I’m not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said. Enough women repeated it to me at the time and the McCain campaign had a non-denial denial,” said Coile, now with the Arizona Daily Star. “It came after his ‘Seizure World’ joke, in which he referred to the [retirement community] Leisure World as Seizure World… I just think it reinforced this idea that John McCain is humor-challenged. Whatever his qualities, he seems to have a tin ear for how these jokes will go over.”
I like the Seizure World line. Quick, to the point, everyone gets it.
Yeah, old people never vote anyways. Mock away Johnny.
did noone in this thread bring up the retardedly retarded BOMBOMBOMBOMBBOMBOMIRAAAAN! thing?
???
So far this is the one McCain thread that hasn’t been brought up in. WHOOPS!
Yes, do you comprehend that very bit you quoted? Did you notice that the women she mentions are never described as witnesses?
You yourself know right now that there are millions of people who believe in their heart of hearts that Obama is a Muslim, and their primary reason for believing it is because they are surrounded by people who believe it. Each one of them “Heard it from somewhere.” They say things like, “Obama can say whatever he wants to, I know he’s a Muslim.” This is the exact same thing.
Compound this with the age of the story – older than people who are able to vote in this election – and that spells ess tee yoo pee aye dee.
I’m not saying things like this can’t happen. In 1990, Texas Gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams was at a rainy outdoor event with some members of the press, and was heard by all to have said, “This weather’s a lot like rape; you can’t do anything about it, so you might as well enjoy it.” This act of idiocy (compounded with his “refusal to shake hands with an alcoholic” at a debate) pretty much led to Ann Richards winning the governorship of Texas that year. But in that case, we know the witnesses, we know the time and place. It’d hold up in court.
But this? This is weeeeeeeeak. It was weak in 1986; bringing it up today is so weak it actually comes back to bite you. Just lame as all get out.
If you read the original article (i.e. the one written when McCain supposedly said this) it mentions a couple of witnesses who were not available for interview but were willing to give their names to the story as witnesses to the joke. The article itself notes that there were some inconsistencies in how people reported the joke being said but that there were several people who corroborated it.
This is of course assuming that if it is true, it is somehow not lame. I mean, if McCain had been a paragon of propriety in all his speech since then, I could see this being a big deal. Like, whoa, dudes.
I mean, he probably said something just last week that we could be bitching about instead. Except that we won’t, because tomorrow he’ll say something else eyebrow-raising.