Sigh. How many times do we have to pray that we get a president smarter than George Bush? No. Really. Talk about a God who works in mysterious ways.
What did Republican candidate for president and Arizona Senator John “I’m so experienced in foreign policy” McCain say this time? (You know I find something outrageous when I’m at this level of snark.)
Oh – just this little tidbit, covered by MSNBC, Huffington Post and JTA, among others. From JTA:
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Purim is the Jewish version of Halloween during his Israel visit.
McCain was corrected by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), one of the Republican presidential nominee’s chief supporters who accompanied him on the trip, according to MSNBC.
In a news conference Wednesday with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak following a tour of the besieged southern Israeli city of Sderot, McCain had noted the impact of continued rocket fire on the city’s children.
“As they celebrate their version of Halloween here, they are somewhere close to a 15-second warning, which is the amount of time they have from the time the rocket is launched to get to safety,” McCain said. “That’s not a way for people to live obviously.”
Lieberman at the news conference said the fault was his, as he had compared the two holidays in explaining its significance to McCain.
Lieberman reinforces just how little McCain’s foreign policy experiences matters with the fact that rather than describe the holiday as it actually is, he figured that McCain would only be able to absorb or “get it” if he (Lieberman) used the Halloween analogy.
As a Jew, I’ve mentioned how kids dress up for Purim like kids dress up at Halloween. But I have never told anyone that the holiday is the Jewish version of Halloween.
The only reason anyone would describe the holiday that way is because they don’t think the listener has the capacity to understand the holiday in any other terms.
Remember the British teacher in Sudan who was jailed for letting the kids name a teddy bear Mohammed? When it was obviously a simple cultural mistake? And thousands of the country’s citizens rioted and wanted her killed?
I’m really not wanting our next president to be neutralized that way.
PS – I want to add that if he or any of his staff or volunteers had been reading my blog posts about Purim, they would never have made such a mistake.
VSAS: 8 [For readers unfamiliar with Writes Like She Talks, VSAS is the Vessels Sarcasm Alert Scale, named in honor of blogger Eric Vessels of Plunderbund. Eric is an Ohio blogging buddy who once thought I was being serious when in fact I was being completely lowball in relation to what some very conservative Ohio GOP blog was trying to do. He suggested that I give a warning whenever I was using humor because most of my regular readers just don’t expect that kind of underhanded post from me. Thus was born the VSAS.]