BREAKING: President Bush announced in a press conference this morning that all the "bad intelligence and all the half-assed planning for Iraq were the responsibility of White House interns.
Bush added that Fed Chair Henry Paulson will schedule a noon presser to blame the sub-prime mortgage meltdown on interns as well. Bush said that a number of federal agencies are also hastily arranging press conferences to announce that interns are also responsible for any problems that may have happened in the last seven years of Bush Lite.
Outgoing HUD Secretary Alphonso Johnson said that interns made him approach developers in a pay for play scandal in a Philadelphia housing project.
Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, on the campaign trail in Nebraska for the open Senate seat, said that interns were responsible for the skyrocketing cost of food, particularly staples like milk, bread, cheese, and eggs.
Putting humor aside for a moment, the Cindy McCain blame the intern story deserves more play than it is receiving from the MSM. IMO it is also not a truthful answer and is Clintonian in logic.
First of all, the intern did it, does not even hold water as an excuse. Even if this were true, the recipes were on the official McCain website for months. So, my question to Cindy McCain is: you blame an intern for the "mix-up, but you left those recipes up on the web site for months. Are you pulling a Michael Gerson and taking credit for other people's work, but then throwing someone under the bus when you were caught?
David Weiner, blogging on HuffPost said,:
Personally, I'm not sure how an intern can be responsible for messing up the McCain "family" recipes. Did the intern lose Cindy's recipe box only to haphazardly try to replace them with Food Network recipes? If only we could all steal and lie and lay it off on the unpaid help.
McCain 08 officials had a chuckle thinking they hoodwinked the MSM with the intern explaination. They even laughed that they docked the intern his "zero pay."
As Rachel Maddow pointed out on Countdown, the GOP has been pushing these bogus types of character issues since the 1988 election and they ought to be held to the same standards that label Barack Obama an elitist because he sucks at bowling and orders orange juice instead of coffee at a dinner.
I would ask everyone claiming mock indignation over the "bitter" remarks when was the last time they went bowling? For me it was October, 1990 (I remember because I was watching the Giants beat the Redskins). For the record, I bowled a 157, which was probably 40 points higher than I ever bowled because I was relaxed with a pitcher of beer.
I also wonder if anyone would pick weak-assed dinner coffee in a blind taste test. The only thing worse than dinner coffee is the brew they sell at gas stations cum convenience stores these days. Even McDonald's has better coffee (Newman's Own) than most dinners.
Maddow is correct in that this matter goes to the fundamental character of John and Cindy McCain. They are a Potemkin Village couple, looking nice in front of the cameras, but behind the scenes, he is calling her a trollop and "see you next tuesday" in the same sentence, mind you!
I like to cook and the Food Network is one of my favorite stations. Ethical and principled chefs like Ming Tsai always say something like..."I learned this dish from ___ and this is my take on it. BTW, he has a recipe for Napa Slaw in his , Blue Ginger Cookbook that was published in 1999. Let's face it, in writing, music, and recipes, there is much borrowing and a good deal of plagiarism.
People have been sued for less blatant violations of copyright law, but something tells me that neither the Food Network nor Quaker Oats are going to sue Cindy McCain and McCain 08 for this appropriation.
The reality is that this was a minor mishap, but the manner that the McCain campaign responded was telling as they began to lie and claim an intern was responsible. Cindy McCain said the Ahi Tuna recipe had been in their family for three generations. Now Ahi Tuna has been a trendy fish probably for less than 25 years so that is highly doubtful, unless, as Keith Olbermann pointed out to Maddow, McCain's 90 something year old mother watched the Food Network, claimed the recipe on her own, and then passed the recipe onto Cindy McCain.
Cindy McCain does not strike me as the type of person that spends hours in the kitchen. Andrew Malcolm, blogging for the LA TImes, concurs:
" Just to look at the beer distributor heiress, anyone can tell she spends five to six hours a day over the stove."
On the other hand, I am not surprised that Mitt Romney's wife, Anne, did contribute two recipes. She seems like a woman that might actually cook and enjoy doing it at that.
I still can't understand the intern blame game. So what happened, Cindy gave an intern her recipe and this kid lost it and in a panic decided to appropriate one from the Food Network. It's not like no one knows how to use the Internets and do the Google — which was precisely how a New York attorney managed to stumble onto recipegate.
Even if this were true, which I doubt, it happened at least five times, and I am willing to wager there are others out there too. Are you trying to tell us that an intern did this on at least five different occasions? Also, saying an intern did it is at best a partial truth. Maybe the intern was told to do so by someone in the campaign. That would change the face of the story big time.
My gripe is not that an intern did it, which I don't believe anyway, but that Cindy McCain willingly took credit for someone else's work and passed it off as her own. The right thing to do if in fact it was totally the interns fault, would have been to quietly remove the recipes from the website immediately. That didn't happen until the story broke two days ago, so Cindy McCain kept telling little white lies about how she loves to cook and these are my recipes. I guess you really need to disguise the fact that you are a beer baroness worth more than $100 million and not some kind of elitist like ...Cindy McCain.