Okay, I know what you're thinking about Craig Crawford. He looks a little plastic -- like an action figure of a talking head horribly come to life. And on TV he comes across like an stand up comic from the fifties, the kind of comedian who warmed up the strippers, using his own nasally laugh to sell his bad jokes (sort of like McGaffe, actually).
But it turns out Crawford is stupid, too.
On his CQ Politics blog, Crawford lashes out at Obama's handling of the mixup on his VP search team.
The important part after the break:
But it was Obama's preposterous response to the scandal on Tuesday that made it necessary to dump Johnson and clear the decks.
"I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages," Obama told reporters in St. Louis. "This is a game that can be played. Everybody who is tangentially related to our campaign I think is going to have a whole host of relationships. I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters."
Obama's cavalier response utterly contradicted his campaign's supposed crusade for reform. Not only did those words come across as tone deaf to the very ethical issues that he has raised in this election, but his remarks sounded like the ethical relativism we so often hear from the Washington business-as-usual crowd that Obama claims to be running against.
I don't get it, Craig. Preposterous? Cavalier? Contradicted? Tone Deaf? I guess I'm tone deaf, too, because I don't hear it. Instead, what I heard is Sniggering Craig Crawford trying to make me think that it's any of these things.
This guy used to provide semi-interesting insight on MSNBC -- but I haven't seen him of late. Perhaps he's been vetted off the air? Craig, a piece of advice: if anyone's going to listen to you, you have to remain within the realm of possibility, and not engage in propaganda quite so flagrantly. We know you want it to be a tight race so that you'll have things to write about, but dammit, man, we won't believe anything you say just because you look plastic and giggle at us. If we're to give your opinion any weight at all, it has to at least remotely appear as though your comments comment on what you're commenting on. Otherwise, we're left speechless.
Finally, I defy Craig Crawford to provide an adequate definition of "ethical relativism" without engaging in it.