Much ado about that one

When I got up this morning and checked the news, what jumped out at me was a sudden, overwhelming degree of interest in two words that barely made a blip on my personal radar screen last night: "--that one." If this isn't a teapot tempest extraordinare, somebody pour me up a cup of Earl Gray with two lumps of sugar.

Was McCain being belittling? Sure, in a sense. Any parent should be intimately familiar with the uses of the term "that one." It's generally directed at a child who is being maddeningly unruly. It's not unfriendly, just bemused and perhaps a little frustrated. Was McCain attempting to reduce Obama to subhuman status? I doubt it. Was he addressing Obama as the wet-behind-the-ears kid he is who has repeatedly not only failed to learn from those with a little more life experience than he has but has had the unmitigated hubris to dismiss them entirely while aggressively promoting his own dangerously naive worldview? Very probably. And with that in mind, I think McCain could have gotten a lot nastier than "that one," had he chosen to do so.

Stop looking for macacas where none are, all you mediacs. Or at least be even-handed. It seems to me that the attempts by the Obama campaign to portray McCain as a doddering old computer illiterate are at least on a par with an off-the-cuff "that one" in an unscripted exchange.