AND NANCY PELOSI IS GETTING A PASS FOR ATTACKING APPLE PIE AND FREEDOM! Matt deals with the central abject idiocy in this post by Michael Goldfarb . Obviously, nobody is mocking McCain for having security when he tours Baghdad; they're (correctly) mocking him for claiming that walking around with a bulletproof vest, a hundred troops, and air cover could tell us anything meaningful about the security of Baghdad neighborhoods.
Going for the double play of dead-ender hackery in celebration of Opening Day, however, Goldfarb also asserts that "Nancy Pelosi gets a free pass for wearing a burka." I know that Middle Eastern culture isn't terribly important in the current political context, but it seems relevant here that a burka is a head-to-toe covering that severely restricts a woman's ability to engage even in ordinary day-to-day activities. Pelosi (like Laura Bush and Condi Rice), however, actually wore ... a headscarf. (See a convenient comparison here.) Unlike burkas, they're often worn voluntarily by liberal Muslim women in secular societies. Wearing one is an ordinary sign of respect for someone's religious traditions, like a man wearing a yarmulke to a Jewish wedding or a woman wearing a veil to a Catholic funeral. So it's not surprising that people who aren't straightforward bigots are giving Pelosi "a pass," although admittedly the fact that Pelosi didn't actually do anything objectionable hasn't necessarily stopped the media before.
--Scott Lemieux
