BY TOM TOMORROW
A Republican member of Congress Tuesday criticized NBC television’s showing of the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List,” saying its airing during Sunday family time should outrage parents.
Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was quoted in a release put out by his office as saying the airing of the highly acclaimed film took network television “to an all-time low, with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes.”
His criticism brought a response from Sen Alfonse D’Aamto, a New York Republican, who told the Senate Coburn’s statement was “shocking.”
“To equate the nudity of the Holocaust victims in the concentration camp with any sexual connotations is outrageous and offensive,” D’Amato said.
“I just wonder if Congressman Coburn is aware that there was a Holocaust, that millions of people died and it’s not something anybody should ever forget,” NBC West Coast president Don Olhmeyer was quoted as saying in Variety, an entertainment industry trade paper.
“NBC is extremely proud of its presentation of this unique award-winning film,” he said. “We think that Congressman Coburn’s statement should send a chill through every intelligent and fair-minded person in America.”
John McCain’s presidential campaign released a new television ad Tuesday that says Barack Obama is bad for families because he supports sex education for kindergartners. Obama’s campaign called the ad a “shameful” distortion.
The ad says Obama has a weak record on education and that his only accomplishment was legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners.
“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the ad says. “Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.”
But the legislation was not Obama’s, it never became law and it would have required age-appropriate information in schools. Obama has said that means warning young children about sexual predators and explaining concepts like “good touch and bad touch.”
“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.
Earlier today I wrote a post with a suggestion for an Obama ad, but what I’d really like to see is a Palin-ized shot-by-shot remake of the first half of this ad :
…but that’s not why you should vote against John McCain. Beneath all the hype is the same economic policies, foreign policies, energy policy, and dirty politics we’ve seen for the past eight years. I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message because you can’t promise change when your record is just more of the same.
Who’s the celebrity now?
In tonight’s speech, John McCain used a line I’ve heard him use more than once on the stump :
I’ve fought the big spenders in both parties, who waste your money on things you neither need nor want, and the first big-spending pork-barrel earmark bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it. I will make them famous, and you will know their names. You will know their names.
He’s already lived up to half of his promise :
As “jumped the shark” applies to television and “nuked the fridge” applies to movies, lemme just say that, in the realm of politics, the Republican National Convention really “earned the desk” last night :