Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald

January 27, 2008

Leonard Pitts, Jr.

The Miami Herald

One Herald Plaza

Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: Obama’s “foes” – As described by you in your column in today’s Miami Herald

Mr. Pitts,

I read your column, watched some comments on the South Carolina primary on TV, and reread your column. Then I reached for my pen.

You mention, as a “non-friend”, Pat Robertson, as being “as scary as the scariest ayatollah in Iran”. I know of no ayatollah who was a Marine officer and a Yale Law School graduate. However “scary” he might be he wasn’t on TV this morning smarmily and sneeringly dismissing the winner of the South Carolina primary with the comment “Jesse Jackson won here twice” as if that cancels whatever effect a win would have on the rest of the campaign.

Those words were said by President Clinton the First.

Is he to be included in your enemies list? If not, why not?

I am not sure whether it was President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs or Czarina wanabee Hillary, the poster girl for abused and humiliated wives everywhere, who used the word “spade” when discussing Senator Obama’s candidacy.

I presume that in the pecking order of words that cannot be used “macaca” is worse than “spade”. A United States Senator, a man whose name escapes me, used it some 28 months ago and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Is “spade” OK? Has it passed muster with those who know about these things?

What would have happened if Pat Buchanan had used the word “spade” even if he was standing in a garden supply store? He would have been on the next space shuttle duck taped to the outside.

I do know that 2 weeks ago a TV gal used the word “lynch” in a way that the Word Police found to be inappropriate. She was duly flogged and then sent to the dunking pool for a week of reeducation. Hmmm? Could that be a colonial predecessor to waterboarding?

I do know that a disc jockey used inappropriate terms about a chickie basketball team. He was made to ride though town on an ass while tied to his saddle facing backwards. He had rotten fruit and vegetables flung at him by various fakers and hustlers. Then he was fired even though he had consumed 4 times his body weight in crow.

I’ve never made anybody’s enemies list. If you have some pull with the Obama campaign can you get me on it? It seems to me that he is a “clean and articulate” spokesman for the flapdoodle claptrap persiflage that gave us “midnight basketball” as s serious example of public policy. It is an inconvenient truth but smacking him around is like striking out the pitcher. It counts but not really.

I know it is audacious of me to hope that he will lean over and whack Big Bill right in his perpetually pulled pouting lip. But isn’t that what campaigns are all about? Hope and all that, right?

I never did congratulate you on your Pulitzer Prize. Walter Duranty, Janet Cook, and you. Perfect together.