A coincidence? an unfortunate oversight?  The scan below is of pages 26-27 from today’s The Independent Magazine.  Note the lips in each page–I’ve ringed in red to highlight.  An otherwise fine publication is jeopardising its reputation, it seems to me.

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A wonderfully witty piece from Robert Fisk today in The Independent, so incisively (if scarily) insightful into the reasoning machinery of the middle-American mind that I have to share it with you:

one of the funniest reports of the week, yet another investigation of Obama’s education, came from the Associated Press news agency. The would-be president, the Associated Press announced, had attended a Muslim school but hadn’t “practised” Islam.

What on earth did this mean, I asked myself? Would AP have reported, for example, that McCain had attended a Christian school but hadn’t “practised” Christianity? Then I got it. Obama had smoked Islam but he hadn’t inhaled!

… just as, I suppose, though born to a white mother and brought up in a white household, Obama is being touted (or reviled, depending on your point of view) as America’s “first Black president”, clearly the “one drop of blood” theory that, for example, dogged Warren G. Harding’s presidential campaign in 1921.

The perceptive Mr Fisk has, in drawing the implicit parallel with an allegation that arose during Clinton’s 1992 campaign, uncovered a deeper generic cognitive schema about which the likes of Sigmund Freud, Géza Ròheim and Claude Levi-Strauss could undoubtedly have written more fully and more interestingly than I can.

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