Obama, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Washington Monument, Plus Britney and Paris

Bob Herbert is now far into the fever swamps of kookland.
Byron York:

I know it's been commented on elsewhere on the Web, but this exchange from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" is quite striking. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was on to explain why he thinks the McCain "Celebrity" ad is racist. "The first thing you see are a couple of images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, right? And we see an image of Barack Obama right after that," Herbert explained. And then he continued: "Do you remember any other startling images right there at the beginning? All right. There is an image right there in that very beginning of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and there is an image of the Washington Monument. Look at the beginning of that ad again, and you tell me why those two phallic symbols are placed there — POW — right at the very beginning of that ad."

The other people on the show didn't get it. "You didn't see them?" Herbert said.

"Really?" said Scarborough.

"Isn't that the Victory Column where he made his speech?" asked Jonathan Capehart and Willie Geist, referring to the structure actually portrayed in the ad.

"And also the — well, it looked like the Leaning Tower," Herbert answered. "But it's definitely a phallic symbol."

Obama's defenders on the left get pretty defensive when they're accused of venturing far afield in their quest to find derogatory messages in GOP ads. But we're in new territory now.

Bring on the men with the white coats and bring a net, this is nuts on high red wheels.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online:

It's getting loony, but then who is to say that the Leaning Tower of Pisa might not really be the Victory Column?

What was stunning about the NY Times' Bob Herbert's charge that the McCain campaign, in its satire on Obama's messianic sense of self, had deliberately inserted clips of the phallic Leaning Tower of Pisa and Washington Monument to drive home a racist trope about black men and white women was not just his embarrassing ignorance of architecture, or his infantile pop-Freudianism, or even his preemptory efforts to tie all criticism of Obama to racism and thereby stifle dissent. It was the sheer arrogance in the manner in which he persisted in his false points: "An image right there... of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and ... the Washington Monument.... You tell me why those two phallic symbols are placed there...".

If one listens to the clip, he asks rhetorical questions, and then in condescending fashion chides his bewildered panelists about their inability to fathom his own pseudo-charges: "You remember that! Alright!...Look at the beginning of that ad again! You tell me!...Pow! ...I really wish someone would answer the question!...Run the ad again and take a look at it!"

There is never any sense of humility or self-doubt that he might just not know anything about the Victory Column or campaign ads. Instead, there is a very strong sense that all he has to do is evoke the charge of racism and, presto, all facts, details, and truth thereby simply are to disappear and skeptics are to cower.

So here we are this summer: a messianic candidate, rebuked in his efforts to use the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign backdrop, then settles for the garish Victory Column, the 19th-century monument to Prussian militarism and conquest over its neighbors, and thereby provides fodder for his supporters to allege that when others use clips of his silly stagecraft they are really inserting phallic symbols in racist fashion. Orwell couldn't have thought all this up.