I saw this first on Malkin’s blog and ignored it. But then I clicked on the National Review’s Campaign Spot blog and decided to do a little poking around.
To set this up: During the debate, McCain mentioned the bracelet that he wears for a soldier who was killed in Iraq. Obama then pointed out that he too wears a bracelet, given to him by the mother of a soldier with the message that Obama do everything he can to ensure that another mother doesn’t have to endure what she has.
Well, it looks like Malkin and the National Review think it’s important that Obama looked at the bracelet on his wrist while speaking about it. They think it was because he couldn’t remember the name on the bracelet. Since I’m in the tank for Obama, I think it’s, you know, kind of normal that you touch and look at something that has significance for you while you talk about it.
I think it is FUNNY that the National Review’s Jim Geraghty resorts to phonetic spelling instead of using the google (like I did) to find the correct spelling of the man’s name. One search just using “sergeant ryan david” got me this post from February of this year. Even though that post doesn’t link to the NYT article, another quick search got me this post.
This is all pretty lame. Looking through the hits my searches got, I see that all of the wingnuts are going with the phonetic spelling — which is actually a correct spelling — instead of doing a simple google search. Pathetic.
Oh, and a couple of other things — the recording of the debate I made on my other tv didn’t have the hissing of McCain’s and Lehrer’s ‘s’s’, so maybe it was just my HD; the video on the National Review link has the weird McCain neck tie thing that I didn’t see on either the HD or the video tape of the debate.
My take on that is your response to the extranious things depends on not only what channel you watched, but in what form you watched it . . . it complicates the 1960 comparisons I’ve seen some people make last night and today.
calle viena 
That’s really interesting and it sort of came full circle this morning on Stephanopoulos, when George S. asked McCain whether it was significant that he (McCain) hadn’t looked at Obama directly through the entire length of the debate. McCain at first denied it and then said he never looks at his opponent during debates but rather at the moderator or the tv camera (which he thinks of as “the American people”). I’m willing to concede that McCain’s inability to turn slightly to his left has no darker meaning provided that the other side treats Obama-and-the-soldier’s-bracelet exactly for what it was. A thoughtful serious man pausing to find the right words to convey what this meant to him, rather than cheapen it with something off the cuff and political.
The thing that struck me about the Stephanopoulis interview was 4 references to Teddy Roosevelt and NONE the Reagan. WTF? I wonder if their pollsters have uncovered something – what exactly am I supposed to think when I hear Teddy’s name- because my mind turns to his near disasterous trip up the Amazon, not his presidency.
I actually stopped what I was doing to listen to McCain’s answer to that question. Something else that’s interesting — it adds a layer to how McCain was acting is this exchange of letters. I don’t buy McCain’s answer after reading that. McCain’s been pissed at Obama for a while.
And more on the bracelet — one wingnut has taken a comment from the soldier’s dad that the soldier’s mom (and mom and dad are divorced) didn’t want Obama to say anthing about the bracelet or her son. Goldstein has even got a post up about it. Complete nonsense, but they’ve got nothing else, I guess.
Yeah, I think McCain is overdoing the Teddy Roosevelt thing. I think for younger voters, it’s history and begs the question of why does he keep going back to a time when the parties were very different than they are now — it skips out on a lot of important changes that have happened.
And as an update on the bracelet thing — AP stoke with the mom and she was ecstatic that Obama had pointed it out — to show that there are different views out there from the one McCain was being heavy handed with.
Sorry wingnuts, that shit didn’t stick. But what’s new about wingnuts over-reaching?
Maybe he’s hoping that people will get confused and think of FDR & how he saved the country during the Depression? There are some admirable things about TR but I always think of Gore Vidal’s comment: “any grown man who spends that much time killing animals he doesn’t need to eat to survive is fundamentally a sissy”. Of course it’s much funnier having been said by good old Gore V.
I keep thinking about how I got to support Obama in the first place. I wonder about how it would be to have McCain and Palin in office. I might sell everything for what its worth and go to Latvia. Cut everything cleanly and just go.
I never said such a thing during Bush’s time.