Flashback: McCain joked about how much women love to be raped.»

The blog Rum, Romanism and Rebellion pulls out a 1986 Tucson Citizen article recounting a joke about rape told by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Speaking to the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington, DC, McCain allegedly said:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, “Where is that marvelous ape?”

McCain was swiftly criticized by women’s groups. A spokeswoman for NOW in Arizona said the organization’s members were “incensed by his cruel and sexist remark.” McCain said he did not “recall” telling the joke. More recently, the McCain campaign scheduled a fundraiser with a Texas oilman who compared rape to the weather while running for governor. “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990. After public outcry, the event was “postponed.”

Update - Huffington Post's Sam Stein spoke to reporter Norma Coile, who wrote the original article. Coile told Stein, "I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said."

The 'joke' as given makes no sense; no punchline, no funny.

I think I can identify the actual joke; Near enough,it's

There were these two little old ladies visiting the zoo. As they lingered around the gorilla cage, the biggest male of all the gorillas reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed one of the little old ladies, dragged her through the bars of his cage and began having sex with her right there in front of God and everybody!

Well, the zookeeper came and sedated the gorilla, the paramedics came and sedated the little old lady and her horrified friend, and they took the little old lady to the hospital.

The little old lady's friend was shaken and embarrassed by the incident, and she didn't know what to say, but after a couple of days finally got the courage to go see her friend in the hospital. "Are you hurt? Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Does it hurt? Am I hurt?" repeated the teary-eyed little old lady. "Goddamn yes, it hurts. It's been two days -- he doesn't write, he doesn't call!"

http://www.ssqq.com/jokes/

Which is more or less the way I happened across it first some decades ago.

What is odd, though, is that that version comes a fair way down google; the top ten or so are on racist jokes websites - that is, specialist anti-black 'white pride' type websites, or at a pinch jewish jokes.

Collendina

When mother was a girl before the family went bust the family property was Collendina,up on the Murray. It reappears again today in the context of a fraudulent land scheme - "a proposed retirement village scheme at Collendina, near Ocean Grove." There may even be a family connection, Ocean Grove being near Barwon Heads, where the family moved after the bust, grandfather being the golf club secretary and everybody living at Portrush, the house I love.

Hancock

Saw Hancock last night. A mess, as reported; possibly not as bad as I expected: unrealistic not because it postulated the existence of superheroes but because it copped out [even before the happy ending copout] - the superheroes re basically nice people (that is, people whose interests are the same as ours) in a basically nice society (where the only real problems are used by holdup-levelcriminals). We shall have to wait for Watchmen to get the real lowdown.

And how do you get to qualify as a criminal mastermind if you make an attack on a superhero that could only possibly work if a completely unpredictable mysterious loss of powers comes upon him?

And sexist; the male hero must save lives, the female hero has apparently no obligations beyond being a good wife.

These Names Make News

A crapshop up at North Melbourne has a stack of old Time mags, raising the question of why one would ever buy a new Time when the old ones are available as competitors. Take yesterday's purchase - a cover story on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott, review of the new Camus, a story on the new Israeli occupation of Gaza:

Now that the Israelis (who controlled Gaza in the days of King David) have driven the Egyptians out, as their ancestors once expelled the marauding Phoenicians circa 1000 B.C. The Israelis are determined to stay - first to make sure that Nasser's suicide raiders shall never return to resume their over-the-border raiding from Gaza against Israel's desert settlers, but also because they think the place belongs historically and economically with Israel. They have decided that they cannot now annex the strip, if only because that would mean absorbing the refugees and so increasing their Arab minority to an unacceptable 30%. Their long-term plan: keep administrative control under U.N. supervision, press the U.N. to resettle the refugees, and meanwhile, run the strip so progressively that both the Arabs of the area and the world will some day see that Israel should keep the place permanently.

Well, that worked out.

More to the point, the wisdom of hindsight being what it is, it sounds self-contradictory from the off; make it so nice that the Arabs will like it, while at the same time getting rid of the Arabs. Never workable, never rational.

Onward and upward

For some reason I have trouble checking in to this blog frequently: and believing that there's no problem so big or so small that it can't be run away from, I started a second blog, unimaginatively called A Second Live Toad every Morning, or http://livetoads.blogspot.com/. Any completeness freak should look at both.