Thursday, June 05, 2008

Today's nitpick: "Kenner" IS "New Orleans"

After McCain's impressively lame "that's not change we can believe in" speech, the lefty web is rife with lines like this:

Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans...


I've got some news for y'all. I grew up in Louisiana, and none of my friends ever talked about going to Kenner or flying into the Kenner airport. Kenner is "New Orleans," like Richardson is "Dallas" or Galena Park is "Houston." It may offend some of you, but I don't know anyone (except maybe a native) who talks about going to the Bronx to see the Yankees or going to Anaheim to go to Disneyland. Everybody knows that the auto industry is centered in Detroit, although as far as I know Detroit itself actually contains few if any auto plants these days. So bashing McCain for only being "near" New Orleans or for saying he was pleased to be in New Orleans when the CNN Chyron clearly said "Kenner" is just idiotic. He was in New Orleans. He wasn't in the damaged part of New Orleans, like John Edwards was when he announced his candidacy, and one can ask if McCain ever bothered to go visit the Lower 9th Ward (he wouldn't even have needed a platoon of Marines to escort him).