All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It happens every now and then to our public officials – they say something they weren’t supposed to. Recently, President Bush was caught off guard (and on a microphone) sharing some ostensibly private thoughts on the Middle East conflict with Prime Minister Tony Blair using less-than-diplomatic terms. And quite a bit of ink was dispensed over that gaffe. Of course, Bush didn’t know anyone was listening to that conversation – there are always those other public flubs in which the speaker doesn’t realize until later that they’ll be issuing a correction.

During his first televised press briefing back in May, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow got a bit of flack for uttering a phrase that some perceived as racist. When asked to comment on the NSA domestic surveillance story, Snow replied that he didn’t want “to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program.” It became some of the more notable news from his inaugural appearance. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley led off her review of the event with the “minor snag”:

“The tar-covered doll that Br'er Fox used to ensnare Br'er Rabbit in an 1881 Uncle Remus story is used as a metaphor for a sticky situation, but for some it also carries vague racist connotations -- it has been used as a derogatory term for a black. In a society where a District of Columbia councilman can be accused of racism simply by using the word ‘niggardly,’ most politicians and TV commentators prefer to avoid tar baby references. When a reporter playfully asked him to explain the term, Mr. Snow mumbled that it could be traced to ‘American lore.’”

Some bloggers were less charitable in their assessments, but Joe Gandelman was glad to see a press secretary who “comes across as a flesh-and-blood human being” instead of the traditional “robot-like human tape recorder.” He noted, of course, the ultimate dilemma of Snow’s casual style: “He's going to have to learn to choose his words quite carefully, because they are pitfalls and he seemingly stepped in one (in a tar pit, that is.)"

Well, someone else has stepped in it this weekend: Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

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So, the Boston Herald’s little run-in with Justice Antonin Scalia’s “obscene,” (well, maybe not so much) gesture seems to have reached an extreme in high comedy. The Herald has responded to Scalia’s letter to the editor with this editorial, (do read the entire thing) which concludes:

So in a letter [Scalia] explained the origins of the gesture and insisted it wasn’t obscene.

Maybe so, but it’s still not something you’d do to your mother.

The Herald further bolsters its, um, “case,” in another article in today’s paper, with explanations of the gesture’s meaning from some “Sopranos” stars, who, as the Herald’s headline explains, are “Divided On Bawdy Body Language.” The “it’s not something you’d do to your mother” defense might have been generated from one of the Herald’s interviews with a “Sopranos” actor John Fiore, who offered his opinion on the gesture: “'It’s not that bad, but I wouldn’t do it to my mother. No way. Would I do it in church? These days, maybe. It depends if the priest was giving me the hairy eyeball,' said Stoneham native John Fiore, who played Sopranos capo Gigi Cestone."

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Perhaps the generally limited access that the media has to Supreme Court justices has something to do with the media frenzy that typically accompanies anything remotely newsworthy that transpires among the nine jurists. So, when Justice Antonin Scalia responded to a Boston Herald reporter’s inquiry as to whether “he fends off a lot of flak for publicly celebrating his conservative Roman Catholic beliefs,” by making what the reporter described in a Monday article as “an obscene gesture, flicking his hand under his chin,” the news tended to spread -- far and fast. And it seems that a justice making obscene hand gestures would be a fairly substantial development.

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