“Play the ball where the monkey throws it.”

Just when you think the ridiculous, all-credible-concerns-and-comments-are-just-racist-rants attacks from the Left might slow down, Talking Points Memo, Salon and company choose their next victim: Rep. Roy Blunt, 2010 candidate for Senate in Missouri.

Their issue? Blunt told a story that mentioned monkeys at the Value Voters Summit.

Blunt’s story, according to Salon.com:

Almost from the day the first ball was hit on this golf course something happened they didn’t anticipate: monkeys would come running out of the jungle and then grab the golf balls. And if it was in the fairway, they might throw it in the rough. And if it was in the rough, they might throw it — they might throw it back at you! And I can point to great and long detail about how many things they tried to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done.

So finally for this golf course and this golf course only, they passed a rule and the rule was, you have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time.

The Left is supposed the be the side that’s great at storytelling, and yet here they don’t seem to understand the use of metaphor or allegory.

There’s no credible case for twisting the story into something racist. In fact, Roy Blunt told the same story in 2006 at the Heritage Foundation (ahem, before Barack Obama was president, ahem) in a little bit more detail, noting that playing the ball “where the monkey throws it” is “not a bad rule for life, to understand that you have to do exactly that and you have to deal with the circumstances you find.” For some context, watch the video below between 2:10 and 3:28:

Should the Right walk around on eggshells? Of course not. Do I think this particular story was a good choice to tell this week in the midst of all the absurd racist accusations? No, I don’t. Like it or not, we’re in a strategic war against liberalism. Someone should have seen this coming. But doesn’t that speak to the sincerity of the story all the more? It didn’t even occur to Blunt or his staff that this story could be interpreted as racist. That wasn’t the intention. End of story.

Now, back to the issues, please.

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Related posts:

1. An Affair to Remember in the Missouri Senate Race?
2. Cor Jesu alumna Ann Wagner named Roy Blunt’s campaign chairman
3. MSNBC’s Racist Lie

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Election 2010, Missouri. The entry is tagged under missouri senate race, race, roy blunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.