CNN messed up last week and put Senator Barack Obama's name into a caption that was meant to read "Where's Osama?"The Situation Room's Wolf Blitzer apologized on-air and called Obama personally to apologize, but the gaffe is the latest in a string of accidental and intentional substitutions of Senator Obama's last name for bin-Laden's first name; CNN is definitely not the first to do this.
Numerous instances of this have happened since Senator Ted Kennedy uttered the first public instance of "Osama/Obama" and conservative talk show hosts picked it up to ridicule Kennedy and Obama.
It's easy to make a slip of the tongue since the two first names are similar in spelling and pronunciation. Osama. Obama.
Still, I'm not comfortable with with this kind of accidental or intentional name-calling. It comes across (to me) as calling someone a Nazi, a choice of words for which I have nothing but contempt.
Those who delight in calling the senator "Osama" really ought to come up with something that doesn't have racial overtones to it. This is just nasty.
