Buzz was perusing a recent column by Rufus Shaw in the black newspaper Elite News and was struck when Shaw described a worker at Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson's office thus: "Ms. Simiawsky, who is Jewish, was a unique and welcome experience for me."
Meeting a pleasant Jewish woman was a "unique and welcome" experience? Buzz was mystified. We called Shaw to ask if there was some hidden meaning in his reference. Shaw, a foul-mouthed, ego-driven political hanger-on and onetime consultant to former Mayor Steve Bartlett, took umbrage at our question.
Specifically, Shaw said, "to call me and inquire as to why I identified a woman as Jewish is a bunch of motherfucking bullshit. Who the fuck are you?" (For the record, Buzz is a white, male, fallen Catholic.)
"Are you a white boy protector for Jews?" Shaw continued. "Do you want to write about me now? Because I would appreciate it if you wrote about me. You can call me any kind of goddamn racist you want. I don't give a fuck."
Then Shaw got mad. "You better be very careful...because I'm not just a fucking asshole, I'm a powerful fucking asshole, the kind of nigger you ain't ever come across in your fucking life," he allowed.
It was a unique and welcome experience for Buzz.
So far from God, so close to Belo
Remember the old joke about two-time Texas governor Bill Clements--that he learned Spanish so he could be ignorant in two languages? Well, now The Dallas Morning News has set out to prove it can be irrelevant in two countries.
The DMN--ponderous, slow-witted beast that it is--forever grapples with a hellish inferiority complex. No matter how hard it tries, no one takes seriously the paper's posturing as the New York Times of the Southwest. But they keep trying.
Endeavoring once more to establish itself as a newspaper of heft, the DMN decided to carpet-bomb the recent elections in Mexico. In fact, the paper gave more ink to the elections down south than it did Dallas' own recent city council contests. And no DMN election coverage would be complete without an utterly meaningless poll of voters.
Sure enough, a couple of weeks before the election, the DMN hired a pollster to query the citizenry on the Mexico City mayor's race. Needless to say, charts ensued.
Mind you, the race was never in doubt--every dilettante and street vendor in Mexico City knew Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was going to win. The DMN's poll--conducted, curiously, by the same polling company that was working for Cardenas--confirmed the obvious. It showed the Cardenas would defeat the ruling party candidate by a margin of 35 percent to about 20 percent. The poll's margin of error was supposedly 2.8 percent.
So how'd the vote come out? Well, Cardenas actually won by a margin of about 48 percent to 26 percent, proving that the DMN's Mexico poll was about as accurate as the ones it conducts at home.
Of course, Buzz could be mistaken. Maybe margins of error--like the peso--are devalued when they cross the border.
--David Pasztor
