Recipegate

For once, I'm kinda sorta going to come to the defense of a Republican. The flap-let over the revelation that Cindy McCain's supposed "family recipes" were actually cribbed almost verbatim from the Food Network's website is just plain silly. In the words of Shakespeare's Macbeth, it's "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I mean, who among us hasn't taken recipes from other sources and eventually claimed them as our own, with or without a touch of customization? That is, after all, how most family recipes get started.

On the other hand, if someone else - say, Michelle Obama - were revealed to have copied recipes and passed them off as her own, the media would be filled with pundits all yammering on how this proves Obama to be an elitist who looks down on the common folk.

Rush Limbaugh would call it "Recipegate" and make snide comments about fried chicken and watermelon. Bill O'Reilly would be amazed that no one was shouting "M-Fer, I want more iced tea." And Sean Hannity would just beat the story to death for weeks on end.

The McCain campaign is now blaming the fiasco on an intern, but it sure looks like this was an attempt to make the very wealthy McCains look like just plain folks. That might have worked better had this supposed intern filched some more down-to-earth recipes, such as minestrone soup or ratatouille. Instead, we were told that something called "Farfalle Pasta with Turkey Sausage, Peas and Mushrooms" was Cindy's invention.

Anyway, now that we've all had a good laugh and shaken our heads, can we now get back to real issues?