Race To The Bottom

Shameful, though at this point "shameful" has become a platitude when it comes to the RNC's surrogates' ground efforts:
Don't worry - it only circulated to 70,000 residents in Hernando County, Florida. The front organization here is the generically named "Concerned Citizens of America," not registered with the state of Florida as a political action committee.

I feel the "Concerned Citizens of Real America" would have been more apropos.

If You Couldn't Gather From The Cradle Of Life Music . . .

. . . John McCain thinks Barack Hussein Obama is Muslim or at least has a Muslim name or at least wants YOU to think he is Muslim (if for only one day next Tuesday):


Just when I think John McCain's campaign could not disgust me more, he reinvents himself and reaches new heights in election year destestability.

New Reuters/CSPAN/Zogby poll just released: John McCain is now within the margin-of-error from being a vomitous cretin. Just 5 days to go! You can do it, John. Go get that Los Angeles Times tape. You know, the one where Barack Obama is probably - just speculating here, I mean I know what the Los Angeles Times reported about the tape in detail back in April - burning an American flag and shouting "Death to America." Maybe he has a bomb strapped to his chest. Maybe Ayers, Khalidi and Obama are "three sheets to the wind," reciting windy passages from The Communist Manifesto and spinning maudlin yarns about the halcyon days of the proleteriat.

Keep pushing for tapes, sound bytes, clips, affidavits, photographs, forensic evidence, fortunes from cookies, "magic 8 ball" revelations, testimony from psychics, smoking guns, Elizabeth Hasselbeck's "thought" (singular - cannot generate multiple thoughts), whatever, showing Barack Obama cannot stomach America and seeks to shred the fabric of democracy from within.

If you try hard enough, Bob McRumpson, you may browbeat Fake America into unqualified capitulation. We'll hate gays, stretch the necks of abortionists and keep all of our money upstairs with the top 1% (you know, the conservative elite) and hope some of it trickles down when the rich are overwhelmed by a fleeting spasm of munificence (call me if there's a hurricane, tsunami or tornado. Other than that? Get off my lawn!).

We'll read the Constitution literally and dogmatically (even if that provision counting one black as 3/5 of a vote should rear its mildly controversial head again). We'll support strict constructionist judges who interpret words with their plain meaning as long as plain meaning comports with their world views.

We'll elect officials imbued with the holy spirit, to win the kulturkampf against the secularists and bring them to their knees . . . in prayer. Oh we will pray. We'll pray in school, pray before every class, pray before bed, pray before meals, pray before Kirk Cameron, pray we are not speaking Chinese in 20 years, pray the terrorists leave us alone, pray that God intervenes in this election, pray for the big, bad storms to leave the Gulf of Mexico, pray not that America is on the side of God, but that God is on the side of America (I may have muddled that).

Most of all, we will pray that God rids our country of the scourge of science, the dark magic of scientist-idolaters foisted upon our good citizens, with its hocus-pocus and artifices, misrepresenting the world as 4.7 billion years. We will pray that intelligent design is taught in our schools rather than this sham sorcery, along with bible study in the time slots normally reserved for such impious pursuits like physics, chemistry or biology. We will pray that our history books contain colorful graphics - like a caveman riding a T-Rex.

We will "drill, baby, drill" at the behest of America's foremost energy expert, and suck up that teeny-weeny drop of Alaskan crude, mainline it into our automotive vein and then go back to desert sheiks, hat-in-hand, asking for a bit more of the Arabian black sniff because it's 2020 and our gas-guzzlers are decidedly out of gas.

We will never look to Europe or beyond our borders for ideas and innovations. Limeys and frogs - keep your universal health care. Our 42,000,000 uninsured don't want any of your socialist quackery. We prefer to amputate our gangrenous limbs with a butter knife in the comfort of our housing project thank you very much.

We will not read newspapers. We'll stay woefully uninformed. We'll embrace hypocrisy. We'll demand the end of abuses of power as we abuse power ourselves. We'll shake things. We'll ruffle feathers. We'll be mavericks or reformers or maverick-reformers. We'll prop up clods like Joe the Plumber, deify him and buttress his astute political commentary - that our opponents would seek the death of Israel - with soaring "USA" chants. We will put a boot in EVERYONE'S ass on Toby Keith's command.

Etc., etc., etc., etc. . .

Thanks for the reminder, John, of what I should do on November 4. I look forward to your next campaign ad.

Powell the Racist

So says Rush Limbaugh:

"Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race," Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail. "OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."

How quickly the right wing slime merchants like Limbaugh and Hannity turn on real conservatives when those conservatives think for themselves instead of basking in the celebrated ignorance and fear-mongering of today's Republican party.

Lets hope people like Powell, Ross Douthat, David Frum and others like them get the Republican party back on course.

The Hannity Dilemma - McCain's Jane Fonda

I'm coining a new phrase - The Hannity Dilemma. From this pint forward, the Hannity Dilemma will be used to describe the situation where a standard developed by a hard line partisan hack like Sean Hannity, intended to be used only against those heathens with opposing political views, is instead applied to a member of the standard-setting hack's own political party. The horror.

The award is named for Master Hannity because of his wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonder____ (that's 5 1/2 for those counting - you'll see) near aneurysm after his own standard (paraphrased here) asserted against John Edwards - "people who lie to their families by having affairs can't be trusted by the American people" - was applied to John McCain by Hannity's own weak-kneed liberal pushover but awoken from his castrated slumber co-host, Alan Colmes. Hannity gets so fired up that the standard he developed is used against one of his own, that . . . well, he starts quoting math and yelling protest slogans.



In that clip, Sean Hannity was faced with the Hannity Dilemma. His response: Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates!

Now that we have an illustration of how The Hannity Dilemma works, lets apply it:

The Standard: The personal acquaintances of presidential candidates are valid, especially when such acquaintances are or were anti-American.

The Intended Application: In applying this standard, just about every talking head on the right (and some on the left), as well as the Republican Presidential ticket, have been hammering the Obama-Ayers and Obama-Wright connections, and particularly the anti-America angle. Fine. As I've stated before, I think those topics are fair game. As long as the same standard is applied to everyone.

The Hannity Dilemma: Joe Klein draws a comparison today between the scrutiny given to Obama's "radical friends," as opposed to the right's absolute silence on McCain's friendship with his own personal Jane Fonda - David Ifshin. As Klein explains:

Ifshin, you see, had been a vehement anti-Vietnam radical. He had even gone to Hanoi at the height at the war and given a speech denouncing the American pilots dropping bombs on North Vietnamese civilians as “war criminals.” The speech was broadcast repeatedly in the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain was being held captive. More than a few people thought Ifshin was guilty of treason.

He was also a close friend of John McCain until he passed away in 1996.

Klein's telling of this story is quite personal and worth the read, as Ifshin was also a friend of Klein's. It also shines a very favorable light on McCain (or, rather, the man McCain used to be). Their friendship was forged out of a respect for each other, despite their polar-opposite opinions so many years before. Ifshin was vocal about his regret for giving the above-referenced speech, and McCain forgave him. The McCain-Ifshin friendship was also detailed with admiration by the NY Sun in 2006. It's really a great story.

But as much as he regretted it, Ifshin did give that speech, just as Jane Fonda gave similar speeches attacking American soldiers. Guess what the right wing pundits think about Jane Fonda? Well Sean Hannity's guests, like Ollie North, think she's a "traitor" for her actions during the Vietnam war. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that view as common among the right.

Now here's the dilemma: If Fonda is a traitor, so was Ifshin. So if Obama's associations with people like Ayers who, as John McCain described Ifshin "a long time ago, in the passions and resentments of a tumultuous era in our history, I might have considered my enemy," are fair game that must be examined, shouldn't the right wing pundits be examining McCain's association with this person who was a "traitor" by their own standards? Who is the real John McCain? Can we tolerate a president who palled around with traitors? Donna Martin Graduates!

Baghdad John

I'm sure you all remember Baghdad Bob - Saddam's minister of disinformation turned internet sensation - proclaiming that there were no American tanks in Baghdad while the 3rd Infantry Division was rolling down Hussein Avenue. Well it seems we now have our own American version - Baghdad John. As the Palin-McCain tanks of racism are rolling down Main Street, USA, Baghdad John is telling the world that he's running a respectful campaign. Another day, another appeal to racism by the McCain campaign, and another day where Baghdad John asserts that the campaign he's running differs from the reality on the ground.

From Karen Tumulty of Time:

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama's controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won't salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don't even know where Senator Obama was really born." Actually, we do; it's Hawaii.

The Frederick in the above anecdote is none other than the GOP Chairman of Virgina, Jeffrey M. Frederick. Not some low level volunteer. Not some maverick Maverick supporter spewing hate on his own time. This is the GOP Chairman of Virginia. You can email or call him here, if you so desire.

Now either John McCain is sincere in his desire to run a respectful campaign, but has no control over that campaign (disqualifying him from the presidency), or he is a bigot (disqualifying him from the presidency). And for those who bristle at the allegation that McCain is a racist, I will offer the following - if McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he should stop appealing to racism in his campaign. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he should stop defending his supporters that call Obama a "terrorist," a "traitor," and advocate killing him. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's racist, then he should stop looking the other way when supporter after supporter treat Obama's middle name as a pejorative term. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he shouldn't let his campaign Co-Chair - his campaign Co-Chair - call Obama "a guy of the street" and insinuate that he was a drug dealer. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he shouldn't unleash his running mate to incite rage and xenophobia resulting in racial outbursts towards the closest black person in the room. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's racist, then he shouldn't allow the invocation at a Palin-McCain rally to explicitly call for a defeat of the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim people praying for Obama. If McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he shouldn't allow his supporters to send letters from Republican headquarters stating that "Obama is an Arab."

If McCain doesn't want people to think he's a racist, then he should stop his campaign from saying racist shit. And if Baghdad John doesn't want to become the joke that Baghdad Bob is, then he better start facing reality instead of creating his own.

They're Trying to Kill Him

Accuse him of palling around with terrorists? Check
Say he doesn't see America the way that ordinary Americans do? Check
Claim he is - hint, hint - from the street? Check
Insinuate that his campaign is funded by foreign terrorists? Check
Stoke the fires of hatred and racism? Check
Invoke cries of "terrorist!" and "traitor!"? Check
Look the other way when a supporter advocates murder? Check
Defend those views as coming from "ordinary Americans?" Check
Taking it a step further and actually accusing Obama of attacking those same violent, enraged nutjobs? Holy shit, check

McCain has gone too far. Will an adult please step in before one of these wackjobs takes the obvious cues being given by McCain and "puts country first" by trying to take Obama out? Really.

MSNBC:

McCain camp defends the behavior?
Posted: Friday, October 10, 2008 3:30 PM by Mark MurrayFiled Under: 2008, McCain
From NBC's Mark MurrayEarlier today, Obama remarked on recent outbursts of "Traitor!" "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" at McCain campaign events. "It's easy to rile up a crowd," Obama said. "Nothing's easier than riling up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that's not what we need right now in the United States."

In response, McCain senior adviser Nicolle Wallace released this statement, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports. "Barack Obama's assault on our supporters is insulting and unsurprising. These are the same people obama called 'bitter' and attacked for 'clinging to guns' and faith. He fails to understand that people are angry at corrupt practices in Washington and Wall Street and he fails to understand that America's working families are not 'clinging' to anything other than the sincere hope that Washington will be reformed from top to bottom."

"Attacking our supporters is a new low for the campaign that's run more millions of dollars of negative ads than any other in history."

*** UPDATE *** McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers adds in another statement: “Barack Obama’s attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn’t understand regular people and the issues they care about. He dismisses hardworking middle class Americans as clinging to guns and religion, while at the same time attacking average Americans at McCain rallies who are angry at Washington, Wall Street and the status quo."

Dem Democrat "Hooligans"

"I am madder than a old wet hen. Let me translate dat der jumble-o-words I just dropped on yah, McCain: I ain't happy as a pig in slog no more. Even dem lipstick pig variety and such. Get dem commie bastards, Pelosi, the lot of em, and that uppity boy Obama. Get him good!"

Get them, Johnny. Go get them!!!! Burst through that door and hack'em up!!!!!

Nothing is more Americana then an ol' country kook cleaning the crust from his mouth, rattling his partisan chains around like Jacob Marley, calling the Democrats "hooligans" and "socialists," atavistically referring to "an Obama" like he's subhuman for having a feasible health care plan, then starting a hackneyed "U.S.A . . . U.S.A." chant just in case you thought McCain was hosting a tea party in Paris.

And the curmudgeon's incendiary red glare, an octogenarians head full of air! Francis Scott Key was the original Toby Keith. Yippeee! U.S.A! Obama is a muslim, terrorist, radical! Kill darky! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

The gap is shrinking between embellishment and what my eyes perceive. That's frightening.

Whether it's Dennis Miller deranged bellicosity on the O'Reilly Factor, looking into the camera and screaming at McCain to "fight, John. Fight!!!" or Michelle Malkin making the case for her own internment because she can't live under a Democratic administration, the Republican Party is fraying at the base (or is it a Socialist administration as the next bucket of radical paint is dumped on Barack Obama for tomorrow's news cycle).

There are many revealing moments in the short video of Waukesha, Wisconsin apoplexy! A complete lack of respect for McCain, the rampaging codger giving the "maverick" senator the business and telling him in campaign speak to "shut his piehole" (ie, "Let me finish, please"). The imbecilic dissonance of two sequential sentences, one saying "and I'm not mad about the economy," the very next sentence shrieking I'm mad "about the socialists taking over our country."

Socialism (as defined by Merriam Webster): Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Hey Wilford Brimley - you're mad at the economy, you f**king wingnut, or at least you will be when they repossess your PT Cruiser, they take your job away greeting at the Wall-Mart and disabuse you of your last five dollars because the church needed it! It's the Christian thing to do.

What's the use. There is an exorbitant premium on making sense within conservative dens during the last throes of what Karl Rove touted "50 years of Republican domination."

I found McCain's instinctual response to the surly fella even more fascinating. It's almost like he's uncomfortable consorting with these vitriolic crackers demanding a political lynching of Obama. "Act together because all of us are Americans first." All of us. And McCain will "work with anyone" and "work together as one nation indivisible."

But the ideological dummies, clod fanatics of neo-conservatism on the wan and firebrand zealots waving their bibles wildy don't want bipartisanship, cooperation or even the "maverick" persona McCain and Palin shill.

They want leftist blood. They want to murder liberalism. They have no idea why. The rhetoric is a hodge-podge of hate, fear, insecurity, a dollup of subconscious racism (a bigger helping for some folks) and confusion. They cannot formulate sentences to express this madness. It's a venomous melange of terrorism, communism, socialism, radicalism, liberalism, nihilism and any other "ism" reduced and muddled into formless chimeras haunting the good neighbors on Main Street, Mayberry as they slumber.

It's a request for grotesque and unseemly tactics that John McCain may not fulfill - for two reasons:

One, a political view, that this election is not won by preaching to the converted at Republican rallies, but by appealing to the whopping 40% of the electorate that consider themselves independent, many of them rational thinkers, unfettered by party talking points.

And two, a moral view (really, an American view): that I will not spark a match and set this country ablaze when the blood in my veins pulses with doing the right, but sometimes unpopular thing and working with members of both parties if that's what it takes to accomplish it.

How ironic: McCain might lose this election because he truly does put "country first." As dirty as it's getting, McCain may not be willing to cross every line, only most of them. And that will come up short.

Foreclosure of the Fourth Estate

This is scary stuff. The Palin-McCain campaign is creating a lynch mob mentality among its supporters. Both the media and Obama are targets.

From Talking Points Memo:

Milbank: McCain-Palin's Attacks On Media Have Spawned Unprecedented
Crowd Hostility Toward Press
By Greg Sargent - October 7, 2008, 2:35PM
Dana Milbank -- the Washington Post reporter who wrote this morning's piece about the Palin crowd's disgusting abuse of reporters at a rally yesterday -- tells me that the McCain camp's repeated attacks on the media have spawned crowd hostility towards the press that's running at a "degree of intensity" he's never experienced in covering presidential politics.

As Milbank wrote, one Palin supporter hurled an unspecified racial epithet at an African American sound man, and told him: "Sit down, boy."
. . .

Milbank says that after the Palin attacked the New York Times and Katie Couric in her stump speech yesterday in Florida, he and other reporters were pelted with boos, with some saying things like "screw you" and "f[]ing liberal media."

"McCain has so overtly taken on the media -- they're doing it to rile the base," he continued. "And lo and behold, the base is good and riled."