Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Joe Klein Gets It

Embarracuda

I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putresence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that. But...every so often, we journalists have a duty to remind readers just how dingy the McCain campaign, and its right-wing acolytes in the media (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity) have become--especially in their efforts to divert public attention from the economic crisis we're facing. And so inept at it: other campaigns have decided that their only shot is going negative, but usually they don't announce it, as several McCain aides have in recent days--there's no way we can win on the economy, so we're going to go sludge-diving.

But since we are dealing with manure here, I'll put the rest of this post below the fold.

It is appropriate that the prime vessel for this assault is Sarah Palin, whose very presence on a national ticket is an insult to your intelligence. She now has "credibility," we are told, because she managed to read talking points off notecards in the debate last week with unwitting enthusiasm.

Over the weekend, she picked up on an article in The New York Times, which essentially says that Barack Obama and the former terrorist Bill Ayers have crossed paths in Chicago, served on a couple of charitable boards together, but aren't particularly close. To Palin--or her scriptwriters--this means that Obama has been "palling around" with terrorists. Now, I wish Ayers had done some serious jail time; he certainly needed to pay some penance for his youthful criminality--even if most people in Chicago, including the mayor, have decided that he has something of value to say about education. But I can also understand how Obama, who was a child when Ayers was cutting his idiot swath, would not quite understand the enormity of the professor's background. (I got to know Alger Hiss twenty years after the fact--he was a printing salesman then, a friend of my father's--and thought of him as a sweet old man, if a good deal more liberal than dad's other friends.)

In any case, this is rather rich coming from Palin, who is married to a man who belonged to a political party--the Alaskan Independence Party--that wanted to secede from the union. (I should add here that the Times may have been overreacting to the McCain campaign's attack on its fairness here: the Ayers story was a nothingburger, but it was placed prominently in the top left hand corner of page one--a position that would seem to indicate that it contained important news, which it didn't.)

Then we have the ever-reliable Bill Kristol, in today's New York Times, advising Palin to bring up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Palin, of course, believes that's a darn good idea:

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

So then, I'd guess, it would be appropriate to bring up some of the nuttiness that passes for godliness in Palin's religious life. Leave aside the fact that The Embarracuda allowed herself to participate in a cermony that protected her from witchcraft, how about her presence--she didn't "get up and leave"-- at a sermon by the founder of Jews for Jesus, who argued that the Palestinian terrorist acts against Israel were God's "judgment" on the Jews because they hadn't accepted Jesus.

Speaking of Jews, the ever-execrable Sean Hannity has been having intercourse with a known Jew-hater named Andy Martin, who now wants to expose Barack Obama as a Muslim. According to the Washington Times:

In 1986, when Mr. Martin ran as a Democrat for Connecticut's 3rd Congressional District seat under the name "Anthony R. Martin-Trigona," his campaign committee filed papers saying its purpose was to "exterminate Jew power in America and impeach U.S. District Court of Appeals judges in New York City."

Calling all Podhoretzs! Where's the outrage? I mean, don't the hateful doings at Palin's church and Hannity's perfidy deserve a lengthy exegesis from Pete Wehner or Jennifer Rubin or one of the other empretzled ideologues over at Commentary?

As I said, I'm of two minds about this. I don't want to give currency to this sewage, so it will remain below the fold. And I'll try to devote the lion's share of my time to the issues--the war, the economic crisis, the fraying health insurance system, the environment--that should define this campaign. But what a desperate empty embarrassment the McCain campaign has become.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Young people get it, too.

Here's what's happened to the Republican Party:

I'll tell what happened to Republican popularity.

They went from being for a strong defense to being for militarism.

They went from reducing taxes to giving money to the rich and banrupting government.

They went from being a shining beacon on a hill to being for empire and torture.

They went from reverse discrimination to trafficing in racism.

They went from family values to theocracy.

Anonymous said...

Whew! I know everyone's been talking about how the MSM is in the tank for Obama, but man--Klein has apparently welded himself inside it.

Anonymous said...

MCCAIN AND PALIN ARE INCITING VIOLENCE- REMEMBER YITZHAK RABIN, TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY

This is not just another scandal, or joke, or gaffe. Sarah Palin and John McCain are inciting violence, against Barack Obama and any of the millions of Americans who support his campaign. Anyone who is familiar with the recent history of Israel, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist, will recognize the pattern. We must take this seriously, and make our protest against the McCain-Palin incitement to violence heard, before it is too late.

Sarah Palin's new punchline is calling Barack Obama a ""pal of terrorists."

It is easy to laugh, and to see this as yet another example of Sarah Palin's astonishing lack of knowledge and/or conscience--and it is that. But it's no laughing matter.

The United States is engaged in a "Global War On Terror."

Our policy--as advocated by Barack Obama as well as his opponents--is to attack not only terrorists, but states or organizations who harbor and support them.

In Virginia, you can see many license plates bearing the slogan "Fight Terror."

So it's very clear what Sarah Palin means when she calls Barack Obama a friend of terrorists. She's calling him an enemy. She's calling him a target. She's calling him someone who needs to be "taken out."

Don't kid yourselves. This is direct incitement to violence against Barack Obama, and against the millions of Americans who support his campaign to be our President.

In Israel, in the early 1990s, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin faced similar accusations from the extreme Right, after he achieved a historic breakthrough and started the first-ever official Israeli negotiations with the PLO. The incitement came from above and below. It began with politicians in Israel's parliament using the exact same words--calling Rabin a "friend of terrorists." It continued with crowds of right-wing demonstrators, seething with hatred, chanting "Rabin is a traitor" and waving images of Rabin in Arab headdress and Nazi uniform. And it ended with a right-wing extremist assassinating Yitzhak Rabin, and mortally wounding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Make no mistake, people.

Think of the lies about Barack Obama that have been repeated a million times by our own homegrown American right-wing--no, not just that he will raise taxes on the middle class--that he is a brainwashed Manchurian candidate of Radical Islam, he is a Marxist, he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance, he swears on the Koran. We laugh it off because we know he's a politician, a better one than most, and about as much of a mensch as it's possible for an effective politician to be in these times. But it's no laughing matter if you believe this stuff--and some percentage of Americans do.

Anonymous said...

trhgm,

I'd like to post that on my blog.

Frightening.

People have to understand that words have consequences. I've already warned one guy over at Sane Political Discourse to be aware of what he's posting.

He posted that Obama has to be stopped "at all cost."

I told him the Secret Service would be very interested in hearing that.

The Right sees its power slipping away and they need to make their opponents into devils.

They can't compete on issues.

John McCain's campaign has publicly said that they can't talk about the economy because if they do, they'll lose, so they're going to demonize Sen. Obama.

They've sent Palin out to do the work of throwing shit around like a demented monkey, hoping some of it sticks.

It's all they have left. Shit.

There's an old saying that I'll change a bit--about if you lie down with dogs, you'll rise up with flea--if you start flinging shit, chances are, a lot of it will land on you.