Quote of the Day

From Obsidian Wings, a propos the McCain-Palin campaign:

[O]nce you've made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it — you can't just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can't decide in chapter 2 that he's also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles.  All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.

This is the problem. It's not just the McCain campaign's problem — although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable — it's a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hitler [me: Chamberlain!] Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from — wait for it! — the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It's a jumble sale of fears and scary associations.

I'd guess that for every person won over by the boundless and honorless scaremongering, there's a previously fence-sitting voter wholly put off (and pissed off) by it all, to the point where he'll pull the lever for Obama a week from today.

Even if McCain wins the presidency — a proposition that now calls to mind snowballs and hellfires — he has forever lost something that most ordinary people value higher: integrity. I've always found him a likable, in many respects admirable guy. That opinion no longer holds up. The McCain campaign has taken a low road not seen since Bush's political operatives push-polled the Arizona senator out of the 2000 race with that nastiness about him having fathered an "illegitimate black child." Eight years later, McCain hired the very same lowlifes who orchestrated that smear, to help give him the edge against Obama. I've rarely seen a man squander his credibility quite so spectacularly. The McCain campaign — and the Palin nomination — has been a slow-motion car wreck. Can't look. Can't look away.

In one week, the rubbernecking will be over. The foul taste, though, might linger for a bit.

Comments

[George Arndt]

Its striking how all this right wing ranting is at odds with reality. Obama doesn't seem to have a radical bone in his body. As far as "cultism" goes, look at the way Palin, who has no qualifications to be Veep, is being viewed by many on the right as a "savior". Talk about extremists!

[Marc J. Randazza]

I volunteered on McCain's campaign in 2000. His behavior in this campaign makes me ashamed to say that.

[hermesten]

George makes a good point. Some of the Palin adoration is downright unbalanced and stomach churning --and it leads to ridiculous behavior like the woman in Detroit who actually asked CHILDREN coming to her door on Halloween who their parents supported for president, and turned away any children who said Obama.

The right-wing propaganda is effective. It has some of the people I work with absolutely terrified that the world as they know it is coming to an end --with the election of a guy who is essentially a Chicago machine politician. I had someone tell me Obama was going to rewrite the Constitution if he got elected. There is no reasoning with people who are this ignorant.

The latest I heard was a clip in which the wingers purport that Obama says is going to intentionally bankrupt the coal industry (a claim that is false on its face). What's ironic is that in the version I heard (linked to off the nutter site, FreeRepublic), Obama says he's going to make each producer pay for their own pollution --essentially then, he's suggesting the imposition of a free market on power producers in place of the current socialist system where externalities and other production costs are "socialized" (the actual term used in the industry until it got replaced by "uplift" over the last couple years).