Monday, October 6th, 2008
Saving Ryan’s Privates
After seeing the events of last weekend, I’m starting to think that this Candorville strip was giving Sen. McRove too much credit — he never had any honor to begin with.
Unfortunately, it didn’t get any better today. The lynch mob got started early at a Two-Minutes Hate Session campaign rally in Clearwater, FL headlined by Gov. Mooseburger and Sen. Joseph “Iscariot” Lieberman, when a hate-filled wingnut in the crowd shouted “Kill him!” in response to an “applause” line about Obama’s alleged connection to Weather Underground alumnus Bill Ayers.
It would only go downhill from there. Sen. McRove then picked up the slack at a campaign event in Albuquerque, NM, serving up the following softball: “Who is the real Barack Obama?” Can you guess the $64,000 response? If you said “A terrorist,” you’re right!
The whole pile of shit was capped at Palin’s last campaign event of the day, a speech at Germain Arena in Fort Myers, FL. Introducing Gov. Bridge-to-Nowhere was Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, who in true wingnut fashion pulled the “Obama is a super-secret double-probation Muslim Manchurian Candidate” smear out of his taser holster.
Country First™, my left nut.
To be fair, though, I think I can understand why McRove doesn’t want to discuss real issues. He’s facing poll numbers that were rapidly approaching the toilet and an increasingly daunting electoral college map. Even his top aides realize that unless something changes, he’s toast:
“It’s a dangerous road, but we have no choice,” a top McCain strategist told the Daily News. “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”
I too would want to throw out as many shiny things as possible to distract the public if I were in his shoes.
And if that’s the game John McCain wants to play, we’ll be happy to play it. We can talk about his role in the Keating Five. We can talk about his “palling around” with anti-Semitic Rapture Cheerleaders like Rev. John Hagee and Rev. Rod Parsley. We can talk about his time on the board of the United States Council for World Freedom, a far-right fringe group with ties to the Moonies that the ADL castigated as “a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-semites.” We could also talk about McCain’s ties to Italian con man Raffaello Follieri.
We could even talk about Palin’s ties to the Alaskan Secessionist movement, or her crazy, witch-hunting pastor.
We could do all of that, showing how for every one of Obama’s alleged sins, McCain’s got a skeleton in his closet that’s at least twice as bad, if not worse. But that won’t provide Americans with health care, keep them from being foreclosed on, or end the war in Iraq in a reasonable fashion. It won’t secure our ports, bring good jobs back to America or preserve the environment for our progeny. It won’t even educate our kids or keep us competitive in the quest for knowledge about the world around us.
And that would most definitely not be putting the country first.
