John Mccain Attack Ads on The Huffington Post

Daniel Frick: Obama Defeats . . . Nixon?

2008-11-26T15:55:02Z

Can Barack Obama succeed in laying Richard Nixon's ghost to rest? As Obama pledges bipartisanship and reaches across the aisle to John McCain, many of us can't help but hope that we've seen the end of the politics of denigration.

For five decades, the Republican party has taken its lessons from the master of divide and conquer politics. By the time of the 1968 presidential election, Nixon had already demonstrated that votes could be won by questioning not just the patriotism but the loyalty of the opposition. During the 1952 national election, Republican vice presidential candidate Nixon, in one sentence, slurred the reputations of the sitting president, Harry Truman, and the Democrat's presidential nominee by calling them "traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation's Democrats believe." Forever after, Nixon would piously declare that he had never called either man a traitor--a defense that was literally true, but also wholly false. He didn't earn the name "Tricky Dick" for nothing.

As he entered his second race for the White House, Nixon had established the axiom that going negative was the path to victory. In the 1968 campaign, when Nixon spoke about the need for law and order and for the recognition "that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence," the white southerners and northern blue collar workers of Nixon's "forgotten" America knew he was speaking only to them. Once in office, Nixon stirred simmering resentments against school busing and nominated Southerners with racist pasts to the Supreme Court. In his handling of the Vietnam war, Nixon famously sent his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on NBC's Today show to tar the anti-war movement as traitorous for its "aiding and abetting" the North Vietnamese.

Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and others well-schooled in the Richard Nixon brand of politics created the modern presidential electoral playbook. And what we got was race-baiting law and order pitches like the infamous Willie Horton furlough ads used against Michael Dukakis and the jujitsu negativity of the swift boat captain spots. And though he himself had been the victim of this kind of politics during the 2000 Republican primaries, John McCain embraced the Nixonian model on his failed road to the White House. Turning his vice presidential candidate loose to a good share of the dirtiest work, a strategy that Nixon participated in on both ends of the Republican ticket, McCain relied on Palin, who cast herself as voice of the "pro-American" sections of the United States, to accuse Obama of "palling around with terrorists." In the election's final days, the McCain campaign, desperate for a game-changer, threw most of its money and energy into warnings that a "socialist" Barack Obama would raise taxes on "us" while re-distributing wealth to those who refused to work.

For the first time in recent memory, these tired old tricks didn't work. In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to bring us together. But he never really meant it. Obama rejected the Nixonian game plan: divide the nation and pick up the biggest piece. By constructing an electoral victory that relied on blacks, whites, Latinos, women, and men, on north, south, east and west, and by acting now on his promise to speak to all of us, Barack Obama has positioned himself to re-shape American politics in ways even more historic than we realize.

Daniel Frick is the author of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession (University Press of Kansas, 2008). He directs the Writing Center at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Bill Ayers Calls Obama A 'Family Friend' In Updated Book

2008-11-13T15:07:12Z

In a new afterword to his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers refers to himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama, according to a copy of the manuscript obtained by the Chicago Tribune:

Ayers -- who did not respond to requests for comment -- summarized his relationship with Obama: "[W]e had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."

Ayers' description of himself as an Obama "family friend" appears to run counter to how he explained their relationship on Election Day to Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin:

"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?" Ayers said in his first interview since the controversy began. "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."

Though his description of his relationship with Obama is different in the updated book, Ayers' analysis of the guilt by association attacks used against Obama in the campaign remain consistent:

"The more serious point is that Obama was asked once more to defend something that ought to be at the very heart of democracy: the importance of talking to many people in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others. ... In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders, indeed, all of us, would seek out ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, even radical ideas."

This echoes a piece Ayers' wrote last week for In These Times:

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy's heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

Tom Gilroy: Keep The Lipstick Off The Pig

2008-11-11T09:35:24Z

As we bask in either the glory of making history or the relief that the most loathed global figure since Hitler will finally exit the White House, it's tempting to follow Obama's lead and focus only on the positive, on 'where we agree', and to move past the partisanship of the past eight years.

And who can blame us? Scrolling through the endless slides of ecstatic Americans of every demographic, tears streaming down their faces as they hug their neighbors in jubilation, it's natural to want to forget the fetid stench of Ann Coulter's bile, Donald Rumsfeld's torture, Alberto Gonzales's spying and judicial racketeering, and George Bush's lies.

But this would be a mistake.

However badly we'd love to flush the karmic toilet, we should pause to ask ourselves how likely it is the forces that gave us Enron, Jack Abramoff, economic collapse, millions foreclosed into homelessness, Blackwater, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, waterboarding, economic collapse, abstinence-only education--the list really is endless--has been humbled into changing their venal ways.

Not a chance.

No, the party that still tries to spin Ronald Reagan into 'the Great Communicator' to make us forget his trickle-down economics and unprecedented deficit, nuns murdered by illegally funded contras, and battle stories from a world war he never fought, is already re-branding the rancid old GOP wine into a new bottle, hoping that in your history-making reverie you'll forget the policies that got us into the hole we're praying Obama can pull us out of.

The rewriting of history is already in full swing. For a week now we've been told incessantly Obama won because he ran 'a center-right campaign' in a 'center-right country' when only a week ago he was a Socialist. John McCain humbly delivered a 'gracious and heartfelt' concession speech, when only four hours earlier he was calling Obama a Marxist, a terrorist, a Muslim, and a liar.

And just this weekend, confessed drug addict and ACLU client-wannabe Rush Limbaugh declared the economy 'Obama's recession,' the plummeting stock market caused by a global 'fear of an Obama economy.'

Does this sound like a party suddenly chastised into soul-searching to you?

While you were running down the streets in exultation last Tuesday night, the largest taxpayer bailout to corporate America in history was being administered by no-bid Bush crony Reuben Jeffery, who lost billions of taxpayer cash in Paul Bremer's Iraq.

The next morning, while you mass-emailed cell phone pics of your Obama party to your friends, the Bush Interior Department looked into weakening the laws protecting the Grand Canyon from uranium mining, drinking water from mountain coal mining runoff, and gutting The Clean Air Act.

And just yesterday when Obama met with Bush, the most disliked president in history magnanimously said he'd 'consider' a bailout to the American auto industry if the Democrats in Congress will pas another disastrous 'free trade' pact, this time with Columbia.

Boy, does he sound chastened.

And what about the international joke that is Sarah Palin, do you think she's been discouraged by her two months of ethics violations, hate-baiting McCarthyism and blatant ignorance of American history, world geography, and international politics? Or do you think she's already putting her team together to come back at us in 2012 with a whole new set of Rovian catchphrases and winks?

Still feel like partying?

No, the values voters that booed John McCain when he mentioned the next president of the United States in his 'gracious' concession speech are not going to disappear because you took the time to pull a lever in a voting booth.

The thing we feared most these past few weeks was not that Obama would lose the election but that the Republicans would steal it. This will not change overnight.

So while it's great--indeed crucial--for Obama to appear to be above the fray of the ugly divide-and-conquer politicking that has poisoned this country for the past eight years, it's important for we the people to keep our outrage over these policies alive.

Because America did not end up here via mismanagement, mistakes or ineptitude; we ended up here via exquisitely executed policy. The largest budget surplus in the history of the world became the largest budget deficit in the history of the world, and as bridges collapse, hospitals and schools close and our economy implodes, let us never forget where our money went and how.

The honeymoon is over; not Obama's, but ours. We cried, we yelled, we screamed, we danced. Now we have to get to work.

Now we take that same fervor that lead us to man phone banks, campaign door-to-door, lick envelopes, hang posters, give money and wait for ours in the rain to vote, and we inject it into to Community Board meetings, Town Hall press conferences, and Planning and Zoning hearings.

We go to School Board meetings and address the lunacy of teaching our children in science class the world was created 6,000 years ago. We write letters to the editor correcting factual inaccuracies linking abortion to breast cancer, gay marriage to pedophilia, or global warming to natural causes.

And we correct people in conversation when they link the war in Iraq to 9/11. We complain to the police when our pharmacist won't fill our prescriptions. We immediately march down to the statehouse when a book is banned from or restricted in our libraries.

There is no triangulation with lies, suppression, greed, or discrimination.

Because the loonies will be back, and they will be bucking for the whole appalling mess to repeat itself, with new catchphrases, wedge issues and faces, carrying updated bios that say 'former aide to Stephen Hadley' or 'a key figure in WHIG,' or 'chief researcher for Alberto Gonzales.' There they'll be, delivering the updated, think-tank fresh versions of 'secure the borders,' and 'protect marriage' and 'the ownership society.'

Be ready.

As we embrace The Man Who Will Lead Us Out of Here let us not forgot the The Man Who Dumped Us Here.

And when some wide-eyed triangulator in a bar waxes pseudo-pundit and wistfully wonders if the former GOP presidential candidate might now go back to being 'the old John McCain,' rather than bask in the touchy-feely glow of the new political day dawning, ask him if he means the one from the Keating Five scandal.

Bill Ayers Tells His Side: 'A Bit Surreal'

2008-11-07T19:54:39Z

Bill Ayers, who stayed quiet throughout the presidential campaign even as he became its central lightning rod, finally broke his silence on Election Day, discussing his experience with a few reporters who knocked on his Hyde Park door.

On Friday, Ayers wrote about his "surreal" year in In These Times.

"Whew! What was all that mess? I'm still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing," Ayers begins.

He charges Hillary Clinton's campaign with laying the groundwork for the attacks that would become central to John McCain's campaign:

Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.

McCain, Ayers writes, "immediately got on message" about him after an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, but it was Sarah Palin who took it "viral":

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists." (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)

The crowd began chanting, "Kill him!" "Kill him!" It was downhill from there.

Ayers sees the 2008 campaign attacks in the context of the 1960s:

The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American political life that the '60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, let's get over the nostalgia and move on. On the other, the lessons we might have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance against the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require that we face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.

Ayers cites Studs Terkel's Huffington Post interview with Edward Lifson, in which Terkel described Palin as "Joe McCarthy in drag," to support his point that McCain and Palin saw this campaign as an opportunity to "bury" the mores of the '60s:

The '60s pushed us to a deeper appreciation of the humanity of every human being. And that is the threat it poses to the right wing, hence the attacks and all the guilt by association.

McCain and Palin demanded to "know the full extent" of the Obama-Ayers "relationship" so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, "is telling the truth to the American people or not."

This is just plain stupid.

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy's heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

Read the entire In These Times article.

Toby Barlow: Stop the Last Big Lie

2008-11-03T12:52:36Z

There's a last minute ripple of inflammatory rhetoric churning round a radio interview Obama gave last winter. As it's currently being spun by the right, Obama supposedly said he "wants to bankrupt the coal industry."

Well, not surprisingly, that's not what he said.

I wouldn't care except that Obama need states like Pennsylvania and Ohio if he's going to win this thing. This is one more desperate move by a desperate campaign, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be effective if we don't spread the truth now and stop it.

All the usual tricks apply, it's a snippet of a much larger interview, it's out of context, etc, etc. But they are hoping, with enough hype and hysteria, it can somehow change the tide. How bad are they twisting it? Well, if you go listen to the whole interview, you realize the reporter was actually accusing him of promoting coal!

So, in the interview he is not against coal, he knows we depend on coal, in fact he literally says, "this notion of 'no coal' I think is an illusion." Obama was speaking about our need for clean coal technology to battle climate change.

In the part of the interview they plucked out of context, Obama, speaking as a proponent of coal, was describing the construction of new power plants in some theoretical cap and trade system, he was not speaking about the industry at large. And, yes, there are probably parts of his position that are debatable, sure.

But guess what, his position is a whole lot better for coal miners than John McCain's.

Because McCain's big energy solution is not coal, it's nuclear.

This is what McCain said: "If I am elected president, I will set this nation on a course to building 45 new reactors by the year 2030, with the ultimate goal of 100 new plants to power the homes and factories and cities of America."

Now, 100 new nuclear plants sounds bad for whole a lot of reasons, but most ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE A COAL MINER. Yes, the region has a bit of uranium, but not whole a lot. The U.S. actually ranks eighth in global uranium production, behind such wonderful places as Kazakhstan, Niger, and Namibia.

So, all you coal miners out there, does it bother you that McCain is trying to export your job to Namibia?

Another Robocall On Obama's Aunt, Jeremiah Wright

2008-11-03T10:08:11Z

The last-minute, under the radar issue some Republican groups are pushing this year appears to be the news that Obama's aunt is an illegal immigrant.

Stephen Medvic, a professor of government at Franklin & Marshall University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, tells Politico he received a robocall on that subject, and on Jeremiah Wright, last night.

Robert Kubey: McCain's Rev. Wright Attack Ad Can Drive Undecideds: Polling Science Tells Us So

2008-11-02T23:11:04Z

In these last hours of the campaign, the sudden onslaught of McCain 527 "swiftboat" style Rev. Jeremiah Wright attack ads are worrisome and could swing undecided voters and shift close battleground states into the McCain column.

The ads show Rev. Jeremiah Wright and we hear his voice saying "God Damn America," the "KKK of A", and other incendiary words. There are a woman's words about trusting the presidency to a man who had Wright as his pastor and mentor, and then print saying of Barack Obama: "Too Radical, Too Risky" for America. Various Rev. Wright speeches are on youTube and the ad itself was there earlier today.

Millions of dollars are being spent on these ads that are all quite similar and appear to come from different groups (goptrust.com, as one example). They just ran one inside "Hardball" on MSNBC. And those millions of dollars aren't being spent without some people thinking their money is being well spent and will get results.

That's because both parties, and these 527 and other numbered groups, test market their ad campaigns well in advance, then tweak the ads many times over with carefully selected focus groups of undecided voters.

The technique has been honed and made into a science over the last 20 years, especially since Lee Atwater developed the method into a disturbing art in the Willie Horton ads that tested well for Vice President Bush in his smear of Gov. Dukakis in 1988. Incidentally, Atwater asked for forgiveness on his deathbed, regretting what he had done in his career with such ads.

The critical point is that it is easier to scare undecideds than uplift and inspire these same voters. The psychobiological study of fear demonstrates this.

People innately fear more immediate dangers that can be readily imagined than more distant threats. They experience real bodily fear and anxiety. Global warming, for example, doesn't scare most voters much in the here and now as it will happen more in years to come and some may rationalize miles from our shores. It takes some thinking to get worked up about global warming.

A presidential candidate linked closely to his own African American pastor who said "God Damn America" will not calm the concerns of millions of shaky and impressionable voters.

A four to six point margin in some battleground states with five to nine percent of voters still undecided coupled with an unpredictable Bradley effect--never tested in a presidential election--and so many other factors, make for uncertainty.

And the Bradley effect may come more into play now that Rev. Wright's preaching style and voice and picture have been brought back into the campaign. The ad clearly permits the McCain support groups to play the race card, and inject primal racial fear, in a very deliberate way.

Meanwhile, commentators are spewing out one Obama path to 270+ electoral voters after another for Tuesday night, and all the electoral college maps leaning blue are impressive.

But I am not convinced. I think Senator Obama may well win, but I also know the power of negative attack ads on less informed voters. The people who tweak campaign ads for every last bit of power are not paid millions of dollars for nothing.

This is true on either side, from the most inspiring to duplicitious of ads.

And who knows if on Monday a new fear inducing ad from a McCain support group won't take up another feature of Obama's biography?

Jim Kaplan: Major Newspapers, Networks Don't Dig Deep When Covering McCain

2008-11-02T15:24:16Z

When John McCain used distorted arguments to attack Barack Obama in the final presidential debate, you'd have expected the so-called "liberal media" to effectively rebut him and then offer equally combustible -- but fully documented -- charges against McCain.

Yet the major newspapers and networks have dropped the ball in their coverage of the Republican nominee. Intimidated by the McCain campaign in particular and conservatives in general, they've self-censored their coverage to the point that they deprive the American people of the information they need to make informed decisions.

To understand why, I keep returning to a conversation I had a few years ago with Daniel Schorr, the political commentator for National Public Radio. "Do you think the media bend so far over backward to avoid being labeled liberal that they become operationally conservative?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said.

Far more aggressive than traditional conservatives, McCain supporters are jumping at any word or phrase they can use to discredit big media. Hence, the kid-glove treatment of everything from McCain's war record, to his positions, to his associations,to his character. The intimidation runs so deep that reporters have stopped asking the hard questions that they're hired for.

The basis of McCain's appeal, reported uncritically in a recent front page New York Times story,"Writing Memorial, McCain Found a Narrative for Life," is the image of a heroic naval aviator steeled by five-and-one-half years of torture in a Hanoi prison. The article mentions that McCain never considered himself a hero, nor used his wartime service until it became useful to him in memoir-writing and politics. But the writer didn't follow up by investigating his service time.

You have to bypass the newspapers and networks and read less visible magazines, blogs, and books to get another view. A 12,000-word profile in Rolling Stone,"Make-Believe Maverick," that most major media have ignored describes how McCain piled up demerits at Annapolis, crashed three planes on non-combat missions (including one after he'd returned from Vietnam supposedly matured), and arguably stayed educated and airborne because of family connections (his father and grandfathers were admirals). Most of us would forgive him for attempting suicide and confessing to his jailers of being a "black criminal" and an "air pirate," because we ourselves would have wilted. Nonetheless, many fellow POWs are quick to point out that McCain violated the Code of Conduct that allows prisoners to give only their name, rank, birth date, and service number and forbids them from making "statements disloyal to my country."

No doubt, McCain's supporters would find much to defend in his war record. The point is, it should be debated and would be, if McCain were a Democrat, swift-boated by Republicans. We can start with Vietnam Veterans Against McCain, whose sparsely reported accusations charge the "Hanoi Hilton songbird" with giving his jailers flight plans and target schedules. But if the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or NBC had done due diligence on airman McCain, they would have had to beat off charges like "traitor!" and "unpatriotic!" that McCainiacs would have thrown at them.

To their credit, the media have reported McCain's flip-flops. Gliding with the tides of political convenience, he has reversed himself on numerous issues, including the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion decision, tax cuts for the wealthy, flying the Confederate flag, and even torture. Little noted nor long remembered, some fellow Arizonans profess themselves tired of this act. "The guy has no core, his only principle is winning the election," Rob Haney, a Republican committeeman in McCain's home district, told The Nation's Max Blumenthal as reported in the article "McCain Mutiny", "He likes to call his campaign the 'straight talk express.' Well, we call it the 'forked tongue express.' "

It is not enough to report what a candidate says. When he lies, distorts, or smears, he should be held accountable in print or on the air. The McCain campaign says Obama would tax the middle class more than McCain would. We need to be reminded -- the Times measures up here -- that Obama would tax middle-class Americans less and give them more tax relief than McCain. Similarly, Republicans warn of rampant Socialism if Obama wins. Since Obama has never endorsed the government owning the means of production, journalists should report that Republicans are attacking him for no more than supporting such venerable government programs and institutions as Medicare, social security, national parks, the post office, and your local police and fire departments.

Perhaps because Obama hasn't made an issue of it, we have read and heard less about McCain's real extremist friends than Obama's imaginary ones. That should not have prevented investigative reporters from looking into the subject. After calling the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson of the Christian far-right "agents of intolerance," McCain more recently praised Falwell on "Meet the Press," then delivered a commencement address at his Liberty University. McCain has also palled around with convicted Watergate burglar and domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy, who currently has a radio talk show. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great," McCain told him.

But these associations have received tepid coverage at most. Why? Imagine McCain's wrath!
Which leads us to the matter of his character. Granted, the media have noted that he's run a cheap and nasty campaign at odds with his seemingly principled run in 2000. In truth, all of McCain's campaigns have run under a flag of convenience. As Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate, in "(The Closet McCain Psst ... he's not really a conservative."), "He was a conservative before he was a liberal before he became a conservative again."

Some commentators hope his "better angels" would govern him as president. What better angels? McCain grossly insulted Chelsea Clinton in remarks at a GOP fundraiser and obscenely insulted his wife Cindy in front of reporters, but you have to go to places like "Rolling Stone" or The Raw Story | Book, where you can read in "The Real McCain", by Cliff Schecter how McCain's temper boiled over in a 1992 tirade to find out. If elected president, McCain will have to restrain his celebrated temper, knee-jerk responses and volatility -- liabilities increasingly ignored by big media other than "The New Yorker" because he has largely managed to control himself during the campaign.

According to a popular Internet source, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, in an article called "McCain Blows His Top", "a former senior Bush administration official told . . . of at least three occasions where he saw McCain fly into a fit of rage, including one time when he got physical and actually pushed the person annoying him." (They aren't the only Republicans fearful of McCain outbursts; the former executive director of the Arizona GOP doesn't want McCain's finger on the button. See the video on YouTube.

Thanks to the McCain campaign's endless undercurrent about race ("the other," "not one of us"), the media have also made a mistake potentially harmful to the Obama campaign by constantly referring to him as African-American. Actually, Obama is bi-racial. His mostly single white mother, a feminist ahead of her time, raised him, in some periods on food stamps. His father was not African-American but Kenyan -- an important fact. Obama has no slavery in his heritage, and bears none of the burden or anger associated with the African-American experience. Indeed, he's as comfortable with whites as they should be with him. Having lived in the East, the Midwest, the West, Hawaii and Indonesia, he's the most universal presidential candidate we've ever had. Obama's appeal is post-racial in the Tiger Woods mode, but describing him as black or African-American may undercut it. By signing on to a label, with all the political polarization it involves, the media not only help the McCain campaign but prevent all of us from moving beyond static and unhelpful racial categories.
The founders, especially James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, considered the Fourth Estate the last bastion against tyranny. They wanted newspapers to find the truth and print it, not worry about how their coverage was perceived. During the current campaign, even the best of our media have fallen short everywhere but in their editorials and editorial columns.

Matthew Filipowicz: WATCH: John McCain's New Attack Ad "Closing Argument"

2008-10-31T15:59:29Z

The polls are looking grim for John McCain. Traditional Republican states including North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Indiana and even McCain's home state of Arizona now appear to be within striking distance for Barack Obama. With the odds stacked against him, John McCain is taking to the airwaves to make his last pitch to the American people in a new ad called "Closing Argument".

In the ad, McCain goes on the attack. But not in the way you might expect. Take a look.

With even the red states turning on him, I'm tempted to feel sorry for McCain. But then, I remember that he was the one who chose the path that led him to where he is today. He chose to destroy his brand and his reputation to cater to the craziest of the crazies. And look at where it's gotten him.

Now it's true, Obama may not win any of these red states but the truth is he doesn't have to. The fact that McCain and Palin are being forced to spend time and money in places that should be "safe" is amazing.

So why shouldn't McCain go all out and try attacking the Republican base? His schizophrenic campaign has tried everything else. And it's not like his campaign had been tied to logic or facts so far. Why on earth would he start now?

Joseph A. Palermo: If Only Obama Agreed To McCain's "Town Hall" Meetings

2008-10-31T10:52:10Z

When John McCain grabbed the microphone out of the hand of that disheveled Republican lady in Minnesota who called Barack Obama an "Arab" he was sincerely trying to rise above the woman's racist misconceptions to set the record straight. But what came out of his mouth was this: "No ma'am, [Obama's] a decent man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreement with on fundamental issues." His response speaks for itself.

When McCain's ignorant tool, Samuel "Joe The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, agreed with someone at a McCain-Palin rally that if we elected Obama it would mean the "death of Israel" even Fox News had to reprimand him.

Lately, the McCain campaign is claiming that Obama's 2003 interaction with a Palestinian professor, Rashid Khalidi, has nefarious implications. They never miss an opportunity to link Obama with Arabs, Muslims, and "terrorists."

And then there's the McCain campaign's "voter fraud" histrionics against low-income African-Americans in the cities who are just trying to register voters. Voter suppression is the Republicans' bread and butter and the attacks on ACORN are just subterfuge.

And let's not forget Ashley Todd, the 20 year old Young Republican volunteer in Pittsburgh who carved a backwards "B" on her own cheek to fake an assault by a rampaging black Obama supporter, and how the McCain campaign jumped at the chance to milk the hoax for maximum political effect.

And when John McCain and Sarah Palin say that Obama will turn the Internal Revenue Service into "a giant welfare program" they choose their words carefully and know exactly what they are saying.

And when they slam "community organizers" as second-rate people no one on the campaign staff bothers to inform them that they are dissing people from our nation's history like Samuel Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez.

And don't forget the phony pamphlets that have popped up pretending to come from the Obama campaign and trying to scare white voters in swing neighborhoods of swing states.

And there was also a fake broadsheet pretending to be from the state of Virginia falsely alerting voters in African-American precincts that due to high voter turnout Democrats and Independents will be voting on November 5th instead of the 4th.

And out on the stump Sarah Palin likes to talk about Obama's "early surrender in Iraq" and his secret plan to "gut" the defense budget. She also talks about how terrible it will be for the nation if the "Democrat Party" takes power. Nobody hurls red meat to her supporters better than Sarah Palin. She fuses together the cluelessness of Elisabeth Hasselbeck with the meanness of Susan Molinari. I hope the Republicans nominate Palin in 2012.

Add to this mix of McCain campaign slime the accusations about Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, his relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the questions about his country of birth and his "true" religion, the charge of being a "socialist" and sympathetic to "terrorists," and what we have is one of the most vicious, dishonest, and mean-spirited presidential campaigns in American history.

It is fitting that at the miserable close of the George Bush-Karl Rove era we are finally seeing, at long last, the Republican Party's true colors divorced from the verbal pabulum of "compassionate conservatism" and "reaching across the aisle." McCain and Palin, Hannity and O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Medved are singing to the choir, spewing their bile in an endless loop inside an echo chamber whose walls are closing in all around them. The party is shrinking. It's becoming whiter and more intolerant at a time when the country is moving in the opposite direction.

But McCain sticks to his absurd story that it was Obama who forced his hand. It is Obama's fault that McCain had to embark on one of the most fiercely negative campaigns in history.

If only Obama agreed to appear with his esteemed opponent in the series of "Town Halls" that McCain proposed at the beginning of the campaign.

All of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

Steve Young: McCain Campaign Resorting To Scam Emails

2008-10-31T07:52:30Z

(SYOP News 10/31/08) In an attempt to cover last minute paid ads, the McCain/Palin campaign has resorted to emails sent from untrackable Nigerian URLs. One such email follows...

Hello My Dear,

You may be surprise to receive this letter from me, since you dont know me personally, I am JOHN McCAIN, the son of DR IBRAHIM MOHAMED MCCAIN, who was recently murdered in the land dispute in Western Pennsylvania. I got your contact as i was searching for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction which involve a transfer of fund to a Republican National Committee account and i decided to write you.

My late father was among the few pro-American pro-military murdered by the agents of the ruling anti-American Barack Obama Acorn party socialistic and marxist minority, for his support and sympathy for the pro-American god favoring christian Republicans. Before my father death ,he had taken to and deposited the sum of fifty-six million united state dollars (US$56,000,000) with a charles keating security and financial company, The money right now is in ALASKA (USA), as if he forseen the looming danger in Washington. The money was deposited in a box as valuable items to avoid over taxed custom clearance by 95 per cent of undeserved godless and foreign READ THE REST OF THE UNBELIEVABLE SCAM HERE.

Award-winning TV writer, Steve Young, is author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" (www.greatfailure.com) and blogs at the appropriately named steveyoungonpolitics.com

James Love: McCain/Palin Appeals to Prejudice, Fear and Anti-Intellectualism are Making it Close

2008-10-30T14:53:58Z

There are a rash of polls showing a close race nationally and in states like Virginia and Colorado, with Pennsylvania narrowing. One has to wonder if the McCain/Palin relentless innuendos about Obama are beginning to pay off. This is quite depressing.

Officially Obama's campaign people have been declared geniuses, but one has to wonder if they have been tough enough in pushing back on the massive hypocrisy and gutter politics of the McCain/Palin camp.

I for one would welcome some more pointed attacks on McCain for pillaring Obama for merely having talked to or known people who are Muslims or who have non-mainstream views, and something more personal toward Pallin on the socialism charges, given how close to the trough she has been.

I watched McCain have a long interview on Larry King last night that was basically an endless string of cowardly insinuations by McCain over things that have no relevance or evidence, and that are pretty much designed to appeal to prejudice and ignorance. When he wasn't doing that he was making absurd comments about how he'll balance the budget by "growing" the economy, with zero details or explanation as to how.

The Palin/McCain camps have so completely played the press guilt about their personal views in favor of Obama, they can now say just about anything without paying a price.

The only Obama ad I have seen mentioning Palin is the one with the wink, and she actually looks cute and likeable. She's kicking Obama in the ass right now, with idiotic first level appeals to rednecks. I would not underestimate the impact of these attacks, which are not being very strongly addressed. I would welcome more open challenges to the un-American notion that politicians shouldn't talk to people with diverse views and backgrounds, and emphasize that she is basically an ignorant uneducated rube, and the world is complex place with some tough competition and we can't afford a third rate mind at the helm. Don't be ashamed of being smart and well educated. We have suffered plenty from the other kind already.

Wajahat Ali: Dear John McCain, A Farewell...

2008-10-30T14:37:39Z

Dear John McCain, Sarah Palin, the RNC, Charlie Black, the corrosive spirit of Lee Atwater, Rove-ian politics, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Elizabeth Hasselback, Joe the Plumber and other respected members of your respected ilk:

Please stop. Just stop. Enough. No more. Is this how you really want to go out? Do you want the following hate-filled gems to be the final symbol of your failed campaign? Is this how you want to be remembered?

According to you, Obama is now a cowardly, pseudo-Muslimy, Iran-first traitor who is more loyal to the "radical Muslim world" than to his own country.

[See McCain's latest ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1azQcs-8iI&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/29/mccain-making-last-ditch_n_138969.html]

Really? That's fascinating considering most of the Muslim world has the intelligence and common sense to recognize Obama's Arabic name neither makes him Muslim nor Arab. And as a Muslim, I should know, we Muslims are like the Borg -- we can identify one of our own through innate, radical "Muslim-y" powers. But, that's our little secret -- don't tell anyone.

Next up, apparently you all believe Obama is a pro-Palestinian extremist who does not support Israel and instead "pals" around with "radical" Palestinian American academic Rashid Khalidi: a respected Columbia faculty member and scholar whose Palestinian background and "radical" notions that Palestinians might be suffering labels him an extremist. Last April, it was revealed that Obama and Khalidi were friendly acquaintances during their time in Chicago, and Obama even made a respectful toast in praise of Khalidi at the latter's farewell dinner. [Khalidi subsequently left to assume his position with Columbia University.]

So, judging from your logic, both Obama and Khalidi are radicals, with Obama automatically absorbing, accepting and endorsing all of Khalidi's ideologies and beliefs purely by virtue of his social relations with the Palestinian professor.

If indeed Obama's social "palling around with Khalidi" makes him an anti-Israel, anti-American radical extremist, then McCain surely emerges as the 72 year old hybrid incarnate of Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda. After all, as chairman of the International Republican Institute, McCain personally oversaw and approved the funding of Khalidi's non-militant and academic Center for Palestine Research and Studies organization to a tune of $448, 873. I mean, that is the natural correlation, correct?

Obama might have had dinners with Khalidi, but unlike McCain, at least he didn't fund the man with 6 figures.

If these associations and analogies hold logical water, then McCain supporters should demand why their candidate -- whose slogan by the way is "Country First" -- not only "pals" around with pro-Palestinian rights advocates, but also funds them! (This is of course a logical question only if one assumes that speaking for Palestinian rights and against human rights abuses in Gaza and West Bank automatically makes one unpatriotic and somehow un-American.)

I mean, even Moose Hunting, God fearing, Plain Jane Sarah Palin said,

"This is important because [Obama's] associate, Rashid Khalidi ... in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he's a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization."

Even though this claim is an outright, vacuous lie, which lacks all notions of credibility, perhaps we should ask why McCain, as chairman, helped fund the spokesperson for Yasser Arafat's organization? Inquiring, moose hunting patriots demand to know!

In last April's L.A. Times article, at least Khalidi distanced himself from Obama when it was revealed

"[Khalidi] strongly disagrees with Obama's current views on Israel, and often disagreed with him during their talks over the years."

For the uninitiated or for those running for the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, that means Khalidi and Obama "strongly" disagree on Israel.

However, I have yet to hear such a stinging disagreement between Professor Khalidi and John McCain over this same issue. Surely, McCain's silence means consent and agreement with Khalidi's opinions, beliefs, writings and declarations. After all, the Senator did fund this "Radical" organization! A ha! The red herring, the bloody glove, the smoking gun, Keyser Soze!

Dear rabid hate-mongers, do you see how ridiculous you sound?

Your fear-mongering and smearing has soared beyond the depraved, leaped over the
humiliating boundaries of pathetic, teetered off the ledge of shamelessness, bounced off a steaming mountain of cynicism, and finally boomeranged back into your mouths where it incestuously mates with your desperation and hypocrisy only to be reproduced by your next, inevitable smear sound bite.

Someone from McCain's campaign please muzzle your pit bull. Your Caribou Diva has become unhinged in her zealous quest to become the Moose Hunting Margaret Thatcher of America's radical right. Seriously, someone needs to file a permanent injunction enjoining Palin from ever commenting on any domestic or international topic of merit. Not only is her rhetoric disgraceful for the office she is running, and thus an international embarrassment for our nation, but it is also reckless in its attempts to smear reputations and careers by carelessly suggesting opponents are terrorists, socialists, communists, radicals, and extremists.

There is less than week left in these historic elections. Who knows who will win? Whatever the result, please be assured that somehow life will continue. Yes, the Earth will rotate around its axis. Starbucks will still overprice their mediocre coffee and compete against itself by opening the same exact branch across the street. Angelina Jolie will yet again adopt another child and officially become her own United Nations. Britney Spears will inevitably do something crazy. And, a Republican senator will resign over corruption or a sex scandal or both.

However, you will have to live with yourself, your actions and your well-earned legacy of promoting and stroking prejudice, fear and hysteria in an already tenuous and volatile global climate.

And to quote King James: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Mary Lyon: I Helped Pay for That, Too, Senator McCain

2008-10-30T04:31:15Z

The piece of film that just made the biggest impression on me on this particular night, when Barack Obama aired his half-hour TV special, was not anything Obama presented. It was the sour grapes John McCain squeezed in reaction.

He complained about all those sinister mystery contributions, the suspicious credit card funding that's poured into the Obama campaign coffers. Not on the up-n-up. Something's undoubtedly fishy here (probably because all that money hasn't been raining down upon McCain).

Okay, Senator McCain. Wanna make something out of it? I helped underwrite that film. Me, Mary, with my piddly little credit card donations that I've inputted on numerous Obama campaign contribution forms online. You gonna set your running mate on me now - and accuse me of "palling around with terrorists"?

Well, go ahead (I'm sure you will, anyway, without the need of any prodding or double-dog-daring from me). As a matter of fact, let me introduce myself to both you AND that new gal you've been parading around on your arm lately (the brunette, not the blonde). Mr. Senator, Madam Governor, I'm one of those many people you've slapped in the face as frequently as you've gone after Barack Obama and Joe Biden. My name is Mary. I'm a wife and a mother. And, Senator McCain, it might interest you to know that I'm also an adopted daughter (for whose sake MY father would have shaken the earth in my defense, and actually did, a few times, when somebody years ago ruthlessly attacked me).

I'm a woman of faith (lifelong Catholic), semi-retired after years spent toiling in various newsrooms large and small. I put up a manger scene and a decorated tree every Christmas. I teach kids to put together red-white-and-blue toilet-paper-tube "firecrackers" for the 4th of July, and I make a ridiculously mean chocolate chip cookie. My husband and I have been together for more than three decades, in a marriage stable enough not to be threatened if Ellen and Portia or Adam and Steve decide to get married, too.

We have two kids -- both of them well-adjusted and eager to vote in the upcoming elections (although our son isn't quite old enough yet). Our daughter was taught in great honesty and full detail about how not to get pregnant -- both from us and from her school -- once her class was deemed old enough to handle sex education (Catholic school, too, mind you). Our kids were in the Brownies and Cub and Boy Scouts, and I helped with crafts and served juice boxes and snacks at every den meeting. I was an art teacher and a room mother, and my husband a musician and a Boy Scout pine car derby car builder. I am the proud member of a family that's not afraid to talk science and evolution, analysis and logic with our kids, even while we've taught them about Jesus -- AND given them as full a working knowledge as we're able -- about Mohammed, Abraham, Buddah, and the mythology of Native American tribes, among other faith/belief systems.

You may question our patriotism because we lean liberal and won't vote for you, but my husband and I are both the proud children of World War II veterans. Funny enough, neither of them EVER dropped bombs on anyone from the safe, antiseptic distance of miles overhead. Neither of our fathers raised a single weapon against his fellow man, something of which my dad, who flew photo-recon in the Air Force, was immensely proud. And my army doctor father-in-law served in a field hospital trying to stitch up the broken bodies of soldiers who'd seen the hideousness of war far more intimately than you did, Senator McCain.

I was born in "fly-over country" as were both my parents and my in-laws. I'm sure that doesn't qualify me for salvation from your partner, Ms. Palin, even if it's in the Midwest, because I was born in a big city. According to her, only the small towns are where you find REAL "Americans". So that makes me some sort of accursed political heathen, I'm sure. Never mind that at least two of my cousins and their spouses and children still live in the Midwest - on small family farms. A couple of the men among them look like they might be ready to go have a beer with your friend "Joe the Plumber", although they're far too informed to vote like the low-information voter he sadly is. Nor are they now racing to hire publicists to manage their "image" or get them book deals and recording contracts, much less spreading a lot of misinformation around to other gullible, low-information voters.

So now you know a little bit about me, and about my family, too. There, don't say I never gave you anything. We're obviously among the many "terrorists," terrorist-fraternizers, and unpatriotic, godless, anti-American vermin with our "secretive" and evidently suspect credit card Obama contributions - whom you and your snide, mean-spirited attack-dog running mate are so quick to denounce. That's me - and those I love - whom you both are insulting and insinuating shadowy doings. I'd ordinarily hope that you and Ms. Palin are only dressing up as character assassins for Halloween.

That's okay. I'm used to it by now. I've been demeaned far worse, and even threatened, by a lot of the same people who fanatically support you now, ever since 2002 when I started protesting the idea of unilateral and unjustified military intervention in Iraq. I've been condemned as a baby killer merely for insisting that I have the last word over what happens to my body. I'm smeared as a filthy "Commie" or socialist because I believe in government as a force for good, and the obligation we all have to help those less fortunate - with our tax dollars if it's beyond our capability as individuals and the need is that great. You know, that "least of My brethren" thing that the Jesus - Whom you and your understudy worship - tried to teach everybody. I can only imagine with a fair amount of horror what some of them might yell at me if I were dark-skinned.

Could it be, Senator McCain, that you're just a wee bit jealous that it isn't you raking in all those hundreds of millions of dollars? If it isn't for your benefit, then it's automatically suspect (particularly when it's for "That One" instead)?

Could it also be that I am sick and tired of being on the receiving end of this kind of intolerance and derision? I don't know which is worse - your campaign speeches stirring up the rabble or the outbursts of your angry, intolerant mobs and pathetic stunt-pullers that give you cover, justification, and spur you onward. They're bringing out the very worst in you and Ms. Palin both, and you, in turn, in them. I've asked here, before, Senator McCain, if this is really how you want to go out, if this is how you want to be remembered. I can't fathom how you'd want that, even while your behavior says you do.

Yes. I helped pay for that extravagant half-hour Obama commercial. I contribute as much as I can afford. On the other hand, the price you are paying, Senator McCain, is far more dreadful. It will be exponentially higher for all of us if you should somehow manage to win.

Lee Stranahan: WATCH: My Reponse To McCain's Weird "Yet" Ad : "Anymore"

2008-10-29T22:57:25Z

John McCain is so darn mavericky that's he's put out an ad that says Barack Obama isn't ready....yet. I myself do not have the mavercikish brain to wrap my head around the maverickal implications of this, really.

But it does beg an obvious response. (Cue the scary music!)

More stuff like this including my 30 Days | 30 Reasons I'm Voting For Barack Obama project on my YouTube page. Sources close to the campaign tell me if you don't subscribe to my YouTube videos, your favorite candidate will lose the election!

Charles J. Brown: There Will Be a Crisis, No Matter Who Is President

2008-10-29T18:24:07Z

It's been over a week since Joe Biden said that world events would test Obama in his first six months in office:

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama. . . . The world is looking. . . . We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. . . . I guarantee you that it's going to happen.

The McCain campaign has jumped all over this, running an ad with the tag line, "It doesn't have to happen. Vote McCain."

When I first heard about this, I dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot -- Joe Biden running off his mouth and the McCain campaign using it to make yet another commercial. But then I began to think about it a little more, and I realized that not only is Joe Biden right, John McCain is delusional if he thinks that his election would prevent the world from testing him.

Over the past fifty years, every newly elected President -- with one notable exception -- has faced multiple major international incidents in his first year of office (defined as January 20 to the following January 19 for those elected to office, day of swearing in to one year later for Johnson and Ford). Using Wikipedia's year by year historical calendars, I put together a short list:

John F. Kennedy (January 20, 1961 - January 19, 1962):

* Civil war in the Congo
* The Bay of Pigs incident
* Soviet decision to build the Berlin Wall

Lyndon B. Johnson (November 22, 1963 to November 21, 1964):

* Coup in South Vietnam
* Gulf of Tonkin incident (and subsequent Congressional incident authorizing war)
* China tests its first atomic bomb

Richard M. Nixon (January 20, 1969 to January 19, 1970):

* Sino-Soviet border conflict
* Secret bombing of Cambodia
* Hamburger Hill (major battle in Vietnam)
* The "Football War" between Honduras and El Salvador
* My Lai massacre

Gerald R. Ford (August 9, 1974 to August 8, 1975):

* Cyprus
* Mayaguez incident
* Fall of South Vietnam
* State of Emergency in India

Jimmy Carter (January 20, 1977 to January 19, 1978):

* No major crisis

Ronald Reagan (January 20, 1981 to January 19, 1982):

* Israel's attack on Iraqi nuclear facilities
* Gulf of Sidra incident (U.S. and Lybian planes clash)
* Assasination of Anwar Sadat,
* Martial law in Poland

George H. W. Bush (January 20, 1989 to January 19, 1990):

* Lockerbie/Pan Am 103 (technically, this happened before Bush was sworn in, but the determination of who was responsible took place during his watch)
* Tiananmen Square massacre
* Fall of Berlin Wall and collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe

Bill Clinton (January 20, 1993 to January 19, 1994):

* Somalia
* World Trade Center bombing
* North Korea withdraws from the NPT,
* Attack on Iraq in response to ttempted assassination of G.H.W. Bush by Iraqi agents
* Yeltsin uses tanks on Russian Parliament

George W. Bush (January 20, 2001 to January 19, 2002):

* U.S.-China dispute over American spy plane
* 9/11
* War in Afghanistan

So it is not uncommon for new Presidents to be tested by world events. In fact, early crises are the rule, not the exception. The only President in the past fifty years not to face multiple crises in his first year was Jimmy Carter -- and we all know how well he did with foreign policy.

For argument's sake, let's remove relatively minor crises like the Soccer War or self-inflicted ones like the Bay of Pigs. In fact, let's limit the list to incidents that involve another country or terrorist group "testing" a new President. Here's what we end up with:

* Kennedy: Soviet Union (Berlin Wall)
* Johnson: North Vietnam (Vietnam War)
* Nixon: North Vietnam (Vietnam War)
* Ford: Cambodia (Mayaguez incident)
* Reagan: Libya (Gulf of Sidra incident)
* Bush I: Libya (Lockerbie), China (post-Tiananmen sanctions)
* Clinton: Somalian insurgents (Black Hawk down episode), terrorists (WTC bombing), Iraq (Bush assassination attempt)
* Dubya: China (spy plane incident), al Qaeda (9/11), Afghanistan (the Taliban's refusal to hand over bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members)

In other words, other than Carter, every President has been deliberately provoked by someone over the course of their first year in office. The notion that McCain somehow would be an exception to the rule defies the reality of the past half-century.

Or to put it another way, new Presidents don't get tested because of their youth or inexperience -- they get tested because they're new. The key question isn't whether there will be a crisis, but rather how the new President will respond.

On that basis, which candidate do you think is more likely to manage a major crisis? Which one has the temperament to stand up to those who would like to embarrass the United States or do it harm?

I know my answer. And it isn't John McCain.

McCain Attack Ads By Hollywood Auteurs, Round Two

2008-10-29T16:57:26Z

Last week, LandlineTV released a reel of spoofs, using the aesthetic of well-known Hollywood directors (John Woo, Wes Anderson, and Kevin Smith) as a jumping-off place for parodies of John McCain attack ads. I thought it was just okay, with the Wes Anderson spot being the strongest. But now, Landline has put out a second round, and they've really found the sweet spot -- with attack ads as imagined by Diablo Cody, M. Night Shyamalan, and David Lynch.

The Shyamalan spot seems right to me -- it probably proves that I've either seen too many or too few of his movies to know any better. NO TREES KILL ANYONE, so that's good news. I have seen many David Lynch movies, and Landline has captured his metier perfectly -- you get a dose of Twin Peaks, a bit of Mulholland Drive, and Lynch's harsh pirouettes between kitschy quirk and oppressive menace. But, my friends, the Diablo Cody spot is pretty pants-wettingly funny. Pretty much nailed me at the first instance of Levi Johnston's "baby paste." I guess Bristol Palin and I have that in common!

Jerry and Joe Long: McCain's "Real Americans" Ad

2008-10-29T10:18:30Z

"Real Americans" from "Real America" give their carefully reasoned and meticulously constructed arguments against an Obama presidency. Behold the GOP base in all its glory.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Brian Ross: Channel This Election Fervor Into Helping the Country

2008-10-29T09:39:39Z

It is fear of change, or the lack of change, that are polarizing our electorate.

In an odd way, my brief meeting with Joe the golden retriever owner, while doing some canvassing for the Obama campaign yesterday evening here in Boca Raton, FLA., was probably a pretty good way to help me regain some sense of balance in these final days leading up to the election.

It is easy, reading everything you can find on the web, to get caught up in the waves of the news cycle, and the high-amp that happens when shows try to find extreme points of view, which, sadly, this year, are plentiful. John Oliver's brilliant "Obama and Palin Rallies of Fear" on "The Daily Show" was a funny bit that showed how strong opinions become in the heated final days.

Yet there was Joe, who told me that he was a McCain supporter, but that he was happy to help my son canvassing for Obama find his way around the apartment complex where we were working.

His five week old golden retriever doesn't have any political affiliation, apparently, because it was more than happy to run over to me and jump all over me and enjoy a good head scratch.

Joe, as we'll call him for this interview, since that seems to be the fashion of this year's campaign, said:

"I'm for McCain but I can appreciate that you guys are taking the time and being part of the political process. That's really good."

I knocked on a few more doors, and came back. Joe and his dog were still out there, taking in the 65-degree crisp, by Florida standards, evening air.

"Do you mind if I ask you why it is that you support McCain?" I asked him.

"Oh no, sure," he replied as a good-natured Joe is apt to do, "I've voted Republican my whole life, and I think he just represents more of what I'm looking for with all of the stuff going on out there."

I asked him if he was more of a social or a fiscal conservative.

"Oh, fiscal, more so, yeah, but I, there are a lot of other things that the Democrats want that I don't go with."

I got the impression, from talking further, that McCain would not have been his first choice, but that he was the party's choice. That's pretty common, even amongst us Democrats.

I said: "You know, I know where you're coming from. I didn't get all excited about Kerry, either. You know who I miss though? Robert Rubin."

Joe smiled, nodded, and agreed that Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary was pretty good for all of us.

"John Snow was one of the worst Treasury Secretaries in history," I reminded him.

"Yeah, a lot of people in the Bush Administration weren't too good on the money," he agreed.

"That's what I worry about," I told him. "Maybe you know, because McCain hasn't mentioned it on television that I know of, or in his stump speeches. He says that he's going to solve this mess. Who is he going to get to do that? The same guys who are doing it now? I mean, I know that Obama has Robert Rubin, and Warren Buffett to advise him, who I think are pretty smart guys..."

"Oh yeah, Buffett's great," Joe acknowledged.

"So who is McCain going to get to fix the mess like he says? I looked a bit, but maybe you've seen something at one of the Republican websites or on some news that I missed."

Joe thought, and realized that he didn't know.

"For what it's worth," I said, "You might want to take a look and see, because right now, the economy is job one, and I think that Obama on the rest of the stuff that you might be worried about isn't so bad. He's got good people behind him who can help get the economy back on its feet."

Joe promised that he would check it out, and, even though it is likely that he's still going to draw the line between the arrows (our system) for McCain, at the very least I got him thinking about it.

Reasonably.

The reason that I bring this little slice of humanity to you is because I think that it is way too easy to demonize "the other side" in all of this. I sit and listen to McCain and Palin's incendiary stump speeches on POTUS, the XM Radio political channel, and hear their stream of desperate distortions and outright lies, and think to myself: 'Who can listen to this and have watched TV or the video and know that this is not total bull.'

I thought that Karl Rove and Lee Attwater came up with this type of slimy politics. dlinguist, a HuffPost reader, corrected me by showing me this:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. "
-- Joseph Goebbels.

The rest of the quote is:

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

There are a lot of people for whom voting is more habit, and following in the footsteps of one's parents, just like, for a large part, religion.

There are going to be differing opinions on which way to go. There are those who are going to be afraid of John McCain's wild behavior and hyperbolic rhetoric, and there are those who think that Obama is a black Muslim socialist communist reverend Wright Christian vote-fraud endorsing baby killer. If I missed a smear tactic, my apologies.

In between, though, are me, and Joe with the golden retriever puppy. When the dust settles next Tuesday, the lunatic fringe of both sides will crawl back into their burrows for another three years of winter, and the rest of us will have to repair the damage that the Bush Administration has done to this country.

This is one thing that McCain, reluctantly, and Obama are now in agreement upon.

So go and be passionate. Get out there and get people to vote. Speak to your point of view. Temper, though, your passions so that you can hear other people's needs, wants and fears, and they can hear you, too.

Next week, we will need that level of calm and order to get to the hard work once the confetti and streamers are gone, and the heat of the campaign has not left a warm enough glow to keep the house heated this winter, or families with sub-prime mortgages from being put out of their homes.

Erik Ose: Top McCain Advisor Learned Slime Tactics From Jesse Helms

2008-10-28T18:01:49Z

Despite sharing the same initials and middle name "Alexander," Jesse Helms and Joe Herzenberg were very different. Helms was a bigoted, heterosexual, Southern Baptist, extreme right wing Republican who used divisive politics to keep himself in power for five U.S. Senate terms. Herzenberg was a tolerant, gay, Jewish, staunchly liberal Democrat who spent his life standing up for progressive ideals.

Jesse Helms and Joe Herzenberg

Yet they were both historic politicians who bookended the Old and New South. Helms, who died last summer at age 86, was the last unapologetically racist politician of the segregation era. Herzenberg, who passed away one year ago today at age 66, was elected to the Chapel Hill Town Council two decades ago as the first openly gay elected official in the former Confederacy. And in 1984, their paths memorably crossed during the epic Helms-Hunt U.S. Senate race.

That year, Helms used shameful hate mongering against Herzenberg, his partner Lightning Brown, and the rest of North Carolina's gay and lesbian community to eke out his narrow re-election against sitting Gov. Jim Hunt. Helms had been getting decreasing mileage out of race-baiting, drawing heavy criticism for his filibuster against the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday a year earlier. So he found a new bogeyman - the homosexual menace.

GOP operatives like Lee Atwater whose names are synonymous with slimy politics cut their teeth working on Helms' campaigns. During the '84 race, one of the top Helms aides responsible for implementing this gay-bashing strategy was Atwater's mentor, Charlie Black. Black was neck deep in the planning behind every one of Helms' infamously racist and divisive election bids. He went on to a long lobbying career representing disgraced foreign dictators like the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire. Black currently serves as a senior advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign, and the results of his most recent handiwork have become evident as the McCain-Palin message has swerved disgustingly into the gutter.

McCain and Black confer aboard McCain's campaign plane

Headlines screaming "Jim Hunt Is Sissy, Prissy, Girlish and Effeminate," and asking, "Is Jim Hunt homosexual?...Is he AC and DC?" appeared throughout 1984 in a free newspaper called The Landmark, a virulently anti-gay publication printed in Chatham County, N.C. The paper's homophobic publisher, Bob Windsor of Chapel Hill, was a cog in the Helms machine.

The stories ran alongside paid ads for Helms' re-election campaign, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the paper were distributed around the state, particularly in rural areas. Its press run increased dramatically in the weeks leading up to Election Day. The Landmark was funded by shadowy national Helms backers, part of the religious right that played a key behind-the-scenes organizing role in Helms' campaign.

That June, the N.C. Republican Party held a press conference to accuse Jim Hunt of a "gay connection" because gay donors had bought 100 of 700 tickets to a Hunt fundraiser in New York, and Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, leading Senate sponsor of a gay rights bill, had held a fundraising dinner for Hunt in Boston. The next day, Helms supporters paid to have a Landmark story reprinted as a large ad in the Raleigh News & Observer, accusing Hunt of "accepting a $79,000 contribution from Gay Activists."

Posing as reporters for the black and gay press, right-wing operatives made and taped phone calls to gay Hunt supporters around the country. Articles based on distorted excerpts from the phone calls were then published in issues of The Landmark.

Herzenberg and Brown were the smear campaign's N.C. poster children, targeted because they had helped co-found the Lesbian and Gay Democrats of North Carolina two years earlier, and were both vocally campaigning for Hunt. According to Lightning, one caller "asked about my fund raising for Hunt. The details ended up in The Landmark right away - it was frightening."

Besides running made-up stories that slandered Herzenberg and Brown relentlessly, including accusations that they had started a Chapel Hill NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) chapter and were secretly "porno kings," The Landmark also published their home addresses and did everything possible to incite violence against the two of them. No wonder, as gay activist Mab Segrest recounted in an article on the Senate race, that "Brown and Herzenberg were subjected to more than a dozen separate incidents of intimidation, vandalism and harassment...for their work within the Democratic Party."

In a 1984 interview with the Independent Weekly when Herzenberg and Brown were awarded two of the Indy's first-ever Citizen Awards, Brown told of how "two people even threatened to kill me on Rosemary Street" in Chapel Hill. Herzenberg called the attacks "very disruptive and at times painful." Asked if he had been scared, he admitted, with a subtlety that testified to his courage, "At moments."

In September, The Landmark published an interview with Helms in which he called homosexuality "a perversion and a crime." He described the gay movement as a "threat to the morals of our young people" and to "the ability of our population to reproduce itself...jeopardizing the very survival of the nation."

Helms was eventually forced to publicly distance himself from The Landmark after the paper published its most sensational charges accusing Jim Hunt of having a lover who was a "pretty young boy."" But he was well aware of how the paper was being widely distributed on his behalf. Helms betrayed himself on this point during a televised debate.

Although both were known in Triangle political circles, and in the state's gay community, the only actual media coverage of their status as gay activists was through The Landmark's smear campaign. But in one of their four debates, Helms twice gay-baited Hunt by thundering, "You're supported by people like Joe Herzenberg and Lightning Brown!" Herzenberg considered the moment he was publicly outed to have been when Helms announced his name on statewide television.

In the wake of his sliming by Helms' hateful tactics, Herzenberg decided he was out of the closet for good. His political activism and organizing flourished. He was elected as an openly gay Mondale delegate to the 1984 Democratic National Convention. He helped organize North Carolina's first Gay Pride Parade in 1986. He ran for the Chapel Hill Town Council as an openly gay candidate in 1985, and again in 1987 before he was finally elected.

Herzenberg was arguably the first gay candidate in U.S. history elected to office outside an urban area or historically gay enclave, and he did it by assembling a broad-based progressive coalition. His election was an important symbol of how the South was changing, and in some ways, Jesse Helms and his repugnant minions like Charlie Black made it possible. Joe Herzenberg would have been thrilled to see the political landscape one year after his death, only one week away from the election of Barack Obama and a historic repudiation of the politics of division and hate.

Erik Ose is a veteran of Democratic campaigns in North Carolina, one of the curators of JoeHerzenberg.org, and blogs at The Latest Outrage.

Aimee Liu: Projecting McCain

2008-10-28T09:23:48Z

When a little boy shoves a girl in line and then tells the teacher, "She hit me," that's called projection.

When a cheating husband accuses his wife of infidelity, that's called projection.

And when a Presidential candidate with a dismal 20% voting record for disabled veterans accuses his opponent (who has an 80% record) of being "against our troops," that, my friends, is projection.

Projection is one of our most primitive psychological defense mechanisms. According to Freud, when we feel threatened by or afraid of our own impulses, our first reaction is either to deny or to "project" these impulses onto someone else. Projection "is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits."

In other words, we project onto others that which most unnerves, shames, or confuses us about ourselves. Just ask the kid who plays with matches, then blames his brother for lighting the fire that burned down the family home. Or the candidate who blames his opponent for raising the negative campaign rhetoric that is causing his own attack ads to backfire.

Nietzsche wrote, "When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." As we gaze into the abyss of McCain's disintegrating campaign, we see that the abyss has been gazing back at him for months now. Virtually every attack he makes against Barack Obama is a projection of his own fear or loathing.

Here are just a few more examples:
- McCain accuses Obama of being a proponent of "big government," even though the Tax Policy Center finds that McCain's policies would likely add $1.5 trillion more to the federal deficit over 10 years than would Obama's.
- McCain accuses Obama of having "dubious judgment," when he himself picked a hockey-mom running mate under investigation for abuse of executive privilege and then dressed her up in $150,000 worth of clothes from Saks and Neiman Marcus and allowed her make-up artist to become the highest paid member of his campaign team.
- McCain claims Obama' s tax plan will hurt "Main Street Americans" when, according to the Tax Policy Center, " Senator Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income taxpayers."
- McCain calls Obama a Socialist, when his own Sarah Palin is governor of the most socialist state in the union -- where every man, woman, and child receives $3200 of redistributed oil wealth per year.
- McCain warns that Obama is "out of touch" with "real Americans," but McCain is the one with thirteen cars and so many homes he can't count them.
- McCain suggests that Obama is "anti-American" when his own Vice Presidential pick is closely allied with the Alaskan Independence Party -- whose stated goal is to see Alaska secede from America.
- McCain accuses Obama of being "in the pocket" of lobbyists, when the watchdog group Public Citizen has found that McCain himself has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates -- not to mention the veteran lobbyists like Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon, who serve as his senior advisers.

Psychohistorian Peter Gay describes projection as "the operation of expelling feelings or wishes the individual finds wholly unacceptable -- too shameful, too obscene, too dangerous -- by attributing them to another." McCain's pattern of projection, in its breathtaking totality, suggests that the feeling he secretly needs most to expel is his wish to be President.

If the pollsters' non-psychological projections hold true, the Republican nominee will soon be relieved of his misery.

Joseph A. Palermo: Crazy Woman in Pittsburgh? Republican Problems Run Deeper

2008-10-27T10:51:34Z

On October 24, 2008, John McCain's communications director for Pennsylvania, Peter Feldman, fanned the flames of racial bigotry to score political points. Feldman peddled the story to at least two Pittsburgh TV news outlets (KDKA and WPXI) that a 6' 4" "dark skinned" African-American man assaulted, robbed, and carved a "B" into the cheek of a 20-year-old white woman "volunteer" from the Young Republicans named Ashley Todd. McCain's communications wizard embellished the story for maximum political effect, telling reporters that the "B" obviously stood for "Barack," and that her attacker had yelled at her: "Oh you're with McCain . . . you're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson!" Feldman said the man had become enraged when he saw a McCain-Palin bumper sticker on Todd's car. The episode prompted statements from both the McCain and Obama campaigns, as well as sympathy telephone calls to the "victim" from John McCain and Sarah Palin. "We're shaken up by this. It's sick and disgusting," the McCain campaign officially stated. Naturally, such a juicy story with its racial overtones was the delight of the Drudge Report, Fox News, and right-wing talk radio. But the Republicans' dream of exploiting the incident to scare white people in Pennsylvania (and nationally) quickly unraveled when the whole thing was exposed as a pathetic hoax perpetrated by a disturbed young woman and an equally disturbed presidential campaign.

Matt Drudge, Mark Noonans, and Brent Bozell's "Newsbusters" were among the most vociferous purveyors of this racist hoax. The phony attack story revealed just how willing and eager are the denizens of the right-wing blogosphere and Republican echo chamber to fan the flames of racial hatred if they think it will benefit their candidate. Meanwhile, Youtube is overflowing with damning videos of McCain supporters at rallies in the "real America" happy to share their racist views, yelling things like: "Vote McCain, Not Hussein!" and "His education was paid for by Arabs!"

But what's happening to the Republican party today runs much deeper than this election. The current crisis has been brewing for 44 years. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Right Act in 1964 he said that he believed he had just delivered the South to the Republicans for a generation. Johnson knew that the vestiges of the Jim Crow system were so entrenched that white voters in the South would change their party affiliations once it became clear the Democratic party favored black civil rights. The 1968 presidential campaign offered the GOP the first opportunity to run the "Southern Strategy." Subsequent elections proved Johnson right: the South turned Republican. And this "Southernizing" of the Republican party became complete over the course of the last 14 years. In 1994, Newt Gingrich of Georgia ushered in his "Revolution." By 2000, Southern Republicans controlled the House of Representatives with an iron hand under Tom DeLay of Texas. From 2003 to 2007, Southern Republican rule was complete: DeLay in the House, Bill Frist of Tennessee in the Senate, and George W. Bush of Texas in the driver's seat. Yee Haw!

By the end of two miserable terms of George W. Bush the Republican moderates (sometimes called RINOS, for "Republicans in Name Only") were driven out of the party (just ask Lincoln Chafee). Today, the sorry spectacle of the McCain campaign has driven out many of the shining-light intellectuals -- people like Andrew Sullivan, George Will, David Brooks and Christopher Buckley. But the coup de grace was the total collapse of the tenets of market fundamentalism that are at the core of conservative ideology. What do conservatives have left of their ideology if their economic prognostications have been proven to be fallacies? The answer is: Sarah Palin. Without a coherent economic narrative all the Republicans have left is the culture war. The Republican party has exploited race and hot-button social issues for so long that it has whittled away its numbers down to becoming a regional party. If the Obama campaign can turn Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada to the Democratic column it might be able to lock in the Republican party into being a permanent backwater and Electoral College minority. Once a state turns "blue" it will be very difficult to flip it back to "red" again.

President George W. Bush still has eighty-four days, ?? hours and ?? minutes left in office and it seems that the dominant corporate "elites" have already turned against him. He used to be their favorite plaything, but that was before he so badly mismanaged the Empire. He turned his foreign policy over to a gang of neo-conservatives. They gave the United States a debilitating "nation building" experiment in Iraq; led most of the world's people to despise us; and so strained and privatized the military they have undermined America's ability to launch new attacks and to strike fear in the hearts of its adversaries. Their "Unipolar Moment" has long passed, except perhaps in the mind of McCain's top national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who still advocates attacking Iran. Scheunemann is a backbencher, fourth-rate, mediocrity who tried but failed to rise to the status of a Wolfowitz or a Perle. It is fitting that he will spend his last days of the 2008 campaign tutoring Sarah Palin about foreign affairs. What self-respecting neo-con would want that job?

And many corporate "elites" are also pissed off at Bush for mismanaging capitalism. Now that the financial system has collapsed to the point of turning even Milton Friedman acolytes like Alan Greenspan into neo-Keynesians, the market fundamentalists are witnessing their worst nightmare: A Democratic Congress holding the purse strings of the "financial services industry." Ha! Wall Street loved the freewheeling atmosphere that Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission gave them. But they ended up crashing the whole goddamned system, which gave them no choice but to beg Congress to "socialize" their losses with an infusion of hefty amounts of taxpayer cash. The Democratic Congress is now deeply involved in bailing out Wall Street, which is a sign that the "gold rush" is over. Even Sarah Palin's charisma cannot bring back the "good old days" when politically connected companies could securitize bad debt, mix it up with good debt, and then sell it to the world.

Almost everybody seems to know that John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more incompetent, neo-conservative mismanagement of the Empire, along with continuing the Bush Administration's slavish devotion to market fundamentalism (even in the face of its collapse). Hence, the Republicans are deep trouble.

With hope, the Republican party will become a rump that only comprises the Deep South and parts of the Mountain West. The Southern Strategy has born its bitter fruit: the Republican party will become so heavily identified with retrograde social and cultural stands -- and so thoroughly right-wing evangelical -- that it will be on the losing side of the demographic changes that are the country's destiny. The nation is not becoming more Protestant, more white, and more racist. It's becoming more diverse, more tolerant, and more reflective of 21st Century multicultural society. Young people who the Obama campaign has energized and brought into the political process represent the future, and they are the least likely to hate minorities, gays and lesbians, and they have the greatest stake in protecting the global environment. The "values" wing of the Republican party will continue to dominate the primaries so any future GOP presidential candidate will have to pass the Southern evangelical litmus test. It's a recipe for the party to nominate one Sarah Palin after another.

Someone should tell McCain's communications people, like Peter Feldman, that racists don't need to be revved up to vote against Obama. Instead of pandering to the bigots in the party, the McCain campaign needed to cultivate the middle ground and woo moderates and independents to win this election.

But it is too late for that now.

I hope McCain's team of Karl Rove wannabes makes 20 or 30 more mistakes in the final days before the election. Maybe McCain might once again dramatically "suspend his campaign" and produce the illusion he is a crisis manager. Or maybe he'll allow Palin to go on a real news show and answer real questions. Or maybe he'll continue to flog the Bill Ayres story until even the most faithful Sean Hannity viewer vomits at hearing the name. Or maybe they'll finally listen to Michelle Malkin and start running those stale Reverend Wright clips. (And then just watch the videos proliferate of Reverends Parsley and Hagee and Palin praying with witchdoctors and Armageddonists at her weird little church in Wasilla). Or maybe we'll find out that Palin got a $4,000 pedicure while on a golf junket with the executives of AIG.

Or maybe the McCain-Palin campaign will find another phony story like the crazy woman in Pittsburgh who carved a backwards "B" into her own cheek to pretend that violent blacks were rampaging, thereby proving the Republicans' contention that electing Obama is "dangerous."

The possibilities are virtually limitless.

Larry Gellman: Time For Hannity and Friends to Take a Xanax

2008-10-27T10:26:51Z

Every day I receive four or five emails from my Republican friends to make sure I haven't forgotten what a horrible socialist terrorist liar Barack Obama is and how the Democrats -- who have had essentially no power since 2000 -- are really responsible for everything that's wrong with America.

I appreciate that. Occasionally I forget. I hope and assume that in a week or so when the election is over that those emails will stop. I have already noticed that some of my friends have started to lose a little of their energy as it has become increasingly clear that the presidential race is already decided and Obama has not only won -- he has won in a landslide. Those who disagree are in luck. They can get 8-1 odds on McCain on intrade.com right now so if they bet enough, they can make back what they've lost in the stock market this month.

There are some diehards and true believers who think the game isn't over. That's fine. This is America. That doesn't bother me a bit. What does scare me are the vicious and hateful attacks against Obama that seem to be gaining in frequency and toxicity on Fox News, Townhall.com, and talk radio even as the math makes a McCain win a virtual impossibility.

When the McCain campaign first started going negative a few months ago, the party line was that Obama was too risky and inexperienced. He sat in a church for 20 years and listened to hateful sermons, he used to hang out with shady guys, but mainly he was not ready to be president or commander in chief on day one and McCain was. Obama put politics before country while McCain put "Country First" all the time. Many people found that to be both a compelling and encouraging sales pitch.

But look what has happened as the Straight Talk Express has become a train wreck. First McCain started calling Obama a traitor who tried to lose a war. Then Obama played the race card. Then Obama palled around with terrorists. Now, depending on which furious true believer you listen to, Obama is a foreign socialist agent who was not born here and wants to destroy America, Obama is a terrorist, Obama is a liar, Obama is a criminal, Obama supporters are big black guys who attack and carve their initials in the faces of McCain supporters, and so on.

Meanwhile, McCain has steadily frittered away all of his credibility. His "Country First" and "ready on Day One" credentials went out the window with his pick of Sarah Palin. Then he came across as frantic and very confused about the economy. In August and September, he echoed President Bush 17 times stating that the economy was fundamentally strong.

He proudly called himself a deregulator and stated firmly that he was against "the bailout of AIG or anyone else." Then two days later, he said we were facing the greatest economic crisis in 75 years and that he supported the bailout of AIG, the $700 billion rescue plan, and promised more regulation when he's president. Right after voting to socialize our banking system, he started accusing Obama of being a socialist.

During the three debates, he looked angry and confused while Obama looked controlled and presidential. All the polls showed voters thought Obama won each of the debates by a margin of 2-1.

Then, as a perfect metaphor for the whole campaign, McCain introduced us to Joe the Plumber, a guy who owns a business, makes more than $250,000 a year, and is upset that Obama will make him pay more taxes. Of course the guy's name isn't Joe, he's not a licensed plumber, he doesn't own a business, he doesn't make $250,000 a year, he is delinquent in his current taxes, and under Obama's plan he would get a tax cut. Other than that, McCain nailed it perfectly -- the new Straight Talk Express.

McCain hasn't been done in by the Left Wing media or by ACORN or by the economy or because he's a Republican in a bad year. Obama has had his own challenges since 33 percent of all voters have said they know someone who won't vote for Obama because he's Black.

Obama has won the election fair and square because he has been the more appealing candidate to most Americans and McCain has lost it. There are dozens of Republican and Conservative newspapers, public figures, and columnists who have announced during the last few weeks that they are supporting Obama or that they simply can't support McCain-Palin. They have all cited the sleaziness of McCain's campaign and the poor judgment he has shown on the economy and with his pick of Palin. There have been no such defections from the ranks of Obama supporters because they have no reason to defect. Obama has delivered and McCain has not.

It's over. The American people have spoken. If this was a basketball game, it would be time to clear the benches and let the subs play out the clock.

But instead, the fanatics on the Right -- particularly on Fox and the radio -- are committing hard fouls and trying to injure the winner. It's ironic since these are the people who claim to be pro-America patriots. Where I come from, patriots fight hard but when the game's over, they unite behind the winner and work hard to help him succeed. We're all Americans and in this together.

Because of all this hate and ugliness, what was shaping up as a Republican defeat is turning into a Democratic landslide that is spreading to Congress and might give the winners a filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate. If that happens -- a thought that scares me as an Independent -- it will be a harvest reaped by the voices of hate. They have turned off, frightened, and disgusted not just the Left but also virtually every Independent and moderate Republican voter in the country. And it's getting worse by the day. The more vicious and loud they become, the further behind the Republicans fall in the polls.

I worry about the country and I also worry about Obama's safety.

Many of my Republican friends are also staunch supporters of Israel. When they are not reminding me how horrible Obama is, they are making sure I realize what a threat Islamic terrorism poses to Israel and Jews everywhere. There is certainly a lot of truth in what they say.

But what they seem to have forgotten is that the only Israeli prime minister ever assassinated was not killed by an Arab or a Palestinian terrorist. Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by a ritually-observant Jew named Yigal Amir -- a young yeshiva honor student who listened attentively when his rabbis told him that Rabin was a traitor for negotiating with the enemy. So Amir -- a Jewish Israeli patriot in his own mind -- murdered Rabin.

Today, 12 years later, recent polls have shown that 38 percent of religious Israeli Jews consider Amir a hero and rallies demanding his release are held on a regular basis.

It's one thing to say the other candidate is not ready or experienced enough to lead our country. It's another thing to call him a traitor, a socialist foreign agent, a terrorist, and a person who wants to destroy our country.

This has been a tough and energizing campaign and it's about to be over. Isn't it time to start chilling out and cutting back on the most extreme and inflammatory of rhetoric and to get about the business of rebuilding and reuniting our country? Isn't it time for Hannity and Friends to go back on their meds?

All the pro-America patriots I know feel that way. There's probably a name for people who feel differently, but they're not patriots. Not even close.

Erik Ose: McCain Campaign Tried Using Assault Hoax to Slime Obama

2008-10-24T17:00:33Z

The day after her story of a politically-motivated assault made headlines around the nation, coverage pushed relentlessly by McCain-Palin campaign officials, a McCain campaign worker admitted she made it all up. Ashley Todd, 20, told Pittsburgh police on Wednesday night that she had been held up at an ATM, and the mugger, a 6' 4" black male, had become enraged once he saw a McCain bumper sticker on her car. Todd claimed her assailant had then pinned her to the ground and used a dull knife blade to carve a "B" into her cheek, after telling her, "you are going to be a Barack supporter."

The most appalling part of this episode was the McCain team's reaction. Desperate for a turn of events that would paint their opponents in a negative light, they rushed to disseminate the story to media outlets before all the facts were known. McCain's Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman actually peddled a version to reporters that was far more incendiary than details confirmed by police at the time. Feldman claimed the attacker told Todd, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson," and that the carved "B" definitely stood for "Barack."

But it was all a hoax. Friday morning, police stated that "we have learned that the victim's statement has a few inconsistencies in it and her statement has changed." A few hours later, police said Todd had confessed that there was no robbery or attacker, and would be charged with filing a false police report. She also told police she had prior mental health problems.

According to one of the actual police reports documenting the charade's unraveling, Todd says she can't remember whether she mutilated her own face, or had someone else do it. And Todd now claims she can't explain why she invented the story, but her motivation behind staging the incident seems clear from details in the police report - to smear Obama supporters.

Todd said she was driving around in her car, looked in her rear-view mirror, saw a "B," and the first thing she thought of was Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, according to a police report obtained by WTAE Channel 4 Action News.

Todd, from College Station, Texas, had been campaigning in Pennsylvania for the past few weeks. She was volunteering through the College Republican National Committee to recruit other college students to volunteer for McCain-Palin. CRNC executive director Ethan Eilon told FOX News that Todd had taken a year off from Blinn College in Texas to work on the campaign. She is also apparently a former Ron Paul volunteer.

Todd with Ron Paul at campaign appearance in February, 2008

Police doubted her story from the beginning, said Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department's investigations division:

"We have robbers here in Pittsburgh, but they don't generally mutilate someone's face like that," Bryant said. "They just take the money and run."

Bryant confirmed that police were also suspicious as to why the "B" on Todd's cheek was backward.

This tale faced a skeptical public from the moment it hit. Even rabidly far right blogger Michelle Malkin pointed out numerous holes in Todd's hard-to-believe account of being the victim of a political hate crime.

The entire mess is a tragic development, and I hope this young woman gets the mental health treatment she needs.

Yet a double standard is obvious based on the amount of coverage this incident received prior to any suggestion that it might be a hoax. The story was pushed hard by the Drudge Report, and most conservative talking heads ran with it. Sean Hannity devoted most of his Thursday afternoon talk radio broadcast to the topic, broadcasting live from Pittsburgh. Local news stations around the country featured the story on Thursday night's evening and late night newscasts.

Compare this with how little attention has been paid to a recent wave of politically-motivated, violent acts perpetrated by McCain-Palin supporters, several of which occurred in North Carolina and were covered on HuffPo earlier this week.

The crucial difference is that Obama and Biden are not traveling the country stirring up hatred among their supporters that would incite violence, while McCain and Palin clearly are. But let loose the spectre of a scary, hulking black criminal knifing up a poor, defenseless white girl, and predictably, the media lights swarmed.

Thankfully, McCain and Palin's disgraceful attacks on Obama have backfired, contributing to their meltdown in the polls. And the McCain camp's shameful eagerness to exploit hurtful situations like this hoax for political gain helps explain the revulsion that decent citizens have developed for the GOP ticket's increasingly desperate, unbalanced campaign.

Erik Ose is a veteran of Democratic campaigns in North Carolina and blogs at The Latest Outrage.

Miles J. Zaremski: Elected Officials Reflect the Electorate

2008-10-24T12:50:12Z

Over the internet today, colleagues and I saw an ad using the word "terrorist", with what looked to be a likeness of Senator Obama and words about not being able to trust folks. The clear implication of this ad was that Obama is associated with terrorism and that we really do not know much about him -- that we should be afraid of him and in fear of his associations. This reminded us of the robocalls of recent days that were smearing Obama with unfounded truths. Two points occurred to our group. First, resorting to such attack ads are reflective of a campaign out of gas. The RNC has nothing left in its quiver to convince voters that, on the merits, McCain/Palin should be next in line for the White House. We all agreed that the Republicans this election cycle are throwing all the slop they can muster against the wall in the hopes some will stick -- which consists of lies, deception, half-truths and innuendos not based on fact and reality. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is we the voters who will be to blame if we succumb to the scurrility of that which is being foisted upon us by the campaign should the Republicans take the top two offices. Why?

If voters can be convinced that, for example, Obama is an Arab because his middle name is Hussein (and I suppose that means all Americans who have names whose derivation is Middle Eastern must be suspect and thought to be associated with terrorism), or that his sitting on a board with someone who preached domestic violence 40 years ago when he (Obama) was 8 years old, or that it is OK to say you're a hockey Mom and just like a "Joe the Plumber" but then accepts over $150,000 to purchase clothes and make-up, or even not knowing what the vice president does as Gov. Palin has acknowledged with her statements on at least three occasions, then we deserve what we get.

Casting our vote should be based on the skills, ability and know-how of the candidates. If we elect officials who have nothing more to offer in the closing days of a campaign than deceit and deception, then we are no better off than, let's say, a person who smokes many packs of cigarettes a day for many years, then develops lung cancer and blames it on other than his own acts or omissions.

In the end, if we elect someone who panders to our fears and offers only baseless and unfounded statements, our nation will continue to operate on the same premise as those same-type persons at the helm as we have seen for the last 8 years. Such suffering none of us can endure any longer. Remember, "leopards don't change their spots" -- so why would we expect more from a presidential ticket after winning elected office than what we have seen from them in the closing days of this election cycle?