"McCain-Palin: Too Slimy for America." The Republicans have turned to their speciality, smear tactics. One attack ad ends: "How dangerous. Obama and Congressional liberals. Too risky for America". In Florida today, Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, in full police uniform, attacked "Barack Hussein Obama" and endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket. In all decent places, that is forbidden behavior for any policeman, much less someone at the top of the department, and would produce an instant rebuke, probably a suspension, and possibly termination. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' pitbull attack bitch (remember that "bitch" is absolutely proper in describing a female dog), is trying desperately to portray Obama as a friend of a "domestic terrorist", William Ayers. Never mind that the "terrorist" was never convicted of "terrorist" acts, the acts he was to have been prosecuted for took place over 36 years ago, and he is now a reputable member of society, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. There are multiple murderers released from prison after less time than it's been since Ayers placed a tiny bomb at the Pentagon, and they (the murderers) are said to have "paid their debt to society", so should be reintegrated into society.
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• His "terrorist" acts were trivial, by the standards of the time and especially by the standards of today.
• He later apologized to a man who was injured by one of his bombs.
• Part of Ayers's early activism was the damnably radical and un-American act of picketing a pizzeria that wouldn't serve black people. The monster! A thing like that would never be tolerated in Alaska. But isn't Palin's husband part Eskimo? So wouldn't Ayers and Palin be on the same side in the struggle against racism?
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Sarah Palin made much of Ayers's having bombed the Pentagon — ohmigod! Here's what Wikipedia says of that bombing:

Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and The Pentagon in 1972, as he noted in his 2001 book, Fugitive Days. Because of a water leak caused by the Pentagon bombing, aerial bombardments during the Vietnam War had to be halted for several days. Ayers writes:

Although the bomb that rocked the Pentagon was itsy-bitsy — weighing close to two pounds — it caused 'tens of thousands of dollars' of damage. The operation cost under $500, and no one was killed or even hurt.

My God! A 2 lb. bomb! A veritable nuclear attack!
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Never mind that those acts were part of the so-called "antiwar movement" during the Vietnam Era, when the Nation was hugely divided and even some decent people, especially the very young, were misled into thinking Communism was "the wave of the future", a revolutionary movement for economic justice for downtrodden people; and that as a result of the "antiwar" movement, the people of the United States turned their back on our South Vietnamese allies, and on the people of Cambodia and Laos, as left Southeast Asia to the tender mercies of Communist mass murderers, who killed millions even after the surrender. If there is blame to be laid, now, for that fiasco, or crime, there is plenty to go around.
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Do we really want to fite the domestic battles about the Vietnam War all over again? I was a hawk, and had a letter published in The New York Times that asked five (I think it was) key questions such as "Which way do the refugees flow, toward Communism or away from it?"
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But it is vitally important to remember that it is REPUBLICANS who surrendered in Vietnam. John Kennedy got us INTO Vietnam, in honor. Richard Nixon got us OUT, in disgrace. So do the Republicans really want to remind the people of who pulled out of Vietnam, with refugees clinging to the runners of helicopters flying out of the U.S. Embassy? And do Republicans really want to remind us about what happened to the people of Cambodia as a result of REPUBLICANS' surrender? We can go there, if they like.
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And shall we remember who negotiated what turned out to be the surrender?: Henry Kissinger, Republican hero, whom McCain proudly cited in the first Presidential debate as being opposed to a Presidential sitdown with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. John McCain welcomed the normalization of relations with the Communist bastards who beat him over and over thru the course of five years of imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton! Stockholm Syndrome, anyone? Did I mention that McCain Is InSain?
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In an appearance separate from that of the attack bitch, McCain himself said of Obama today that "For a guy who's already authored two memoirs, he's not exactly an open book." Oh? Actually, he is. There's nothing hidden nor mysterious about Barack Obama's background. He is not a "secret" ANYTHING. His openness entailed huge risks. I, for instance, am so hostile to the hard-drug use in his background that it would be extremely hard for me to vote for him even if he weren't an enthusiast for abortion-on-demand.
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Now the Obama camp has hit back with a reminder of John McCain's tainted reputation by referring people to a website, not their own, that produced a 13-minute mini-documentary about the Keating Five scandal, for which McCain was reproached by the Senate. As Craig Ferguson reminded us tonite, people who live in glass houses really should not throw stones.
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Republican Party in Blackface. The all-white Republican Party has suddenly come up with a raft of black spokespersons to carry off the biggest political minstrel show in history. One of these, how can we say?, Uncle Toms? — I've heard that in the book Uncle Tom's Cabin, the character Uncle Tom was a hero, not a race traitor; so how about "house n*rs"? yes — one of these Republican house n*rs claimed on MSNBC's Hardball this evening that Obama said last week that John McCain was "unhinged". I hadn't heard that, and I listen to a lot of news. More to the point, host Chris Mathews, who gets a lot more news than I do, had never heard that, and directed his producers to research that charge. He did not, however, demand from the Republican house n*r the event nor date nor place where Obama purportedly said that. Perhaps a producer or production assistant asked him after the show. I shall be interested to know what they find.
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I have said here on a number of occasions that John McCain is out of his mind; and that I don't know if he was always out of his mind or if the Vietnamese Communists drove him out of his mind, but it doesn't matter. McCain Is InSain.
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The house n*r on Hardball in essence suggested that a satirical skit on this past weekend's Saturday Nite Live — in which Jason Sudeikis, portraying Joe Biden, suggested that McCain was out of his mind — was an Obama attack ad! Shut ... up!
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"Can I Call You 'Herb'?" The McCain forces are trying to tar the Democrats with the brush of having produced the current economic crisis by refusing to regulate the financial industry when McCain was calling for regulation.
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• Never mind that McCain and the Republican Party have been staunch opponents of regulation in general from at least the Keating Five era on.
• Never mind that the savings-and-loan debacle, in which McCain played a major part, cost taxpayers at least $150 billion in 1995 dollars, the equivalent today of over $200 billion.
• Never mind that McCain initially said about huge numbers of foreclosures that people who took on mortgages they couldn't afford deserved to lose their houses, and then that the disaster in the entire banking and credit industry produced by such defaults was merely an 'adjustment' that should be permitted to work itself out.
• Never mind that when the financial industry's house of cards was trembling in the approaching gale, McCain assured us that "The fundamentals of the economy are sound" — in the morning — but by the afternoon of the same day had changed his tune when his handlers, the puppetmasters of the Republican Invisible Hand who control Dumbya and controlled Reagan before him, told him that that would produce his defeat. Obama has, consequently, called McCain's behavior erratic, and plainly it was.
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As to whether McCain is "unhinged", as I believe he is, that depends, in this economic crisis, upon whether McCain controls his CamPain or the CamPain has a mind of its own and contradicts McCain, then forces McCain to echo the CamPain's announced stance.
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That is, it may not be that McCain is a Jekyll and Hyde but that he is Jekyll and the CamPain is Hyde (or the other way around). That is, McCain doesn't have two personalities, nor two faces, but is one personality, with one face, who is countermanded by a CamPain that he must obey, because they have told him, "Before we rescued you, you were nothing. You were done, toast. We lifted you up and made you the nominee. We can make you President. Without us, however, you will lose, no doubt about it. With us, you can win, but only if you do everything we say. We made Reagan. We made Dubya. We can make you. Or we can break you."
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At end, for purposes of Democratic campaign strategy, it doesn't matter whether McC(amP)ain is one entity or two. What t/he/y advocate is Herbert Hoover, true-believer free-marketism, so it is absolutely appropriate to attack MCain as the Herbert Hoover of our day. I thought I actually heard Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the Radical Right loon on ABC's women's talkshow The View, trying to blame the Depression on FDR! But I find thru Google only a reference to a claim last month that FDR wasn't President during the Depression (well after its start). I heard only a very short clip on Bill O'Reilly's show, I think it was, that O'R showed to suggest he might have to calm things down when he appears on The View next week to promote his latest book.
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In any event, Democrats must not let Republicans blame the Great Depression on FDR nor the current alarming financial crisis on Obama and Congressional Democrats. They must instead indelibly imprint on the consciousness of the electorate this simple equation, McCain = Hoover, and warn voters that these are no more ordinary economic times than were the days after the stock market collapse of 1929. Republicans got us into this mess, as they did the mess produced by the freewheeling, unregulated 1920s, and now they not only want to blame Democrats for the financial crisis but, failing that, scare people into feeling (not thinking) that their economic woes are nothing compared to the national-security catastrophe "The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama" threatens us with. Hit back hard: "McCain-Palin: Too Slimy for America" and "Hoover-Palin '08: The Fundamentals of the Economy Are Sound". Now that's what I call a "sound" bite.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,177 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM