Sarah Palin has been hung in effigy by an alleged adult who thinks that showing the lynching of a woman is excused or warranted by it being Halloween time. Please go here to not only read but watch the coverage of this latest in the barrage of misogyny that continues to go unaddressed by Senator Obama or his surrogates.
Senator Obama, your silence is dangerous and unforgivable.
You should be convening a press conference with your top advisers, supporters and surrogates, including John Podesta, Senator Clinton, President Clinton, Senator Biden, Senator Kerry, Governor Rendell, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Colin Powell, William Weld, Susie Buell and anybody else you can get to stand with you, and at this press conference you should not only condemn this depiction of a lynching, you should apologize for your complicity thus far in creating an environment where anybody in his right mind could think that a children’s holiday - Halloween - is a good time for depicting the lynching of any woman, let alone a woman running for vice-president of the United States of America.
You might be surprised to hear me say this, but I am so glad Heidi Li “Adult Cow Hat” Feldman took up this cause. She was so effective getting John McCain, Sarah Palin, Lindsey Graham, Tom Ridge, Joe Lieberman, Jane Swift, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild to condemn the despicable act by the racist in Fairfield, OH who hung Obama in effigy in his yard for a children’s holiday - Halloween - and getting McCain to apologize for his complicity in creating an environment where depicting the lynching of any black man, let alone a black man running for president of the United States of America, would be considered acceptable behavior.
What?
Heidi Li “Adult Cow Hat” Feldman didn’t do or say anything about that?
Oh, silly me. Never mind.
Roar.
SOMEWHAT RELATED: “Things we hope are true” and “this is 100% accurate”. I feel sorry for anyone who shows up at Darragh Murhpy’s house dressed up as Hillary Clinton for Halloween because at this point she’s so disconnected from reality that she’ll probably utter “I’m your number one fan” and then pull an Annie Wilkes on them. For reals.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild—a personal friend of [Hillary] Clinton, a major fundraiser, and a member of the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee—plans press conferences in Dover and Manchester, the McCain campaign announced.
The events are counterprogramming against Clinton, who is now enthusiastically backing Obama and who also plans events in Dover and Manchester. New Hampshire is among the most competitive states on Nov. 4.
It’s one thing to “go your own way,” but this is just plain repugnant.
When the election is over, kindly do not return columnist Kathleen Parker:
“Palling around with terrorists,” as Sarah Palin said of Obama, gets to an underlying xenophobic, anti-Muslim sentiment. Using surrogates who strategically use Obama’s middle name, Hussein, feeds the same dark heart.
This tactic, denied but undeniable, has been effective with target audiences, some of whom can be viewed on YouTube entering a Palin rally in Pennsylvania. One cherubic older fellow totes a stuffed Curious George monkey wearing an Obama sticker as a hat…
To McCain’s credit, he has tried to correct his audience—when, for example, a woman said she couldn’t trust Obama because he’s an Arab. Gosh, wonder where she ever got that idea? But the McCain-Palin bad cop-good cop routine is what it is. The hot babe lathers the crowd; the noble soldier hoses them down. This isn’t a campaign; it’s a sideshow.
... the most remarkable exchange was when Rove tried to claim that the Democrats were being unduly negative in their attacks on Republican standard bearer John McCain.
[Rove] said: “Yesterday, John Kerry, your nominee of your party in 2004, stands up and said, “if John McCain was asked the question of whether he wears boxers or briefs his answer would be Depends” ... I think that is pretty much under the table and pretty nasty.” [link]
The New York Post, original publisher of the Michelle Obama Lobster/Caviar/Champagne Afternoon Delight story has published a retraction.
I sincerely regret repeating and amplifying what turns out to be a shameful attempt to embarrass and undermine Michelle Obama.
I will take better care in checking sources in the future.
Goddamn, Darragh Murphy really is one of the most disingenuous people in America. I guess she didn’t feel the need to “check her sources” after a PUMA pointed out the story had been debunked in the third comment on her original post pushing this easily-dismissed nonsense (good fucking luck getting a bottle of champagne delivered to your room for only $44 at the Waldorf-Astoria—I think that’ll get you a Toblerone bar). Or I guess she didn’t feel the need to check her sources when she saw traffic coming her way from Lawyers, Guns and Money calling bullshit on her.
And regarding her sincerely regretting “repeating and amplifying what turns out to be a shameful attempt to embarrass and undermine Michelle Obama,” the original post is still up without an update/retraction and the poorly-designed flyer pushing the bogus rumor is still available in the Puma Pac Action Center (aka “Shitty Graphics ‘R’ Us”) (fifth link—left—“MO Piece of the Pie, jpg,color, Aloha”).
There’s a big difference between covering your ass and regretting your error. Don’t think for one second Darragh Murphy doesn’t know the difference.
It’s unlikely that the American media will produce the “penetrating exposé” into whether members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America” that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) called for Friday, but there has been at least one consequence she may not have expected: Her congressional opponent, Democrat El Tinklenberg, has been showered with cash from all parts of the country — America, that is — as apparently insulted Americans respond to Bachmann’s request.
“I can absolutely confirm that we have had in the last 24 hours donations from hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the country,” said Tinklenberg campaign manager Anna Richey. “It’s coming in so fast I can’t get a hold on it and can’t give a precise number. It’s still coming in.” At minimum, she said, $150,000 has so far been donated and she expects the total, which the campaign will release later today, to be far higher.
“It’s overwhelming,” said Richey. “I’ve gotten 600 e-mail messages into our info e-mail account in the last 12 hours. People are outraged.” She said a number of the e-mails decried Bachmann’s call for the investigation as modern-day McCarthyism. “People shared personal stories of how their parents were discriminated against” during that time, said Richey.
The messages, she said, came from “Republicans, Democrats, people who professed to be out of work and struggling economically but wanted to give what they could.”
Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don’t underestimate our ability to screw it up. I want everybody running scared. Over the next 18 days, other than your family and your job, I want you to make a decision that there is nothing more important than bringing about this change that we need.
He’s right. Volunteer at a phone bank. Talk to your neighbors, family and friends. If you don’t have a sign, get one. Slap a bumper sticker on your vehicle. Do whatever you can.
The GOP knows the electorate in aggregate is a beast driven alternately by fear and hate. We might be in the hope column personally, but let’s not forget that fear (about the collapsing economy, the conduct of the war, the loss of American prestige, etc.) is what’s driving the beast leftward right now.
We’re going to see an unprecedented avalanche of sleaze and lies over the next two and a half weeks; it will be an attempt to drive the beast rightward with hate. It has worked before. We can’t let it happen again.
If only he had kept his yap shut and enjoyed his 15 minutes. But then he had to hold a press release in his driveway just now and reveal the raving wingnut beneath that beefy bald exterior:
1. Social Security is a joke that should be abolished. (That scribbling sound you heard was every geezer in FL crossing Joe off their holiday card list.)
2. The citizens of Iraq should be as thankful to the US as Christians are to Jesus. (Even the tens of thousands of dead ones? He didn’t say.)
Campaign tool fail. Maybe the overcompensated media mavens don’t realize it, but it’s absurd to posit a dude who can buy a business that hauls in more than $250K a year as a Regular Joe. Give me a break.
But I expect the desperate McCain-Palin campaign, aswirl as they are in the porcelain vortex, to clutch Joe the Plumber’s broad back and hope he helps them bob to the surface. Just like that hard plastic ball in the toilet tank.
A plumber? Really, that’s all you’ve got? I think I speak for many Americans when I say that most of those butt crack-displaying bastards are merely thieves who wield wrenches rather than guns.
Update: Video
Another update:
Looks like Joe isn’t really a plumber after all (at least not a licensed or apprenticed one), and he’s had a bit of tax trouble, which may explain the ‘tude. Hmmmm. Poor McCain. He can’t even pick a credible heckler.
Via the recently de-Buckley-ifiedNational Review, I was made aware of the most jaw-droppingly vapid attempt to sway female voters since John McCain plonked a screechy, semi-literate, witch-banishing, reality-denying pea-brain on the GOP ticket.
The outreach effort is featured on a site called “Team Sarah,” and it offers unintentionally hilarious “dialogues” between “two undecided women voters.” Here’s how the site describes the accidental comedy:
Annoucing Team Sarah’s “Lisa & Kelly Conversations”
Team Sarah’s Lisa and Kelly conversations represent the real concerns of two undecided women voters. Both are working mothers, Lisa is married and Kelly is divorced. They are interested in the presidential race, watching the coverage, and talking with friends and families about their impressions. As close friends, they catch up with one another daily, discussing the issues close to many women’s hearts.
Remember those stupid anti-drug abuse films you had to sit through in high school? You know, the ones that featured absurdly contrived dialogue that went something like this:
MENACING-LOOKING PUSHER IN ALLEY: Hello there, young fellow. Would you like to try some “grass”? It’ll make you wildly popular on the social “scene”! That girl of whom you are so fond who currently declines your attentions will find you irresistible when you “puff the magic dragon!”
Could Bill Kristol be right for once in his life? Nah. But he could be serving as a GOP apparatchik, which would be entirely in character. An excerpt from his latest NYT column:
It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign…
What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.
And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.
Kristol advises press conferences for both McCain and Palin, which is clearly absurd. Palin can’t handle Katie Couric. She’s gonna do press conferences? Not bloodly likely.
But McCain might adopt part of such a strategy, repudiating negative campaigning, holding press conferences himself and allowing Palin to continue doing Fox infomercials to keep the base on board. He might be convinced that the base will vote for their Queen Esther regardless of how angry they’d be with McCain himself for junking the slime strategy.
Nate Silver over at 538.com also detects a whiff of wingnut media outlet coordination —both in Kristol’s column and in the recent touting of McCain’s polling numbers by Drudge:
Here it is—the smoking gun. Let’s see Obama deny now that he was intimately involved in William Ayer’s domestic terrorist Weather Underground organization.
Al Franken, who I hope will become a senator soon, once said something very wise about the difference between how conservatives and liberals view America:
We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a four-year-old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow.
This is generally true, and Governor Palin is currently behaving as if she were a prime example of the “my mommy right or wrong” type of conservative. She displays that mindset here in this snippet from her recent debate with Senator Biden:
Notice how her voice rises to a yippy Pomeranian pitch* when she indignantly pronounces the words, “hate America!” And like the incurious and/or stupid George W. Bush, she attributes the bad guys’ hatred of America entirely to their distaste for freedom, women’s rights, etc., when it is actually a whole lot more complicated than that.
Well, given the fact that Palin is literally in bed with a one-time anti-American secessionist and was providing encouragement to that anti-American group as recently as this summer, excuse me if I question her “America! Fuck Yeah!” bona fides:
But the sentiments of the yokels she’s targeting with her current rhetoric on behalf of McCain are real enough. And those people need to grow the fuck up. This isn’t about someone being mean to their mommy. This is about a planet on the brink, and we need a leader who can comprehend opposing viewpoints and thus negotiate the best course of action. Not to save us from further embarrassment on the world stage, though god knows that would be change I can believe in. But rather to save our asses, perhaps literally.
The world is getting a whole lot scarier and more complicated. It has never been as simple as wingnuts made it out to be, and the exercise of raw power was never the panacea they crowed about. But with the global financial meltdown and other gigantic, scary-as-shit issues—any one of which could easily keep a person up nights (loose nukes, global warming and terrorism, for example)—occurring simultaneously, we can’t afford a willfully simple-minded approach anymore. That’s why this election is so important.
*If anyone is tempted to accuse me of sexism for pointing out that Palin’s voice sometimes goes all screechy, spare me the lecture. It’s not a woman thing—I’m a woman, and I don’t have a screechy voice. Palin doesn’t have to have one either. She could modulate her tone to avoid sounding like a fishwife. Or she could try bourbon and cigarettes. I’ll stop comparing her voice to that of Pomeranians and fishmongers when she stops sounding like them.
I think Obama won the debate. But the most interesting conversation of the evening was the one we didn’t hear – the accusations of terrorist pallin’ and insinuations that Obama is somehow un-American that Palin has been peddling all week and that McCain has amplified in his appearances. This came as a big disappointment in National Review’s The Corner: Said Andy McCarthy:
Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy [sic] qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.
Good point. You can’t really have it both ways. You either go all-in with the Rovian sleaze, or you try to win on the issues. Contra the talking heads, I don’t think McCain held his fire because of an innate sense of decency. I think he simply realized he couldn’t pull it off in that format.
For that reason, I don’t expect a change in tone on the campaign trail; McCain and Palin will go back to sliming Obama with Ayers, Wright, etc., first thing this morning. But it creates a disconnect – a sense that McCain doesn’t have the balls to slime Obama to his face. That may change in the last debate next week, but it could be too late then.
More hate mail for KP
Wingnut columnist Kathleen Parker, who enraged her readers recently by calling Palin the buffoon she is, will get another load of hate mail for her latest effort:
The McCain campaign knows that Obama isn’t a Muslim or a terrorist, but they’re willing to help a certain kind of voter think he is. Just the way certain South Carolinians in 2000 were allowed to think that McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black child.
But words can have more serious consequences than lost votes and we’ve already had a glimpse of the Palin effect.
The Post’s Dana Milbank reported that media representatives in Clearwater were greeted with taunts, thunder sticks and profanity. One Palin supporter shouted an epithet at an African-American soundman and said, “Sit down, boy.”
McCain may want to call off his pit bull before this war escalates.
Don’t count on it, Kathleen. This is your new Republican Party. It’s no longer enough to paint your opponents as effete, tax-and-spend liberals. Now they must be accused of being directly in league with terrorists if not secret Muslim terrorists themselves. That’s what happens when your party declares a bankruptcy of ideas.
But the netroots like Howard and I think the failure to get him nominated in 2004 has a lot to do with their zealous frenzy to push Obama down our throats in 2008: it makes them feel important.
The Big Blogs seem to have invested so much of their energy in pushing Obama down our throats it seems like they just can’t comprehend why their sheer willpower alone isn’t sufficient for him to win.
Instead of caving to the big boyz, why aren’t we asking them why they are so insistent about shoving a complete neophyte down our throats and into the Oval Office when they *know* he’s going to be in over his head?
If isn’t your responsibility to give up YOUR hopes and dreams to quell the panic of a bunch of Obama supporters who are trying to shove Obama down our throats whether he’s good for the country or not.
If I were a superdelegate who really wanted to win this fall, I’d keep these numbers in mind because it looks like if Obama is forced down our throats, we might just gag up a loss.
As they sat inside a conference room in downtown Ann Arbor Thursday afternoon, a handful of John McCain supporters were oblivious to the news swirling outside that McCain was all but conceding Michigan to rival Barack Obama.
Instead, those supporters - all Democrats who now back McCain - remained focused on how to convince voters that McCain would make the best president.
Without clicking through, guess who one of those McCain supporters was. (Answer below the fold)
