“Just look at the bloodlines”

12 10 2008

Times have changed. Time was when an Ann Coulter could spout off a line like “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” or muse dreamily about what might have been if Timothy McVeigh had bombed the New York Times, and it would barely have raised more than a guffaw among the right-wing chattering classes. It certainly wouldn’t have harmed Bush’s re-election prospects.

In 2008, the ritual brainfarting that ensues each time a drooling authoritarian follower decides to open its mouth is embarrassing the Republican presidential team. Said team, of course, executed the initial shooting of itself in the foot with its desperate attempts to link Obama to terrorism. As this footage of a McCain rally in Ohio demonstrates (and where you’ll hear the “bloodlines” soundbite), where authoritarian leaders lead, authoritarian followers follow, with consequences by turns outrageous, racist and stupid:

There’s even more in this NBC report, in which political analyst Richard Wolffe advises the Republican team to take a leaf out of the Australian conservatives’ playbook and engage in dogwhistle politics rather than foghorn politics which, he suggests, will turn off the swing voters and independents.

As you can see, much has changed since 2004. The fallout from the Obama=terrorist smear campaign now has McCain and Palin at loggerheads.

HT to OK WASSUP and Evolutionary Middleman.


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Categories : Australian Politics, Democracy, Media, Morons, Politics, proto-fascism

We ghost-write. You believe.

27 09 2008

From brokenSoldier, who finds it sickening—which it is—a Salon writer recalls the morning she spent ghost-writing letters to the editor for the McCain campaign:

It is the day after Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention. Today, she is our main subject. The others are already enthusiastically hammering their keyboards. I am struggling with a tiny writer’s block. “Dear Editor …”[McCain campaign worker] Phil Tuchman has handed out model letters, and talking points and quotes from Sarah Palin’s speech. But whom do I want to be?

Let’s loosen up my fingers a little first — and my principles, too. Am I actually allowed to make up letters? At the moment, it seems to be the only way to demonstrate how this is done in a campaign. So yes. I start practicing attractive sentences about Sarah Palin:

“Her biggest plus to me is that, besides being amazingly smart and qualified, she managed to remain a woman like us. She is the PTA hockey moms. She is the working mothers of special needs children. She is every caring mother of a challenging teenager.”

Her pregnant daughter Bristol (17) is not a talking point. A talking point is her son Track (19), who will be deployed to Iraq.

“And most of all, she is just like any mother of a child who deploys to Iraq in the service of this country.”

Now we are getting somewhere. I look around. I type:

“My son, too, is there.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Democracy, ethics, Magical Thinking, Morons, Politics, Psychology

Conservatives on Palin

4 09 2008

Some conservative commenters don’t seem all that comfortable with McCain’s eleventh-hour VP pick:


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Categories : Politics

I see your Hagee and raise you a Kalnins

3 09 2008

Months after John McCain dumped the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic Rapture-welcoming televangelist John Hagee from his campaign, it appears that his would-be Vice-President Sarah Palin has a Hagee-sized albatross of her own to hang around the neck of the Republican Presidential hopeful. Ed Kalnins, senior pastor of the Wasilia Assembly of God, of which Palin was once a member (and which she addressed as recently as June), has preached that

critics of President Bush will be banished to hell; questioned whether people who voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 would be accepted to heaven; charged that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and war in Iraq were part of a war “contending for your faith;” and said that Jesus “operated from that position of war mode.”

[. . .]

“I hate criticisms towards the President,” he said, “because it’s like criticisms towards the pastor — it’s almost like, it’s not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That’s what it’ll get you.”

Kalnins, who claims to have received direct revelation from God, believes hundreds of thousands will flock to Alaska in “the end times”, and he has “asserted that Palin’s election as governor was the result of a “prophetic call” by another pastor at the church who prayed for her victory.” Thanks to John Evo for the heads-up. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Democracy, Magical Thinking, Morons, Politics, proto-fascism, Religion