Here’s a news story for you. Go read it. I’ll wait for you.

Rick Davis is breathtaking in his Orwellian manipulation of the language. Here’s my brief analysis of what he’s doing to the public:

“John McCain held the Bush administration’s feet to the fire more than anyone else for the first four years of the administration.”

Okay, that’s an easy one. Surely even the most brain-damaged nutjob realizes straight out that there’s been another three and a half years of Bushdom, during which McCain voted with the Current Occupant’s desires 90% of the time. These votes include voting to authorize the administration’s torture policies; kill the new GI Bill; authorize unwarranted surveillance; kill expansion of SCHIP; you name it, he’s voted with the White House position. (If I were a real blogger, I’d link to all those votes.)

“…he has attacked Sarah Palin and thrown the George Bush card back on the table.”

“The George Bush card”? Really?? The sitting President, the leader of McCain’s party, is now equivalent to Willie Horton?? It’s an amazing admission on Davis’s part that the past eight years of Republican governance have been an appalling disaster. He cannot possibly have meant that.

“If you bring up his association with William Ayers or Rashid Khalidi it’s, ‘Oh boy, that’s off limits; you can’t do that,’ but they can prosecute a campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars with no accountability.”

William Ayers? ::sigh:: A mischaracterized relationship with no discernible influence on Obama’s thinking or policies. A bogeyman. Rashid Khalidi? A completely falsified characterization, outright lies as to who Khalidi is and what he stands for. A racial bogeyman.

And notice the asymmetry of the sentence: two scary people = …? The natural end of that equation should be the aforementioned George W. Bush, but Davis can’t go there, can he? So he just tapdances. And notice too the awful awfulness: “prosecute… millions of dollars… no accountability.” Just what accountability does U.S. law, and here I’m thinking of the 1st Amendment, provide for campaigns, Rick? What accountability is Obama evading that McCain is adhering to? (vid. sup., re: Ayers, Khalidi)

“You have to wonder what his version of America is going to look like when people who disagree with him get attacked over and over again,” Davis said.

This is a stunning statement, absolutely gobsmacking. It’s a direct dogwhistle to the people who sincerely believe that Obama intends to establish a police state and round up all “right-thinking” people after his election. Crazy? Absolutely, but I’ve read their blog posts and the unhinged comments thereunto. These people are completely panic-stricken about the coming black power/Islamic/socialist destruction of our country. One is reminded of the recent research on the conservative brain being motivated by fear.

The statement is also a damnable hypocrisy, given the hell-for-leather tar and feathering the Republican party has been engaging in since Newt Gingrich passed out his little pamplet of labels to use against liberals. In this campaign alone, remember flag pins? Saying the Pledge? “Hate America”?

Not only all of the above, but Obama just aired a 30-minute infomercial in which he didn’t mention John McCain, or even the opposing side, even once. Can you imagine a 30-minute McCain production doing that? I didn’t think so.

In short, Rick Davis’s got nothing but LOLPreznents: “Hugely successful campaneing: ur doin it wrong.” Only four more days, my friends.

In Indiana — stop me if you’ve heard this one — a congressional candidate recently attended a meeting of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), where he made a speech. The occasion was the 119th birthday of Adolf Hitler. There was a large portrait of the man, a Nazi flag, and everyone in photos of the event was wearing a swastika armband.

The candidate later defended himself on his website by describing the speech as:

my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews.

Well.

I’ll link to the site where I read this in a moment, but first a thought experiment: with which of the two major political parties in this nation is Mr. Zirkle affiliated?

That didn’t take long, did it? My thesis today is: why the hell didn’t it take you long? Yes, there are loonies on both sides of the spectrum, we all know that, but why is it that this particularly nasty kind of loony gravitates to this one party?

To be fair, the state party is horrified and trying desperately to disconnect themselves from Mr. Zirkle, but I think the question still stands, and I think the party needs to do some soul searching: why is it that racist, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-gay candidates automatically affiliate themselves with this party, and not with their rivals?

Perhaps more germane to the party bigwigs is the question: why would most citizens assume that this is the case?

I think this question needs to be asked particularly by those whose first reaction would be, well, now, that’s not necessarily the case.

Go read about it here.

No, I didn’t get anything done on the symphony all weekend. Leave me alone.

However, I was struck by an ad on the TV. You may have seen it. In it we are told that “we [the U.S.] didn’t wait…” to be told or shown how to do a string of wonderful things, and now we’re not going to wait before solving the global warming problem.

Okay, I just googled it and have discovered that this is an ad from Al Gore. The mind boggles. How this got out of the brainstorming phase is beyond me, because…

We didn’t wait…

• …to storm the beaches at Normandy. Actually, yes, we did. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. We didn’t bother getting involved until everyone else was waist-deep in that particular Big Muddy.
• …on civil rights. Hello? What??? Then where exactly did all those images of thousands of people clogging the Mall come from?
• …to put a man on the moon. Well, after Sputnik captured our attention, certainly, we worked our ass off, but until then we had no such ambition.

Sorry, Al, baby, you lost me on this one. Admirable sentiment, but historically illiterate. Abysmally.

Sorry, dear conservative readers, but I probably am going to be ranting much of the rest of today.

You who know me know that I oppose(d) the war in Iraq as needless. We were lied to about its necessity and its rationale, and now we have an unholy mess on our hands in every imaginable way. Incredibly, we are still being lied to, which does not surprise me, of course. I am not easily shocked, if you will recall.

However, here’s a familiar photo that shocked me just now:

Don’t recognize it? Sure you do. You saw it over and over and over three years ago.

Continue reading “Wag the dog: a rant” →