Comment of The Day

The very, very honorable John McCain’s on the ground, under the media radar campaign of vicious robocalls and 3rd party funded racist scaremongering has succeeded.

It’s succeeded in siccing the ultra-right’s flying buttmonkeys of Weimar Republicanism on, of all things, a voter registration charity, ACORN.

ACORN has found itself not only investigated by the FBI and publicly accused of terrorism and anti-Americanism, but also has had its premises and staff attacked and threatened. Why? For trying to get people to exercise their constitutional right to do the very thing the country was established for, choose their own future by voting.

There’s your McCain campaign strategy in a nutshell. Attack the vote itself. Cast doubt in advance on the validity of the process of voting; focus on fraud, even though there isn’t any, thus potentially invalidating the actual election result in the mind of a sizeable proportion of the electorate even before it happens. Tell them it’s all a big conspiracy that the media is complicit in, hire dimestore fascist rabble-rousers like Palin to whip those people into a frenzy of expectant bile and better still tell them that those people – that one- are not real Americans, thus tapping into the primal fear of an immigrant-descended population, that they are not real Americans themselves.

Voila, McCain’s got the country between a rock and hard place if Obama wins. It’ll be like the preppy riots, but much bigger, much more downmarket and with more guns.

I say ‘if’ he wins; the McCain ‘clean hands’ backup plan (I think this is a fair inference to make, what with the bile and the whipping up and Palin and all the maverick, lone wolf imagery and that) appears to be the hope for the fortuitous appearance of a lone assassin. A hope which is being nudged a little bit quite a lot:

John McCain, final presidential debate:

“I’m proud of the people who come to our rallies.”

All of this preamble explains why I find this comment to a TPM post about reporters being attacked at Palin rallies to be either amazingly sweet and naive or conversely, amazingly heroic and rational. Or both. I’m not sure; but it is quintessentially American.

It is very important that we stay firm but calm. We need to follow Senator Obama’s example and stay cool but take action.

This assault, the vandalizing of the ACORN offices… the beyond ‘outrageous’ ground game/robocalls/mailers that McCain is using now may feed this ugly frenzy. People are believing lies and for most of them this is what is making them afraid and full of hate. We have to remember it is because they are believing ‘lies’. Lies that have been repeated over and over again until they get talked about like rumor and urban legend and seem to be true.
We can understand that they have been manipulated and are being used. We can understand that if we were believing what they were believing we might feel just like they do.

I think most of us here know that the answer is get out their and fight to win the election. As Senator Obama said when a crowd started booing McCain… we don’t need your boos… we need to VOTE. So, as ChronoSpark and many others on TPM are doing I would rather use my energy fighting to win than ‘booing’ about what they are doing!

Yes, Yes, Yes WE Can!

McCain may have some really nasty people on his side willing to do anything to win but Senator Obama has US!

Awww, bless – but I would reply, yes, very nice, Obama has ‘YOU!’. But do ‘YOU!’ have guns?