Wingnuts

Don’t Count Your Chickens

'08/12 Election, Election Skullduggery, Wingnuts
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Despite more and more high profile Republican defections to Obama, party candidates McCain and Palin are still rolling with the all-hate, all-the-time roadshow, and the army of flying buttmonkeys is still on the march:

Indiana Star, Oct 23, 5:59 PM EDT

Clerk left letters calling Obama “black Hitler”

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) — A Republican county election clerk distributed copies of an apparent chain letter referring to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as a “young, black Adolf Hitler” to two employees but later told police she intended it to be a joke.

The employees, who had voted for Obama in Indiana’s Democratic primary, discovered the letters at their desks after returning from Labor Day weekend, Deputy Sheriff Doug Cox said in a police report made public this week. One of the workers complained, and surveillance video showed Johnson County Clerk Jill Jackson placing an item one worker’s desk at 5:27 p.m. on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Cox said.

From the text quoted in the article it may well have been this piece of crap , which has spammed just about every comment site out there.

Even the local Republican chair professed himself shocked:

Doug Lechner, Republican Party chairman in the county just south of Indianapolis, said the letter was unacceptable and taints Jackson’s ability to appear unbiased in administering this year’s election. County clerks are responsible for training poll workers, providing all voters an opportunity to cast their ballot without influence, and overseeing vote counts.

“She’s in a sensitive position and she has to give all the appearance of fairness,” Lechner said.

This is one county in one state. How many more thousands of others are just like it with politically biased election administrators?

I’ve blogged about Republican entryism before and how, over the past decade or more, the Right has taken control of the actual voting process by installing palpably biased election officials; the DOJ attorney scandal is just the logical flowering of a long process of deliberate political infiltration. Then there’s the voting machines and the caging and the foreclosure challenges and shutting down polling stations…take this one clerk and multiply her exponentially, produce an army of deliberate obstructionists and saboteurs.

We at the Christian Coalition are raising an army who cares. We are training people to be effective — to be elected to school boards, to city councils, to state legislatures, and to key positions in political parties…. By the end of this decade, if we work and give and organize and train, THE CHRISTIAN COALITION WILL BE THE MOST POWERFUL POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN AMERICA
– Pat Robertson, in a fundraising letter, July 4, 1991

There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.

Pat Robertson, address to his American Center for Law and Justice, November, 1993.

Taking political control over what should unbiased is part of the Right’s strategy and always has been: as Bush senior himself said more than once, politics at base is all about the process and who controls it. The netroots are all very well when it comes to raising funds, but how does that translate into Democrat election judges or supervisors to balance out the malignity of the GOP and maintain a fair election?

Those liberal bloggers celebrating early’d might want to hold their fire, because the results may not necessarily be what they expect. There’s a lot of damage to an unbiased vote that an army of obstructionists and saboteurs can do.

On the other hand, when even Scott McLellan is voting Obama, perhaps times are actually changing. But has anyone remembered to tell the troops?

[Image from Squidoo]

Do It Any Way you Ivanawanna

'08/12 Election, Fashion in Action!, Wingnuts
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Another last word (as if) on What Not To Wear Palin’s wardrobe. I’ve often wondered what or who inspired her style, if ‘midwestern frump circa 1995’ can be called a style. Has she hired an actual stylist, or does she choose her own clothes? Surely that array of ill-fitting, ill-chosen separates can’t be a deliberate attempt at a look, can it?

The Anchorage Daily News is the first with the fashion gossip, for once in its existence: she’s channeling Ivana Trump. It seems Palin is an Ivanawannabe of long standing :

Alaskans line up for a whiff of Ivana (April 3, 1996)

By Tom Bell / Anchorage Daily News

Published: September 2nd, 2008 01:30 PM
Last Modified: September 2nd, 2008 04:57 PM

Editor’s note:This story was originally published April 3, 1996

Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.

And there, at J.C. Penney’s cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.

”We want to see Ivana,” said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, ”because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

Read whole thing

I should’ve guessed – that hair was a dead giveaway. How can I have been so blind? Mind you, the actual result is more Patsy in AbFab than Ivana:

If I didn’t loathe the woman and all she stands for there’d be one line in that report that’d actually make me feel some sympathy for her; it’s that she then “admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer”.

I can see how a girl from the remote provinces starved of glamour and nice things and mostly smelling of fish might be tempted to go on the rampage when given the run of the nation’s fancy department stores on someone elses dime – I’d be tempted too. However one would hope a potential President really would be able to resist that sort of thing.

One would hope too that in clothing terms – and clothes do send a message – a potential president, male or female, would have the minimum aesthetic sensibility to go for plain, smart and serviceable in colours that suit, and leave it that.

But Palin has gone the whole ’90s soap opera diva playing a politician hog; red leather jacket, bouffant hair, stripes of vivid brick or rose blusher down her cheeks, a tattooed lip outline… and for this she reportedly paid $13,200 to a top make up artist? Well I say she, but obviously it was the voters that donated the $13,200 who paid. Bigger fools them.

I had once thought that Palin’s clothes were a clever stylist’s strategy of identifying with women of a certain age bracket, income stream and lack of fashion interest, a way of appealing to the base. Then I found out that these outfits are what she personally chose and that, rather than the JC Penney’s bargain bin finds they look like, they’re actually stupidly expensive. This convinces me like nothing else can – because sometimes I am very shallow – that the woman’s unfit to be in office. She has no taste and no sense of appropriateness of any kind in anything, from clothes to morals.

Worse than that, as even her wardrobe proves, she’s never had an original thought in her life; her entire schtick from her views to her speeches is all bit and bobs cut and pasted from here and there and cobbled together. You could have some respect for the consistency of a complete yahoo, but she’s not even that.

An Embarassment of Riches

'08/12 Election, Palin, Wingnuts
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For Merkin readers who’ve already seen this I apologise, but us Euroweenies otherwise have to wait for the weekly Daily Show compendium to turn up on cable or Fox, ack spit.

Apropos of the previous Palin post and for those of us evil eurocommie elitists who wonder how the Palins can be just so bloody ignorant, venal, provincial and meatheaded, here’s Understanding Real America in Wasilla:

“After a few days in Wasilla, Jason Jones understands what real America is all about.” God, I hope not.

That Pig Lipstick’s Expensive, Ya Betcha

Corruption, Fashion in Action!, Palin, Parenting, Wingnuts
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Two new Palin greed stories today: first that the Republican National Committee spent over $150,000 on clothing, hair and making-over not only Palin, but her husband and children for the campaign trail, including entire designer rig-outs for baby Trig and for daughter Bristol’s boyfriend. Mind you, that’s still less than half what Cindy McCain paid for one campaign outfit.

I wouldn’t mind so much if you could see what had been spent but it doesn’t show. Perhaps they should’ve bought Palin this dress instead…

The RNC should've bought Palin this dress...

Secondly, Palin managed to get the state of Alaska to pay her childrens’ travel costs as the Governor dragged her children out of school and all around the country, even retrospectively amending state expenses claims to look as though the ‘First Family’ (her description) had been invited to national events when they hadn’t.

All this on top of the claiming daily subsistence payments and expenses for living in her own house.

Can you imagine what Palin’d be up to with the entire resources of the USG at her disposal? The woman’s nothing but a freeloading, provincial airhead. This makes American media types who were obsessing over Edwards’ 400 dollar haircut look more than a bit silly – and he paid for that himself, unlike Queen Freebie of Wasilla.

The Election Is Well And Truly Godwinated

'08/12 Election, Election Skullduggery, Race, US politics, Wingnuts
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Why are Palin and McCain attempting to exclude independent reporters from their rallies? You’d think they’d want attention, but no:

Press kept under a watchful eye

CLEARWATER — Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn’t permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, “Can I help you?” and turn the person around.

When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn’t allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.
— Times staff writer Eileen Schulte

Why don’t they want attention at the rallies (other than to hide the pisspoor attendance at Palin’s)? Could they be keeping reporters away to hide the fact that they are rousing their supporters to violence?

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

To which it’s been reported Palin’s response was a faint smile; not even a murmur of protest. McCain did likewise when one of his audience screamed ‘terrorist’ in response to McCain’s rhetorical question. “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

It’s clear both are singing from the same extreme-right hymn sheet.

This gloves off, Klan regalia on strategy is the biggest McCain campaign gamble of all. They’re betting that one of the less inhibited flying buttmonkeys of wingnuttia might hear the message – outsider, dangerous, not one of us – and take a fatal shot at Obama. Should that happen, McCain himself would have clean hands.

He must know by now he can’t beat Obama any other way; it’s either eliminate the opponent, or a massive interference with the ballot.

So is he resorting to inciting assassination by silent acquiescence? McCain has a sociopathic desire to win at all costs and doesn’t care how he does it. He’ll do whatever it takes, it’s said. Does that include colluding in the removal of his opponent from the race ?