On Some Real Underground Shit...

So I was walking to campus the other night, and I sidestepped a woman in a Starter jacket who was yelling at the ground. She had, among other things, lost her phone. Having found her phone, she started yelling into the air things I can't transcribe because they were too wacky to remember (we come to nature through a schema, after all, and what doesn't fit is cast aside as dream-time). Things like: "Are you in a disguise?" and, "one of those fag spies," and "selling oil, real underground shit!" This is run of the mill in Philadelphia, and is mitigated by the fact that there's always someone else on the street with you and Crazy Jane. Here, sadly, no.

All of which made me think of Our Hero, the Famous Air Pirate, who has finally pulled the prohibition on running Wright ads, albeit on broadcast TV with the juiciest bits fobbed clean. He is essentially, at this point, alone on the street, yelling incoherently into the air.

Incoherence. The ad -- on TV, "God damn" is bleeped out -- presumes that the audience knows about it already. I mean, when you bleep out "God damn America," couldn't it just as easily be "God bless America?" Isn't this supposed to be an election won in the center, and by undecideds?

Once again, this is tacking to the right for 2010. The major corporate contributors to the NRTPac (scroll to the end of the individual disclosures) are rightist media outlets: Newsmax, Endeavor Media, Eagle Publishing. The treasurer, Peter Leitner, runs a talk radio blog that reminds us, "Jihad runs both ways." He appears to be his own announcer, and broadcasting from his mom's basement, btw.

Are a handful of amateur Tim McVeigh sympathizers really going to change the minds of every undecided voter in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, usw? Please.

Although, from the looks of Palin's barn-raising down by Rickenbacker Airport, it is not the Great Silent Majority, but the Mere Redneck Plurality that she's pinned her hopes on, viz.: "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson, plywood false-front barn, buckeye necklace, Ku Klux fliers.

That's right, the Klan is using 2008 as an opportunity to pare back to a core of true believers. Said one Travis Pierce, national membership director for KKK, LLC.:

This office gets about 100 calls a day, and it's been that way since the start of the election season [...] People are looking for answers to what's going on in this country and they are coming to us.

So how is the McCain-Palin Tanking like Klan recruitment? A: Both campaigns suffer from the delusion that a greater political force will one day emerge from a dedicated 8 percent of the electorate. The trouble (for our purposes, the entertainment) inherent in such a position is that no persuasion exists without mass appeal. No one listens to Ralph Nader, or Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul. Build the crowd, then sway the crowd.

Also of note: compare Hitchens' response to the McCain Khalidi attack to the desperate parrying and backtracking on McLaughlin by typical MSMers (transcript)! Everyone hears, "Barack Obama sat in a room with Palestinians," and only Hitch refrains from shitting his pants with fear! Page and Clift are scared shitless of Monica Crowley! Hemming and hawing about "They released the tape! They reported it!" Show some spine. The appropriate response to Crowley is as follows:

It ain't "Jew-bashing" to complain when some right-wing arriviste bulldozes a chunk of your millenia-old town, puts guard towers and access roads on the highest point in the area, and tells you it's okay, because God promised this land to him.

Anyway, I'm prepping the post-game rant, on some real Marxist shit. (World Socialism Now! Mandatory Abortions for Everyone! Up Against the Wall! That sort of thing.) See y'all on the 5th...
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Offense outruns defense

I love this shit:
On Tuesday, Media Matters ran this history of the Lieberman Hack , essentially asking ABC, CBS and CNN to apologize for uncritically passing on false allegations. Betty Nguyen of CNN is the worst offender, first reading verbatim two paragraphs of campaign text:

"[...]Let me just read you a statement from the Lieberman campaign, this from the campaign manager, saying, 'For the past 24 hours, the Friends of Joe Lieberman's website and email have been totally disrupted and disabled. We believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the U.S. attorney and will be filing formal complaints reflecting our concerns.'

Also goes on to say, 'This type of dirty politics has been the staple of the Lamont campaign,' referring to Ned Lamont, the challenger, 'from the beginning, from the nonstop personal attacks to the intimidation tactics'

Now, was Sean Smith chanelling Abe Ribicoff there? That started life as "gestapo tactics," right?

'and offensive displays to these coordinated efforts to disable our website.'

...then Nguyen gives it the full Hindenburg:

"Basically, the situation is: Joseph Lieberman is saying that his website was hacked and that there are major problems with it. People can't even access it, especially on voting day. Today is the primary.[...]"

and delivering the coup-de-grace, emphasis mine:

"And Ned Lamont, as you well would assume, says he has nothing to do with it. There's no tampering of the website. So, we'll see."

CNN clearly did Lieberman a solid by passing along the attack, but what I love is the "all thieves also lie" tone of Nguyen's last comments.

As you well would assume, CNN has nothing to say about throwing the race to Lieberman. Here's CTBob's archive of Liebermania.

Attacks run faster than our ability to verify them. This brings us back to the present and to Barry. The killer in the debate -- man, nearly two weeks ago now -- was his excessively delicate, elevate-the-discourse jive on Wright. This emboldened HRC and Wright to, ironically, go on the road saying the same thing: "This is who I am; I dunno about Barry, but this is me." Barry's pimpslap to Wright should have been much harder, and should have come sooner. He knows he has to be twice as good in order to get half as far.

Willie Horton forever! I mean, if only Dukakis in 1988 had said something like, "If George Herbert Walker Bush is so scared of Massachusetts he can windsurf somewhere else," or, "Willie Horton never made it onto any country club, so I don't know what George Bush is worried about," idunno, something. Nip these things in the bud, people! The time to kill the attack, like a newborn wildebeest, is before it gets its legs under it...

I fear, K, we've drunk the kool-aid on the Wright issue. I don't understand why the Rev is a problem for Obama when dudes like Rev. Hagee and Chuck Keating aren't a problem for McCain. Obviously, we're just missing what Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana are getting. And seriously, I have no idea what that is. How the Ivy-educated scioness of Scranton gentry managed to be the candidate of blue-collar whites is beyond me. Do they vote for the boss? In making this election about identity -- rather than, idunno, war, recession, water, food, shelter -- we've handed it to McCain.

McCain by 5 over Clinton.