Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, June 27, 2008

Pots And Kettles, General Campaign Edition 

...given the fact that he is all over the map on the subjects of 'what he believed when' and what constitutes 'respectful discourse', a significant part of the foundation of Maverick McCain's campaign strategy is becoming clear. Aside from harping constantly on what his handlers hope will be perceived as Obama's 'flip-flopper' nature - despite McCain's own weakness in this particular venue when it comes to torture, immigration, off-shore drilling, support for veterans, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a few other issues - Huggy Bear's campaign is going to feature the ploy of trying to stifle the Obama campaign's ability to criticize McBush in any way. This ploy features tired repetition of Maverick's promise to run an honest respectful campaign focusing on the issues instead of sinking to the level of his much respected but much less respectful extremely youthful and untested Democratic opponent...

It would be a clever ploy were it not for the twin facts that McCain's campaign is a hapless mess that only exists because his opponents were either stone rockin' nuts or members of the wrong religion for the fundy base and that he is only getting by now because the SO-CALLED-LIBERAL-MEDIA - primarily white, primarily male, demonstrably swimming in the shallow end of the analytical pool, and totally enthralled by Top Gun Right Stuff-ness and the opportunity of being perceived as part of the Kool Kids clique - has mostly cast it's vote for who it wants to have a beer with, especially if that beer-quaffing were to take place around the barbeque pit at what we little people laughably call McCain's "cabin" in Sedona, Arizona. Aided and abetted by the profound faux-journalistic silence of the analytic side of the SCLM, this main "respectiness" gambit is getting coverage, if not traction, that it simply doesn't deserve. Today we find that Huggy Bear is miffed....dare I say disappointed!!...at Obama's suggestion that a McCain presidency would roll back half a century of gains for women's rights. Apparently in their desperate scrambling effort to make it look like the campaign has a clue, Huggy Bear's minions and handlers have somehow misplaced that critical sheet of paper containing the commonly understood definitions of social politics buzz-words...

Aside from the root simple fact that ol' Maverick, despite all of his presidential campaign flip-flopping on the subject over the last 8 years, has been a rock-solid reliable opponent of abortion as well as any sort of family planning that even hints that it may include discussion about abortion, his profound disappointment at Obama's comments shows how Huggy Bear wants to try to play the game (with, of course, the full cooperation of any members of the SCLM that ever want to cross the city limits of Sedona again on his dime). Barack Obama, in this interesting construct, is being deceitful, disrespectful, nay...even cowardly in a way that a war hero would never be, all because he is saying bad things about that Great American Hero and Fellow Senator. In the real world, the problem is that this approach suffers at the hands of Huggy's own statements. He has slammed Obama for wanting to go back to the "failed" energy policies of Jimmy Carter (which are code words of the first order for conservatives of a certain age). He has accused Obama of being a cowardly islolationist in the area of NAFTA and free trade. He raked Obama over the coals in front of AIPAC for a callow, cowardly willingness to actually talk with Iran rather than bombing them back to the Bronze age. He called Obama little more than a draft dodger or - even more hated to the sort of front-line combat troops that McCain clearly can't identify with - a REMF for actually questioning Huggy Bear's eminently questionable and absurdly reasoned objection to an improvement of veteran's benefits that Jim Webb - a fellow Senator with a far better sense of what today's troops are going through than anything McCain could ever understand regardless of his time as a POW - passionately supports. He has constantly talked down to and denigrated Obama over the whole idea of actually talking to hostile foreign leaders, indicating that he doesn't apparently get that whole "Nixon goes to China" thing.

John McCain starts every day by announcing that he will run a "respectful" campaign focusing on the issues, then launches into a series of assaults stating in understandable but mumbled tones - speckled with enough "my friends" verbal ticks to drive even the most casual absolutely loco-weed crazy - that his "likely" general campaign opponent is probably not to be trusted to independently to cart the cans out to the curb on garbage pick-up day. After completing this little bit of slander, he snatches up a sheet of paper containing the prepared denouncement of the disrespectful nature of Obama's truthful pronouncement of the day, today's denouncement being the 'totally outrageous' claim that Huggy bear's long-standing objection to a woman's right to have some say over her body and ol' Maverick's own clear statements that the most conservative opponents to women's rights on the US Supreme Court are the precise mold from which he would cast his future nominees as
president somehow represent rolling back women's rights by half a century...

What Obama said about the potential result of a third Bush term on women's rights was the truth. Many of the things that ol' Maverick has said about Obama are at best drivel and at worst typical Republican slander. One of McCain's root campaign tactics is becoming clear, however, as he tries to enlist the SCLM in his effort to make any honest comparison of positions by Obama look like heartless attacks on A True American Hero undeserving of such scurrilous attack while his own obscene, debased trash-talk passes without comment. This tactic can't be called ironic, because irony usually presumes a lack this degree of calculation. It is nothing more that the pot flinging deprecations at the kettle, aided by a cooperative media...

Sedona is a lovely place to visit, after all....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:13 PM

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