Wow.*

I haven't touched this "Obama Mugger" story all day because I attributed this horrible sequence of events to the independent and desperate act of a single, disturbed person crying out for attention/help. I didn't want to contribute to the publicity of the event or the resultant backlash.

But this is a serious development...

McCain Spokesman Implicated In Mugger Hoax

Not some local yahoo. The Communications Director of one of the remaining states McCain is seriously and actively contesting.

*Am I honestly really even surprised anymore? Let this fucking election end already.

A New and Improved Democrat

Bob Cesca links to a very encouraging Joe Klein column. It's not encouraging because of anything Klein says, it's the behind-the-scenes look at Obama's style...In fact, Cesca relates the best part of the piece better than Klein himself [emphasis mine]:

Apparently, when McCain suspended his campaign and flew back to Warshington, Senator Obama was in the midst of debate prep in Tampa. Democratic villagers urged Senator Obama to follow McCain -- or McCain might appear more presidential.

Of course, this is the traditional Democratic instinct. To follow... To constantly play on Republican turf rather than defining a a separate path. And of course Senator Obama ignored the leadership and remained calm -- determined to debate on schedule with or without McCain.

[Obama] "You gotta be kidding. I'm going to debate. A President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time."

That's awesome. I hadn't realized that he had been under pressure from the pussies in Washington to pull a "Me Too!" on McCain's stupid stunt.

That's awesome because it shows fortitude the party needs, but more importantly, it was also the right decision for both the short- and long-term. That single moment, more than any other I can think of, altered the race—defining Obama as steady and level-headed, and McCain as an erratic, undisciplined drama queen.

I think any other Democratic candidate would have gotten that one wrong, and be looking up at McCain right now.

UPDATE: Do yourself a favor and go read the Klein piece—the decision about the Rev. Wright Race Speech and dealing with Petraeus are excellent as well.

Incitement

Sullivan:

This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies - not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God's sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

Klein:

I'm beginning to worry about the level of craziness on the Republican side, the over-the-top, stampede-the-crowd statements by everyone from McCain on down, the vehemence of the crowds that McCain and Palin are drawing with people shouting "Kill him" and "He's a terrorist" and "Off with his head."

Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. [...] we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today--and more, it is a national disgrace.

TPM:

The point is, McCain is letting this whack-job fear and hysteria ride across the board, and is even encouraging it. That's news, and you'd think it would get some serious and aggressive treatment from the big news orgs.

Cole:

I just hope the Secret Service knows what they are doing. I was talking to my father last night, who is still a Republican and [...] was audibly shaken by the tone of the campaign- “Have you heard some of the things they are shouting at the rallies? I am afraid where this is heading.”

GOP strategist David Gergen on Anderson Cooper 360:

GERGEN: This—I think one of the most striking things we’ve seen now in the last few day. We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. [...] There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.

COOPER: Really?

GERGEN: I think it’s so—well, I really worry when we get people—when you get the kind of rhetoric that you’re getting at these rallies now. I think it’s really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down.

Greenwald:

Is there anything even remotely comparable taking place at Obama rallies? Are the accusations against McCain even arguably similar to the Right’s relentless and self-evidently dangerous depiction of Obama as a military-hating, subversive Muslim and Terrorist? What do we do with Terrorists and traitors — or, in the past, with those wanting to take over the U.S. with a secret socialist agenda? We kill them. If that’s what Obama is, if that’s what hordes of enraged right-wing mobs are becoming convinced of and having those passions stoked, then what should be done to Obama — just merely defeat him in the presidential campaign?

[...] Everyone can see with their own eyes: over the last two weeks, we have witnessed some of the ugliest and most dangerous attacks by any presidential campaign that one can recall — not from surrogates or from shadowy groups but from the candidates themselves and their campaign. The most hated, despised thing one can be in the U.S. is a “terrorist,” followed closely by ”traitor” and, in many circles, “Muslim.” The McCain/Palin ticket’s prime strategy now is to win by scaring Americans into believing that Obama — the first black candidate with a viable chance to become President in our country’s history — is all of those things. There just is nothing comparable to that.

Digby:

I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but what we are really seeing is the beginning of a right wing story line about the next president of the United States --- he is a drug user, a foreigner, a terrorist and a traitor. And the importance of that is that it gives permission to the right wing machine to do anything and everything to destroy him. He will not really be president, you see. He will be illegitimate -- a usurper.

And don't feed some bullshit that it's just a "one bad apple" scenario. Check out this video of a whole damn town full of scary-stupid asshats—young and old alike. They're don't ALL yell crazy shit, but enough of em do that they can all feel safe and supported doing so.

The McCain campaign is WAAAY over the line, and this shit needs to stop now.

They are willing to create the next Lee Harvey Oswald in a futile pursuit for for wingnut votes, and so far much of the media coverage is still trying to "balance" this "screaming fire in a crowded theater" strategy against legitimate, policy-oriented critiques by Obama.

If something happens, they are all complicit.

Re-run

I've posted this before, but I just got it in an email again, and it's worth re-posting in case you haven't seen it... After the erratic, unstable, desperate and increasingly bellicose behavior of McCain over the last month or so, this is even scarier...



Pass it on.

The Motive

Anonymous Liberal, via Benen:

"I think the McCain campaign knew the Couric interview would be a disaster as soon as it was done taping and spent much of the day frantically trying to think of a way to push it out of the headlines," A.L. explained. "The clincher for me is the fact that McCain cancelled his Letterman appearance at the last second and instead sat down for an impromptu interview with, of all people, Katie Couric. The hope was to bump the Palin interview even on the CBS Evening News, which otherwise would have hyped and teased the Palin interview all afternoon and used it to lead the broadcast. Instead, CBS devoted most of its coverage to McCain and played segments of the Palin interview almost as an afterthought. Mission accomplished."

How bad was it? See for yourself...



From the comments at John Cole's place:

I’m still in shock over how terrible the Palin/Couric interview was. “Train wreck” is being charitable – it was more like a train derailing on a bridge, tumbling a thousand feet into a canyon and landing on a pile of old dynamite and gas drums. And then a jumbo jet crashed into the flaming wreckage. Followed by an earthquake that caused the whole mess to slide off a cliff into the sea, where the few miraculous survivors were eaten by sharks.

And let's not forget they had to bump the about-to-explode story of McCain's campaign manager being exposed as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freddie Mac.

OF course those are the rational excuses for this behavior when it might just be McCain's insane need to be the knight in shit-covered armor. Or his gambling problem.

Pressure Cookers and a Race Boiled Down

From a reader at Andrew Sullivan's...

[...] One benefit of this long campaign is that it really does show a person's character. And I realized. We have two men running for president right now. One has stayed true to himself throughout despite all the pressure. The other really hasn't or maybe we've just seen what he really was all along.

Obama said at the outset that he wanted a civil campaign on the issues. He said he would avoid the politics of person destruction. He demanded a cool, no drama organization -- much like himself.

He organized a strong team. Set clear goals. Adopted a sound plan and stuck to it. Reasoned, careful. Solid judgment. And in the intense glare of things like Wright and flags pins, he stuck to it all. Above all, Obama really has stayed true to who he is.

McCain on the other hand, despite his calls for a civil campaign, injected personal attacks. He cosied up to the same religious extremist he once decried. People like Hagee. And when that wasn't enough, he brought onto the ticket a evangelical with extreme views on abortion, contraception and sex education -- positions well to the right of most of the people in the Republican Party. And he hired the same polarizing, no-holds-barred political assassins that George Bush unleashed on America and McCain himself.

Senator McCain didn't stay true to himself. He morphed into a right-wing, polarizing ideologue campaign. And why? On the one hand, he's ambivalent about his ambitions, but often he'll lose sight of his values and overreach for the sake of those ambitions. In other words, he falls victim to the allure of power and loses his good judgment. He doesn't stay true to himself.

I dearly hope American's will come to appreciate this about these two men. One has stayed true to the better angels of his nature. One succumbed to the darker angels of his. Which one would make a better president in these sad and trying times?

These facts are so plainly obvious, yet never pointed out in the mainstream.

Last night, McCain pivoted from the blistering attacks of the previous evening and played the role (for the most part) of the kindly old veteran telling tales on a porch swing. He is hoping to prop up the illusion of his Maverick™ and serious statesman image. I hope people wake up and stop falling for it...Too bad I have such little faith in the media and even less in the electorate.

Word of the Day

Palintology: n. The act of digging into a person's background after you select them for a position of great political importance.

[h/t Toast]

All the Experts Agree...

Fareed Zakaria agrees with me on McCain being a danger and a jackass. Here he is on McCain's bluster about throwing Russia out of the G8 (which we can't do, btw):

What McCain has announced is momentous -- that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war. [...]

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives -- which would make American safe and the world more secure -- we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

I always liked that Zakaria guy. Partly because he's a sensible expert on world affairs, and partly because he's the Indian Willem Dafoe.

Reading Assignment

Publius at Obsidian Wings.

The Dangerous Warmongering John McCain

A taste:

In short, his is a world of good versus evil, where threatening and using force is always necessary, and where wildly diverse countries are lumped together as evil “autocracies.” No matter the country (Serbia, Iraq, Georgia), no matter the circumstances — the problem is always the same (evil), the solution always the same (threaten or use force).

[...] this is arguably the most dangerous aspect of the McCain “Doctrine” — the tendency to quickly classify things we don’t like as “evil”. Indeed, this is precisely what we’re seeing with Georgia — and we’ll see it again in a McCain administration. The assumption of “evil” is what leads to overbroad responses — after all, everything should be on the table if we’re fighting evil (this same initial assumption leads to torture, lawbreaking, etc.).

Read the whole damn thing. This guy is fucking frightening. Pat Buchanan (!) said that John McCain will make Dick Cheney look like Ghandi. That's starting to sound like an understatement. As cleek put it in the comments at ObWi, "he's not running for Bush's 3rd term; he thinks Bush was a lightweight."