Jesse Taylor’s return to the blogosphere has been full of win, but this is his thing de résistance:
I don’t think John McCain is running the sleaziest campaign in recent memory. I think he’s just running one of the most prominently stupid.
[…]
It’s not so much that McCain’s campaign has been purposefully sleazy as they’ve been meanderingly, pointlessly sleazy. It’s the “fuck it, whatever” guide to Republican politics, with no particular focus except putting anything out there to win a daily news cycle. Obama was a conspirator in voter fraud for a weekend, a terrorist for about three days, until he was a socialist because some plumber in Ohio said so. Before that he was a celebrity and presumptuous, a race-baiter, a shady community organizer, sexist, inexperienced, a baby killer, a sex predator and a dozen other things. You wonder why McCain/Palin supporters feel like they can go to rallies and talk about Obama being a Jew-bought Islamic radical cokehead forced abortionist communist? Because it’s the standard that the campaign’s set by having ridiculously drawn out public conversations designed to draw full attention to the charges while laboring under the pretense that they’re “debating” over using the smear.
Am I going to call McCain a Neo-Nazi? Don’t know – maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It might reflect poorly on me, but it might also be a useful strategy. I’m going to go call up Mike Allen at Politico.com and talk to him about it on the record…you know, just to have a sounding board.
Spot on, and a big part of the reason McCain is going to lose this election.1 It’s not just with regard to Obama, either — he’s never had a coherent message this entire campaign. His “Country First” slogan rings hollow when he picks Sarah Palin to be his veep; he proclaimed that the fundamentals of the economy were strong just before declaring that the economy was such a disaster that he had to suspend his campaign. His campaign has bounced from theme to theme, sometimes in the same day, as it desperately tries to find something, anything, that will work to make today better. Right now McCain is all Joe the Plumber, all the time, but that doesn’t seem to be working;Palin is rolling out Tito the Builder2, and no doubt we’ll here about Stu the Electrical Contractor soon enough. (It goes without saying we won’t be hearing from Jane the Senior Vice President for Human Resources, of course.) And the McCain camp is threatening to pull out Jeremiah Wright, maybe, because we all weren’t sick of that six months ago. And there will be other crazy crap thrown out, because that’s how McCain rolls.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues to push the same theme he’s pushed the whole campaign — Change You Can Believe In. Obama hasn’t veered in any direction at any point, even when things were tough a month or so a go. He’s kept his head down, and just kept advancing his message, relentlessly. He’s built up a solid lead that’s allowing him the luxury of taking two days off from campaigning to visit his sick grandmother in Hawai’i — and even that is being done deliberately and calmly, and with an absence of surrogates going on television to explain how this ties into Obama’s brand new plan to give everyone a $500 tax credit so they can visit their grandma.
Presidential campaigns are a dumb way to pick a candidate, but they can be illuminating. In this race, we’ve had one candidate maintain a steady, consistent tone, a man who can keep his focus when times get tough, who reacts to crises with calm, measured, and level-headed actions. We’ve had another candidate who has been in full panic mode for over a year, one who bounces from idea to idea without pausing to consider the long-term ramifications. One of those men has demonstrated qualities that would be good in a leader — the ability to stay calm, to not panic, to work not just for short-term gain, but for long-term stability. And the other is John McCain.
” Am I going to call McCain a Neo-Nazi? Don’t know – maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It might reflect poorly on me, but it might also be a useful strategy. ”
” Spot on, and a big part of the reason McCain is going to lose this election.”
it may well be that obama will in november. it may well be that sarah palin was a poor choice. it may well be that the economy is that element that entices the electorate to obama. joe the plumber was indeed used by the candidates and abused by the media.
tell me jeff. what does the word neo-nazi mean and how do all of these possibilities create a neo-nazi in the person of john mccain. words have actual, tangible, evident meaning.
” i heard that he is a muslim”
is this any more applicable and accurate than what the author of the thing de resistance spews.
Roger, you don’t seem to grasp the satire here, so I will spell it out. Jesse is parodying the sort of faux-reluctance that McCain’s campaign people have put on display with regard to this or that baseless accusation against Obama. We saw it just yesterday with one of his advisors saying that McCain is rethinking whether to use the Rev. Wright connection, despite having said back in March that it shouldn’t come up in the election.
Regarding Tito the Builder, both Weekly Standard and National Review are getting excited by the idea that Tito the Builder somehow schooled David Corn about the Constitution. John McCormack wonders why Corn didn’t include this part:
“Let me talk,” Munoz said to Corn. “I know the Constitution, and I know my First Amendment — ”
“I’m not the state,” Corn said. “I can’t take that right away from you.”
“No, no,” Munoz shot back. “Even the state, the state cannot take that right away.”
“Right, right,” Corn quickly agreed.
“Nobody can take that away,” Munoz said.
I imagine Corn didn’t want to make Mr. Munoz look dumb. Corn knows that Munoz does not have a right to have Corn stand there and listen to him or to have Corn report what he says. The reason he said that only the state can take away the *right* to speak is that it is true; the First Amendment applies only to state actors. It doesn’t apply to whether Corn does or doesn’t talk to Munoz, report what he says, videotape him, etc.
Pity that Byron York, in his hunger to see the immigrant describe his super-expansive freedoms, didn’t voice some concern about the fact that Munoz said *even* the state cannot take that right away. Munoz evidently labors under the delusion that the First Amendment includes some right for him to talk to Corn when Corn doesn’t want to listen to him, or for Munoz to get on the evening news. It is ONLY the state that is capable of denying your federal constitutional First Amendment right; no private actor can do so even if he yanks away the microphone and doesn’t put you on YouTube.
Munoz the Constitutional Scholar should be about as illuminating as Joe the Economic Historian. I don’t look for media attention and then claim to know about plumbing or construction, because I have a great deal of respect for the training and professional experience necessary for those jobs. I don’t want to embarrass myself blathering about the ills of Liquid Drain-O or the superiority of pouring concrete at one temperature rather than another, even if I might have opinions on these topics, because I recognize that they are informed only by personal experience.
Why do people who apparently haven’t spent any time learning about constitutional law or economics figure that it was a waste to have bothered reading up on those topics before publicly opining on them? Is their respect for lawyers and economists just so low that they figure those schmucks wasted years of youth and thousands of dollars in tuition to know what good ol’ common sense already tells Joe and Tito?
” It’s the “fuck it, whatever” guide to Republican politics, with no particular focus except putting anything out there to win a daily news cycle. Obama was a conspirator in voter fraud for a weekend, a terrorist for about three days, until he was a socialist because some plumber in Ohio said so. Before that he was a celebrity and presumptuous, a race-baiter, a shady community organizer, sexist, inexperienced, a baby killer, a sex predator and a dozen other things. You wonder why McCain/Palin supporters feel like they can go to rallies and talk about Obama being a Jew-bought Islamic radical cokehead forced abortionist communist? ”
would you call this satire or accusation.
Roger:
Your reading skills are poor.
Oh, since there’s a pole: I vote satire!
Why do people who apparently haven’t spent any time learning about constitutional law or economics figure that it was a waste to have bothered reading up on those topics before publicly opining on them?
Beats me. I feel the same way about this whole “activist judges” rhetoric, when people start spouting about how wrong it is that a state supreme court judge can “overturn the will of the people” by declining to bar same-sex couples from marrying. Hello: that’s what the state and federal s/Supreme courts are FOR, to restrain the creation of laws that violate c/Constitutions, particularly when the majority is trying to vote away the rights of the minority. Did NO ONE take a government class in high school? Mine was required for graduation.
Roger,
What you quoted in comment 1 is not what you quoted in comment 4. I addressed my explanation to what you quoted in comment 1. It is not transferable to what you quoted in comment 4. Hope that helps.
PG, I don’t agree that knowing your First Amendment rights is equivalent to shooting your mouth off about pouring concrete. The Constitution and the democratic process apply to everyone, that’s the whole point of democracy. Rights aren’t awards to be given out to the elite few who’ve spent years studying the intricacies of constitutional law. Not only can everyone have opinions about who should be the next president, everyone should have opinions. Even stupid and ignorant people.
Individ-ewe-al,
You seem to confuse *having* rights with *knowing* one’s rights. They are not the same. Certainly all Americans have the same legal rights, but I hope you are not so radically egalitarian as to assume that therefore they all must be equally informed about those rights. The average person, for example, sincerely believes that she has a right to a Miranda warning, when in actuality that set of words appears nowhere in the Constitution and has become common simply because such uniformity means that each individual police officer doesn’t have to come up with his own way of explaining what an arrested person’s rights are. That’s something I didn’t know until I took a class on constitutional law in college. I don’t think everyone has to be well-informed on every subject, only that I personally do not pontificate on camera about subjects on which I am not informed. But as Gail Collins said,
Meanwhile, Joe was happily standing in his front yard, holding forth to the assembled national news media on his theories about everything from Social Security (bad) to the war in Iraq (good). And do not condemn him, people, unless you imagine that if all the cable television reporters in the world were in your driveway, begging for your opinion on the state of the nation, you would say: “No, I leave that to the experts.”
You should, however, understand that once the interview is over, the reporters will go down the street and ask the sanitation man whether you’ve ever failed to recycle.
The nature of concrete is applicable to everyone too; the laws of physics operate whether I understand them or not. Does that mean that if I have seen the laws in action, I must understand them? Or is it necessary to have spent some time thinking and either reading about or directly working with the way a material responds to certain conditions in order for me to say how these laws work? And if I ignore the usefulness of such study, and make mistakes, I fully expect people who work in construction to point them out and to think that I must not have much respect for what they do, if I think it is so easy to understand these things.