Month: February 2008

O’Reilly Suggests Lynching Michelle Obama to Fox Audience – Why Is Security Lax at Obama Rally in Texas?

Jon Ponder

Is the Secret Service Doing Its Job in Protecting the Candidates – Or Has It Been FEMA-ized by Bush and His Cronies?

On Feb. 19, Bill O’Reilly told a caller into his Fox News radio show that he won’t “go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama” unless he finds out that she really did say she has lacked pride in her country.
“I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.”
– O’Reilly

BILL O’REILLY: “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels — that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever — then that’s legit. We’ll track it down.”

Well, Bill – get out your white sheets:

MICHELLE OBAMA: “What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”

Emphasis added. (Video available at same link.)

Later, O’Reilly issued an unapologetic apology in which he brazenly lied about what he actually said that was offensive:

[…]

Is Castro’s Brother Raul Gay?

Jon Ponder

It seems doubtful but here’s what Radar says:
Raúl is known as “la China,” or “the Chinese girl,” because of his effeminate demeanor.

As news spreads of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro stepping down, we’re reminded of the longstanding rumor that has dogged his brother Raúl, one that will surely be amplified as he begins his nasty little sashay into power. Word is, he’s gay.

Whenever Raúl’s been mentioned as Fidel’s likely successor, readers leave comments calling him El Maricón, a derogatory Spanish term equivalent to “faggot.” Not even the fact that he’s married with four children has prevented some sites from claiming he’s bisexual or a cross-dresser. The Economist has mentioned that Raúl is known as “la China,” or “the Chinese girl,” because of his effeminate demeanor. Allen Ginsberg referred to Raúl’s possible gayness in his journal. Andy Warhol alluded to it in his 1965 film The Life of Juanita Castro.

Though they’ve never been proven, rumors of Raúl’s gay thing aren’t that far fetched, Ann Louise Bardach, author of Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana and an expert in the regime, told Radar back in September ’06. There’s a pervasive down-low population, she said. “It might be the gayest place on the planet outside of South Beach.”

One of Raul’s children, his daughter, Mariela, 45, is the head of Cuba’s National Centre for Sexual Education, and is a supporter of the civil rights of gay people.

Peggy Noonan Uses Ebonics to Describe Michelle Obama

Jon Ponder

La Noonan, writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:
“Man, she got it all.”
– Peggy Noonan

Michelle Obama seems keenly aware of her struggles, of what it took to rise so high as a black woman in a white country. Fair enough. But I have wondered if it is hard for young African-Americans of her generation, having been drilled in America’s sad racial history, having been told about it every day of their lives, to fully apprehend the struggles of others. I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think “Man, she got it all.” Intelligent, strong, tall, beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful, and from a working-class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school.

That’s the great divide in modern America, whether or not you had a functioning family, and she apparently came from the privileged part of that divide. A lot of white working-class Americans didn’t come up with those things. Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day.

Does Mrs. Obama know this? I don’t know. If she does, love and gratitude for the place that tries to give everyone an equal shot would seem to be in order.

Emphasis added.

Rush Off His Meds: Liberals Are ‘Snakes’ ‘To Be Defeated’

Jon Ponder

Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio entertainer and provocateur, used the New York Times article suggesting John McCain had a too-cozy relationship with a female lobbyist a decade ago — a story sourced to, and apparently leaked by, Republican operatives in the 2000 McCain presidential campaign — to castigate McCain with a rambling discourse on his dark and paranoid view of Americans who do not share his political views:
Limbaugh’s swipe at Sen. Kennedy’s drinking is particularly rich coming from a man who ingested so many opoids that he was rendered profoundly deaf.

The lesson is liberals are to be defeated. You cannot walk across the aisle with them. You cannot reach across the aisle. You cannot welcome their media members on your bus and get all cozy with them and expect eternal love from them. You are a Republican. Whether you’re a conservative Republican or not, you are a Republican. At some point, the people you cozy up to, either to do legislation or to get cozy media stories, are going to turn on you. They are snakes. If the right lesson is not learned from this, then it will have proved to be of no value. There’s a great opportunity here for Senator McCain to learn the right lesson and understand who his friends are and who his enemies are. He’s had that backwards for way too long. He has thought the New York Times is his friend. He has thought Chris Matthews and these other people in the Drive-By Media are his friends. They aren’t. That’s the lesson today.

The story is not the story. The story is the Drive-By Media turning on it’s favorite maverick trying to take him out. The media picked the Republican candidate. The New York Times endorsed that candidate while they sat on this story, and now with utter predictability, they are trying to destroy him. This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain? Those of you who listen regularly should have been expecting this all along because it’s utterly predictable. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. It’s as predictable as Ted Kennedy finding a bar at happy hour.

The swipe at Sen. Kennedy’s drinking is particularly rich coming from a man who ingested illegally obtained Oxycontin in such huge quantities that he may have rendered himself profoundly deaf.

Rush’s discourse, which is part of what he unironically calls the “Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies,” is classic transference: It is Republicans like Rush and his millions of easily deluded Dittohead followers who view politics as a zero-sum game. He and others of his ilk — Karl Rove, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity to name a few — play by just one rule: Win at any cost.

For these conservatives, no lie is too small. No smear is too unfounded. No political trick is too dirty.

The last thing they are interested in is calls for unity. Without divisiveness and rancor, their livelihoods — the millions they rake in from propagandizing for the oligarchs and corporatists in their books and on their radio and television shows — would disappear.

This is the field of battle they have chosen. Unfortunately, the only way to play against them is to annihilate them. The only way to teach them a political lesson is to defeat them utterly.

Poll: Bush Approval at 19% – Officially ‘Worst President Ever’

Jon Ponder

The perception that the economy is failing may have finally done what seven years of lies and incompetence have failed to do — bring George Bush’s approval rating down to a closer reflection of reality:

George W. Bush’s overall job approval rating has dropped to a new low in American Research Group polling as 78 percent of Americans say that the national economy is getting worse according to the latest survey from the American Research Group.

Among all Americans, 19 percent approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77 percent disapprove. When it comes to Bush’s handling of the economy, 14 percent approve and 79 percent disapprove.

Bad news for Bush but good news, finally, for the United States of America. It means that fewer than 20 percent of our fellow citizens are truly and irrevocably dimwitted and/or delusional.

But how does a 19 percent approval rating compare with other presidents? Here’s an overview from the recent past:

[…]

Timing, Sourcing Suggest GOP, Not Dems, Behind McCain ‘Smear Campaign’

Jon Ponder

The McCain campaign has had two months to prepare for the story published in the New York Times about his cozy relationship eight years ago with a young blond woman who happened to be a lobbyist.
The possibility that Romney’s mitts were all over this might explain McCain’s palpable antipathy toward him.
The campaign’s rapid response team put out a news release last night that twice used the phrase “smear campaign” to describe the Times story:

“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

“Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.”

They have had this response in the can for two months, so it bears some scrutiny. The word “smear” is predictable but to use it twice in conjunction with “campaign” is interesting.

One news story is hardly a “campaign.” And it is obvious from even a casual reading of the Times article that lawyers have been all over it. But is there more to come? The McCain team’s use of the word “campaign” suggests there could be.

Or, it is equally likely that “campaign” is a bit of transference — that McCain and his operatives know the source of the story was a rival campaign.

[…]

McCain and the Lobbyist – Is This Why Romney Only ‘Suspended’ His Campaign?

Jon Ponder

The New York Times has just published a story claiming that John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, eight years ago so concerned his 2000 campaign staff that they blocked her access to him.
Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access.
MSNBC is wall to wall with the story tonight, because everyone inside the Beltway has known about it since December 20. It was then, two weeks exactly before the Iowa caucuses, that McCain operatives convinced the Times to delay the story in order to protect McCain’s candidacy. If there have been subsequent attempts to get the story spiked, they failed today:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

The alleged sin here is hypocrisy, since McCain presents himself as being pure of the taint of lobbyist influence. There is also a hint of the of sin of adultery, but both parties have denied that their relationship was personal.

These charges are very thin. Pending more to come, the Times may well have given McCain what he needs most: the opportunity to play the rightwing victim card, “See! The liberal media is out to get me.” Thus giving McCain’s conservative critics cause to rally around him.

On the other hand, if the story does have legs, it may explain why Romney suspended, not ended, his campaign a few weeks ago. It also could also explain why Mike Huckabee has not dropped out.

Conservatives are trying to blame the leaking of this story on Democrats, but the original timing of its release (in December when the Dems were focused on each other and McCain was not the frontrunner in any polls) and sourcing ( Republican operatives who worked on the 2000 McCain race) both suggest it came from within the Grand Old Party.

Update: Best guess on the source of the leak to the Times: Team Romney.

The Secret of Obama’s Success and Why He’ll Keep Winning – He Listens to George Lakoff

Trish

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank captured the angst foes of Barack Obama are feeling.

The Clintons in the past couple of weeks have done all they could to cook him up into an airy souffle, a candidate so light in substance that he collapses when speared. They exposed him as a guy who copies others’ speeches and makes lofty pledges only to break them.

And yet: The Obama Souffle continues to rise.

Why that is has befuddled many Democrats, particularly Clinton followers. How can Obama score so many wins by offering so little — just hope — and yet everything — hope?

I can answer that question. It’s because Obama gets it. He’s been reading the George Lakoff and Rockridge Institute playbook, Thinking Points and skillfully applying it. Lakoff and Rockridge rewrote the progressive strategy with the concept of framing. Had my guy, John Edwards, followed their advice and like Obama, gone lighter on the policies and heavier on the values, he might be where Obama is today. Dennis Kucinich would have won a primary or two. John Kerry might be president now. Al Gore would not have needed the Supreme Court in 2000.

At some point, Clinton allowed herself to morph into the candidate who does not represent change and derides hope, the authority figure who announces the party is over and it’s time to get back to work. Who wants to vote for that?

Richard Wirthlin, chief strategist for former president Ronald Reagan, made a discovery in 1980 that profoundly changed American politics. As a pollster, he was taught that people vote for candidates on the basis of the candidates’ positions on issues. But his initial polls for Reagan revealed something fascinating: Voters who didn’t agree with Reagan on the issues still wanted to vote for him…

Reagan talked about values rather than issues. Communicating values mattered more than specific policy positions. Reagan connected with people; he communicated well…It was not because all of his values matched theirs exactly. It was not because he was from their socioeconomic class or subculture. It was because they believed in the integrity of his connection with them as well as the connection between his worldview and his actions.

Are Lakoff and Rockridge saying that personality matters more than positions? Pretty much. Because if you don’t have the right kind of the former, you will never get to act on the latter.

Issues are secondary — not irrelevant or unimportant, but secondary. A position on issues should follow from one’s values, and the choice of issues and policies should symbolize those values.

[…]

Page Six: MSNBC Shows bin Laden Pic for Obama

Trish

Leave it to Hairball:

An employee at MSNBC’s “Hardball” probably feels like hiding in a cave for a while after mistakenly flashing a graphic of terror lord Osama bin Laden as host Chris Matthews was discussing presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Monday. The Illinois Democrat’s campaign staffers immediately called in to complain and Matthews issued an instant apology on-air. NBC News said it “reprimanded” the unidentified graphics department geek, but did not detail the punishment.

Gee, I don’t know why the below-average American might be getting the message that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist.

Obama Surrogate on MSNBC Can’t Name Any of the Senator’s Accomplishments

Jon Ponder

After 10 straight wins, including last night’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin (where Republicans could vote for Dem candidates) and Hawaii, his native state, Sen. Barack Obama is now the putative Democratic nominee for president.

Let’s hope his surrogates are better prepared than this guy from now on:

State Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Texas) learned a lesson in preparedness Tuesday night when he was humiliated on MSNBC. Watson was on to talk about his support of Sen. Obama alongside Rep. Stephanie Tubbs (D-Ohio), who backs Sen. Clinton. Watson has endorsed Obama and writes glowingly of all the things Obama will do for the country, if elected.

But he was unable to answer Chris Matthews most basic demand: “Name some of his legislative accomplishments… name any…” A fantastically awkward mix of dead air, stuttering, laughter and repetition ensued, as Watson could not name a single one. Matthews laid off part way through, it seems at the demand of his producers, but came back around to lay a final blow at the end.

Watch what must be the most awkward clip of the night’s coverage.