“Disrespectful” was a powerful word in the Jim Crow era. Like “uppity,” it had a special meaning when used to describe the behavior of African Americans. A black man who was thought to be disrespectful to a white man risked being beaten. A black man who was disrespectful to a white woman could well end up dead.

Here’s what the female announcer in John McCain’s new ad says:

ANNOUNCER: He was the world’s biggest celebrity. But his star is fading. So they lashed out at Sarah Palin. Dismissed her as “good looking.” That backfired. So they said she was doing “what she was told.” Then desperately called Sarah Palin a liar. How disrespectful. (Emphasis added.)

First of all, the fact that Palin is an audacious and extravagant liar has been clearly established. Starting with her convention speech, she has repeatedly lied about the fact that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere and sold a plane on Ebay, just for starters.

The matronly indignation voiced by the new ad’s announcer juxtaposed with the visual of Obama’s face in profile next to the words “how disrespectful” reads loudly and clearly to the ad’s target demo, the racist GOP base. And yet the messaging is apparently too subtle for the punditocracy — even though this same group spent endless hours last week debating whether Obama’s “lipstick” remark was sexist or not. Let’s review Obama’s statement, just for grins:

OBAMA: Let’s just list this for a second. John McCain says he’s about change, too. Except — and so I guess his whole angle is, “Watch out, George Bush, except for economic policy, health-care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics. We’re really gonna shake things up in Washington.” That’s not change. That’s just calling some — the same thing, something different. But you know, you can — you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.

Despite the fact that Obama never referred even indirectly to McCain’s vice presidential nominee — and the equally confounding fact that the nominee has repeatedly compared herself to a female dog in lipstick (pig is bad, but bitch is okay?) — the Rove element in the McCain campaign has successfully recast Obama’s statement as sexist, at least in the empty minds of Fox News viewers.

The racist coding in the McCain ad is more subtle than the infamous “hands” ad that Sen. Jesse Helms, the proud North Carolina bigot who gave McCain senior adviser Charlie Black his start, ran against Harvey Gantt, the architect and former mayor of Charlotte who was African American. The “hands” ad showed the hands and arms of a white man crumpling up a notice he’d received that his job had been given to a less-qualified “minority.”

But the intended effect of the McCain ad is the same — to stoke the flames of racial hatred and fear among voters at the heart of the Republican base.

On Wednesday night, a little reporting about the real John McCain made it past the McCain campaign’s carpetbombing of lies against Barack Obama. Predictably, the story, which came from The Nation magazine and MSNBC’S “Rachel Maddow Show,” has otherwise been ignored by the corporate media since then:

RACHEL MADDOW: So, we’re on the air three days so far and we’ve already got ourselves an exclusive. It’s a photographic image that appears to undercut the well-crafted focus group-tested image of John McCain being pushed on the American people by his campaign. The next time you hear McCain described as anti-lobbyist reformer, the man fighting against entrenched interests in Washington, who rebuffed celebrity, perhaps this is the photo that should come to mind.

Now, this was obtained exclusively by the “Nation Magazine” … The magazine reports that it was taken on August 29th, 2006 in Montenegro … On the right hand side, that appears to be John McCain in the purple baseball cap. Purple is the color of his beloved Arizona Diamondbacks, I’m just saying.

And you’re probably thinking to yourself, you know, that guy on the left looks kind of familiar and so doest [sic] the woman who’s with him. The woman there is Hollywood star, Ann Hathaway—“Princess Diaries,” “Devil Wears Prada” [and “Brokeback Mountain”]. The guy on the left is her then-boyfriend, Italian entrepreneur, Raffaello Follieri. The reason that Raffaello looks familiar is because he pled guilty today to a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud, and five counts of money laundering. He is headed for the crowbar hotel, the pokey.

The feds busted Mr. Follieri because he posed as the CFO of the Vatican in order to win friends in high places and then take their money. That takes us back to the photo. Why exactly is the senior senator from Arizona apparently boarding this yacht in Montenegro on his 70th birthday with a soon to be busted Italian conman?

Well, despite marketing himself as the anti-lobbyist, John McCain, in fact, has a campaign run by one of the biggest names in Washington lobbying, Rick Davis. And Davis has a rolodex full of high powered friends like Raffaello Follieri, the conman, who—“The Nation” reports—hired Rick Davis’ business partner shortly after this photo on the yacht was taken.

Imagine, dear reader, the brouhaha we’d be hearing if a photo surfaced of Barack Obama boarding a yacht with a conman, a lobbyist and Hollywood star. But why are we surprised that there hasn’t been a peep about this in the MSM since Maddow reported it Wednesday night? There is a reason McCain calls the corporate media his base.

Follieri’s victim was Ron Burkle, the entrepreneur who made a billion dollars by making Ralph’s Supermarkets ubitquious, whose primary residence is Green Acres, the Beverly Hills estate built by Silent film star Harold Lloyd, but who is probably best known as an FOB, friend of Bill Clinton’s. Follieri took Burkle for $50 million:

[…]

The way of Rove is to distract voters from the real issues by carpetbombing your opponent with lies: “We reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state, and it was while our opponent was requesting a billion dollars in earmarks as a senatorial privilege. What I was doing was vetoing half a billion as an executive responsibility.”

On the trail, Palin never actually claims that she hasn’t asked for earmarks. But she definitely leaves the impression that she’s every bit as passionate a fighter against the practice as McCain is, and certainly more so than Barack Obama, who didn’t endorse a moratorium on earmarks until this year.

“I championed earmark reform, also, to help Congress stop wasting money on those things that do not serve the public interest,” Palin said this morning at a campaign rally in Fairfax, Virginia. “We reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state, and it was while our opponent was requesting a billion dollars in earmarks as a senatorial privilege. What I was doing was vetoing half a billion as an executive responsibility.”

That speech touched off some unusually outraged media coverage, which noted that Palin had, in fact, asked Congress for nearly $200 million in federal earmarks just this year. Could it be? Where’s the evidence?

Fortunately, if you’re curious, you can look them all up, thanks to the Web site of Alaska’s earmark king, Sen. Ted Stevens — who was thoughtful enough to list all of the earmark requests he got and who asked for them. Sure enough, Palin’s office submitted 31 requests, totalling approximately $197 million. You can read the list here.

In 2008, Alaska got more earmarked federal funding per person than any other state.:

Arizona, the second fastest growing state in the nation, will receive just $18.70 per capita in federal earmarks this fiscal year. By comparison, Alaska – with roughly a tenth of Arizona’s population – is set to receive $506.34 per capita, the highest in the nation, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group which tracks earmarks. The state of Alaska receives about three times as much as Arizona receives in actual dollars, $346 million to $119 million. [USA Today, 3/22/08 ]

The response by the McCain campaign is classic disinformation:

In a memo e-mailed to reporters this afternoon, the McCain campaign said Palin’s requests were a significant reduction from the record of the previous Alaska governor, Republican Frank Murkowski, whom Palin unseated in 2006. Murkowski’s final request asked for $350 million in earmarks, according to the campaign.

Meanwhile, McCain’s claim that Obama earmarked $1 billion in pork was also false:

In fact, the Illinois senator requested $311 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and none this year. In comparison, Gov. Palin has requested $750 million in her two years as governor — which the AP says is the largest per-capita request in the nation.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/9/08]

The trick is to lie so often that the Obama campaign and, occasionally, the media, fill the news hole with debunking.

Works every time.

H/t: Buck