I Hope You're Happy

I don’t remember where I found the original links, but I have a whole browser full of tabs of conservative blog reactions to the elections. It’s time for some rapid fire Johnny responses.
Michelle Malkin leads off a post called “Gird Your Loins, Conservatives” with this statement:

“I’m getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face “What do we do now, Michelle?” e-mails.”

Well, I’ll give you a hint, and it involves thinking for yourself for a change. Why do you have to turn to Michelle for guidance, or Rush, or Bill O’ or Ann or any of them. Obama hasn’t even taken office yet, and you’ve already decided this is going to be the worst four years of your life. How about waiting until a few months in, the famous hundred days mark or yes, even a year to give the new president and congress a chance to prove their worth. There’s a brain under that cranium up there, maybe you should take the opportunity to exercise it.

She goes on:

“What do we do now? We do what we’ve always done.

We stand up for our principles, as we always have[…]

We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them. We defend them.

We pay respect to the office of the presidency. We count our blessings and recommit ourselves to our constitutional republic.

We gird our loins, to borrow a phrase from our Vice President-elect.

We lock and load our ideological ammunition.

We fight.”

You almost had it. Paying respect usually means not picking a fight the day after the election. Here we have a President elect whose platform has been inclusion and finding the right path, and you want to dig trenches. That worked out really well in WWI.

She goes on to marching orders.

“First assignment for fiscal conservatives in Washington:

1) Oppose the Democrats’ next stimulus boondoggle.
[The bill isn’t even written yet and you’re mobilizing against it?]
2) Oppose Obama’s windfall profits tax proposal.
3) Oppose new bailouts for states deep in debt.
[You mean like the United States?]
4) Oppose new foreclosure prevention measures that will simply provide perverse incentives for borrowers to walk away and delay a needed market correction.
[because it would really suck if people stayed in their homes if they could pay for them with a more fair loan]
5) No more federal loan guarantees for corporations

I’m sorry, but the conservative agenda is not working. This is why we have voted it out of power. Don’t get me wrong here, I like small governments, but even more I like effective governments. Under Bush it was neither.

But there’s a lot to go on to, let’s not malinger on Michelle.
Let’s go to Redstate and their post “The After. The Before. The Future, Present and Past.”
We start off good, with a suggestion to take a day of rest, we’ve won some, lost some, a lot of the good clichés. Then we get to this:

“RedState stands at the front lines in the fight against the left. We fight hard here. We are not always meant to win. This is a never ending war. Often we view the fight for the White House as the war, but it is just one battle along the way. The war in politics between left and right does not end.”

Why is it always war? Why do we always have to fight against our own countrymen? We’re not, contrary to what Michele Bachmann might think, un-American. Maybe we could agree not on fiscal conservatism, but fiscal responsibility. I’m not sure we’ve ever had that, but we keep talking about it. We’ll never pass a line item veto so long as one party is looking to the next few years and fear that they will never get an earmark through, but we always bitch and moan about earmark spending. It might be a nice compromise to make right now as we go through a financial crisis. On this end, I’ve got news for you, earmarks are a pretty small portion of federal spending. It’s like complaining about the dripping pipe when you’re looking at a water main break. Can’t we agree to just get this done? It might be a nice start.
But let’s move on again. This time, we’re on to another Redstate blog post by Neil Stevens Here
One good statement is this one:

Point two: This isn’t the end of America.

Thank you for saying this, because this is what the left said when Bush was elected to his second term. And his first. Parties ebb and flow. It is the nature of politics. A free thinker realizes that there are times where the Republicans are good for America, and times when the Democrats are when it comes to certain issues. When we start getting into issues like abortion or gay rights, that’s a different story. Let’s face it, there are times when a government with more oversight is a good thing, and that time would have been about four years ago. There are other times when less oversight is good, times when the economy is growing at a healthy but not overzealous rate. As a free thinker, my biggest challenge is to foresee when each might be better. Wall Street has bears and bulls, and each has their right time. Let’s see how Neil follows this up.

Our values are more resilient than Obama is strong. Our civil institutions are stronger than Obama is socialist. Our nation is greater than any one man, including the President. We will endure anything that happens under his Presidency.

Ooh. Sorry, thanks for playing. Yeah, you missed it by ………………………………. this much. There you go dividing again. Why is it when a Republican is elected, Democrats say we’ll work with him, and when a Democrat is elected, Republicans draw a line in the sand and spit tobacco juice across it?

Let’s move on to Moonbattery with the article, “Let the Backlash Begin.”

Congratulations, moonbats. You finally have your revenge for being forced to look at all those flags after 9/11. This is a day of celebration for everyone hostile to America and the principles of individual liberty for which it stands. Enjoy it while you can.
There are people lowdown enough to know in advance who and what was elected yesterday, and to have voted for the Moonbat Messiah anyway. What they have done to this country is beyond forgiveness.
But an ultra-radical leftist like Obama could not be elected in a center-right country, or even a center-left country, without a great deal of deception. Thanks to a radicalized liberal media willing to sacrifice its own long-term credibility to put a leftist in power, Obama was never publicly vetted. Moderates did not vote for a real person, but for a two-dimensional phantom temporarily conjured into being by hype.
The opposition made the swindle easy to pull off. After eight years of a lousy incumbent, it presented a still lousier replacement, an inarticulate, uninspiring centrist universally reviled by the conservative base. Now the Republican Party knows it must either purge itself of RINO mediocrities like Bush and McCain or go the way of the Whigs.
Bush’s subpar performance will soon fade from memory, as Obama’s malignant collectivist ideology and lack of qualifications become impossible for the media to hide. One way or another, the full extent of his radical past and associations will become public knowledge. As promised by Plugs Biden, Obama will be tested, and he isn’t likely to pass.
We’ve had awful leaders before. New York’s atrocious affirmative action mayor, David Dinkins, gave way to Rudy Giuliani. Jimmy Carter gave way to the only great president of our lifetimes, Ronald Reagan. America will turn toward greatness again, once it realizes it has been tricked into temporarily embracing disgrace and decline.

Woah, did I get any bullshit on me? It was flinging pretty hard and heavy there. This guy has some issues, first is prejudice, and not the skin color kind (though I’m guessing there’s some of that, too). First, you’ve not only judged him before a day into his presidency, but you’ve executed him too. Second, every ad on this site is an ad for fringe quack beliefs that should give some clues as to the character of the blogger. Third, I lived through the Reagan recession. I haven’t forgotten Reaganomics. It doesn’t work. Trickle down economics feels like getting pissed on economics. I’d rather sit through one of his movies than another minute of a Reagan-esque President. He may have been great for the reinstatement of conservative morals (morals are a point of view, so I won’t argue right or wrong in this article), but he ushered in a generation of very loose fiscal and economic morals that started with Charlie Keating and continues to the present crisis.

Let’s move on to NRO. This little snippet by Andy McCarthy, called “Tenured Radicals Coming Home to Roost?”

Preliminary indications are that the youth vote (ages 18-29) was way up:  an increase of somewhere over 2.2 million (maybe way over) from 2004 (a year in which it was very high), and as much as 13% over 2000.  The Left’s dominance of the academy is now having a material impact on electoral politics.  As we think about the future of conservatism, we ignore that at our peril.

Sure blame education. Blame intelligence. It’s the smart ones that did us in. Doesn’t that mean only stupid people vote Republican? Now I know why they hate to fund education.

Let’s go to Blackfive, and this article “Back in the USSA”

“America’s sheep have spoken and elevated one of their own to the Presidency. Uber Sheep (no offense UP) Obama will now lead the flock from the front. The United States of Socialist America has been established and I eagerly await the summons to the Michelle Malkin Internment and Re-Education camps. The left now is the ruling class with a landslide victory and a mandate for The Obama to CHANGE America to the PC wonderland the Bush Crime Family has kept it from becoming.

The CHANGE Obama and his legions of adorers want to enact is unprcedented in US history and the country they want to make would be unrecognizable to the Founders. I refuse to submit. I refuse to HOPE or CHANGE. I refuse to surrender. I refuse to STFU!!!!!!

The Obama in Chief is not a fan of our President Elect and so he will sound the charge. 1 20 09, I have seen it on dozens of bumper stickers of left wing butt heads looking forward to W’s departure. Well I can’t say I’ll miss him much either, but let’s take the day away from them. Screw the coronation and start of the Obamanation. 1 20 09, the day we begin the fight to stop the left from telling the rest of us how to live our lives and pussifying American society. I went with Chuck Z today to his favorite local gun shop and where last week there were dozens of AK and variants for sale, today there were half as many and a line to buy.

There is no point in sniveling; the Obama won fair and square. What we need to do now is pull America’s head out of it’s ass before these bastards do too much damage. Revolution Calling!”

Wow, first, “sheep” is what you call people when you are following a different shepherd. We get just about everything in this one, from his insistence of calling Barack “the Obama” (read: that one, those people, etc. the same old division lines), to socialist (I wonder if he’s actually read anything on socialism instead of just burned the books), he brings up the founders, as if they wanted a coot like this voting, we’ve got name calling, Obamanation, guns, and a call to revolution. He calls us sheep? I just got bingo on my Republican buzzword card, and I didn’t even use the free spot in the middle. Well, comrade, as they said in their cries to revolution in 1917, “Bread! We want bread!”

On to V the K’s blog post “Caption this” (Sorry, lost the link)

We first get his with this picture:

[Did I mention rule #41 of debating modern politics: first person to make a comparison to Nazis loses?]

“First of all, don’t despair too much. John McCain was not that much of a prize. Do you really honestly believe his presidency was going to resemble his one year of center-right campaigning more than his 20+ years of center-left senatoring? Doubtful. We may have gotten another couple of Souters on the Supreme Court instead of another couple of Ginsburgs. That’s about all we would have gotten out of Maverick McAmnesty. That and four years of captions about dropping napalm on “gooks” and kids being chased off the White House lawn.

If only one good thing has come from this election, it’s that it is crystal clear who the enemy is. We don’t have to compromise any more. We’re liberated from having to back mushy moderates just because if the alternative gets power, it would be worse. Well, now the worse alternative is in power, and we have nothing to lose.

Americans have elected bad presidents before. We elected James Buchanan. We elected Woodrow Wilson. We even somehow elected Jimmy Carter. Americans get irrational and make stupid decisions sometimes, but somehow, we pull through. Obama will not be a good president. In the most likely scenarios, Chairman O’s tenure is likely to be sub-Carter in its results. The result of his policies will be a recession deeper and more prolonged that Jimmy Carter’s. And weakness abroad will lead only to humiliation at home. The Democrats can only avoid this fate by governing moderately and not over-reaching, and it is not in their character to do either.

Plus, there will be corruption. Oh boy, will there ever be corruption. The One rode into office on a wave of voter fraud and illegal campaign contributions, and he’s not going to change his stripes once in office. The One has always surrounded himself with the worst sorts of political sewer trout like Tony Rezko, Frank Marshall and Jim Johnson. The greed of his associates will explode exponentially with the power of the presidency, and the stench will be too hard for even the media to hide.

And I’ll be here to make fun of The One and his incompetence, his idiocy, his corruption, for as long as is necessary.”

Wow, 12 hours later, the next four years are tried, already, battle lines are drawn, and bonus name calling. Then we have him accusing the Democrats of being corrupt, especially in comparison to that Paragon of Morals the Bush Administration. Apparently Obama is more corrupt than anything, ever, even though he doesn’t have any Ted Stevens convictions, any investigations, and never lied to a nation to start an endless war in search of oil profits and money for Cheney’s buddies.

Okay, that’s all that I can take, I’m calling it a night. What do I learn from this? We really need to reach out to any conservative we can find, and ask them to not judge until there are actual results, or at the very least, the drapes that we measured four weeks ago are installed in the White House. We have a great opportunity here to bridge the gap and build on this victory. It is a shame that we can’t open our minds to allow the future take shape before it is condemned.

The last month or so has been the season for politics to get nasty in a personal way. I never hear about anybody getting harassed or hazed for voting Republican when in a Democratic environment, but Republicans seem to have this habit of going all schoolyard bully on the people around them. What is even more frightening is how the reasons for this are construed from the Republican Lie Machine.

At my local music shop, the guys told me about how police had set up a drunk driver checkpoint in their lot, and as they left, they were lined up and asked which one was going to vote for McCain. Cops get the asshole reputation for a reason.

But even better is gun company CEO Dan Cooper, who donated to and endorsed Barack Obama, and who has been asked to step down from leading his own company for the trouble. The full article is here: http://usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-30-gun-ceo-ousted_n.htm?imw=Y

It’s so disappointing to see intelligent people in the crossfire of morons who won’t even fact-check what others tell them. Two days and this is all over, right?

Every election, we sift through a candidate, parse everything that he or she has ever said or done, and take the worst bits, run them up the flagpole and see what way the wind blows them. It’s the American way. As a consumer of this information, unless we take the responsibility to research these things further, we are kept in isolation of the context that would make an incident understandable. A candidate may say an opponent is anti cute kitten for voting against a measure to prevent the drowning of kittens, (and who would be against kittens but an evil Communist?) when in actuality he voted against it because a better pro-kitten measure was coming up from the other house. In doing so, the first candidate hopes to create doubt in his opponent, who may in fact have a kitten rescue outreach in his back yard.

Creating doubt is the process of nit-picking our opponent while criticizing him for nit picking ours over standards we wouldn’t hold ourselves to. This election cycle has been a particularly strong example of this phenomena.

McCain has been a good, capable and honorable Senator for a very long time. His campaign has been blatantly dishonest and, dishonorable, and dysfunctional. He has gone the Foxnews route, and I think it has done him more harm than good. There is no straight talk, just a doddering old man who belabors a point like he has Alzheimer’s and hasn’t realized the nation has moved on.

In order to catalog all of the rumors going around out there would be a very long article, so I’ll make a good list, and discuss some fine points of a few. I was wondering where to start on this, and I realized that the best place to look would probably be that bastion of equality, conservapedia. Yes, this is the same place that has a picture of Hitler when you look up evolution.

But let’s look at Barack Obama. It starts off by saying “Barack Hussein Obama II (born, allegedly in Honolulu,[1][2] August 4, 1961)”. Already, they are hitting you with the idea that something isn’t right with this guy. They move immediately to branding him a liberal and a Marxist, which is a step up from a few weeks ago, where they started off by saying he is “almost definitely Muslim”. Just for the sake of pointing out the obvious, saying “almost definitely” is a good warning that what is being presented it almost definitely utter bullshit.

Next, they have a picture of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson, with Obama not holding his hand over his heart for the pledge of allegiance. This one is awkward, and reminds me of lapel pin-gate, speaking of which did you notice in the last two debates, Obama had a pin and McCain didn’t. If I were being dishonest here, I’d move on after the non-sequitor, but I’m not being dishonest. I have no explanation for the picture, I’d have to research a bit.

Then we move on quickly to known terrorists, atom bombs, plagiarism of his own autobiography which “computer analysis” “strongly suggests” was written by “friend” Bill Ayers, a statement followed immediately by an unrelated statement by Bill Ayers that is supposed to create more doubt by reflection. We then move on to Obama being “the most committed abortion supporting candidate in like, history. Notice it isn’t “pro choice”, it’s “abortion supporting”.

Then they move on to saying that doctors have found that he uses mind-control and brainwashing techniques in his speeches. They say his logo is like a crystal ball, a favorite tool of hypnotists. Well, first, no it isn’t, and second, you notice how easily they have him attached to fringe religion, paganism, fortune tellers and other non-Christian traditions. Keep watching for this.

Here they shift to the Muslim thing. They say he will “likely” be the first Muslim president, and will be sworn in on a Koran. No he won’t and no he won’t. And just in case you’re wondering,  he wasn’t sworn into the Senate on a Koran either. We the move to a quick list of Muslim paranoia which you can see if you go to the site. It isn’t worth quoting.

They move on to calling him elitist, how he got through college with the possible support of special scholarships not available to other (read: White) students,

The page continues to undermine his knowledge, brings up his admission of drug use before choosing a different path. Of course, if he were a conservative Christian, they would celebrate his redemption, but let’s not split hairs here.

I’m going to gloss over a section where they talk about his public record in his political career to cover a list of examples of Obama’s secrecy where they talk about how he keeps the records of his public service secret.  Here’s the list:

Certified Copy of original Birth certificate (Hawaii produced it)
Columbia College records (his academic records are there)
Columbia Thesis paper (most colleges don’t hold onto thesis papers)
Campaign donor analysis requested by 7 major watchdog groups (he must submit this information to the FEC, I think according to a law sponsored by John McCain)
Harvard College records (Again, they’re available)
Illinois State Senate records (you mean the records you quoted above?)
Illinois State Senate schedule (again a matter of public record)
Law practice client list and billing records/summary (Just digging for more dirt on this one)
Locations and names of all half-siblings and step-mothers (to open his family to personal attacks? Are you really that low?)
Medical records (only the one page summary released so far) (I’m much more concerned about McCain’s health should he be elected)
Occidental College records (See above)
Parent’s Marriage Certificate (again, a matter of public record)
Record of baptism (only trying to cast doubt on his Christianity here)
Selective Service Registration (I don’t see how this is relevant, but there’s probably a government office he could contact)
Trips schedules for trips outside of the United States before 2007 (they probably want to find his time spent training for al Qaeda)
Scholarly articles (you don’t go to libraries much, do you?)
Access to his Grandmother (who is very old and in bad health, are you trying to kill her? Is that your October surprise?)
List of all campaign workers that are lobbyists (you show me yours, I’ll show you mine)

Before I move on to some of the other accusations I’ve heard, I’d like to make another quick list of some of the wording in this “encyclopedia” entry: allegedly, strongly suggests, would likely become, overwhelming evidence, downplays, claiming, almost always, Presumably. These words aren’t used in the Britannica. The first time I saw this article, it started by saying that Obama “is almost certainly a Muslim.” I think we should all gang up on this site, join, and change it to read that Barack Obama will “almost certainly eat your children.”

Here’s a good list, before I move on, of things I’ve heard, and remember, I don’t hear ten percent of what it sent to “those people.” There’s risky, Arab, Muslim, Antichrist, Socialist, Communist, Marxist, Wants to re-write the constitution, Will raise taxes on all of America, wants to retake America for Blacks, pals around with Terrorists, is trying to rig the election by vote manipulation via ACORN, will side with the Palestinians, wants to lose Iraq, will allow another 9/11 to happen, wants to socialize medicine, eats arugula, wants death to Israel, is gay, is going to take our guns.

Coincidentally, whatever on that list isn’t covertly engaged in by Republicans is a hot-button issue for the core religious conservative voter group.

What these tactics hope to do is create doubt among the easily swayed. The question is, how many poll points is this worth? McCain and the Republicans sure seem to spend a lot of time and effort at these at the expense of actually discussing the issues, or as a distraction to their own opponent’s issues.
So in not giving any accusation the benefit of the doubt, or careful consideration, the whackadoo Republican (there are those that aren’t so easily swayed, aren’t brainwashed, remember), loses his chance to vote based on reality, and so the doubt creates a benefit, whatever that translates out to in the polls and the eventual voter decisions. Of course, in creating that doubt, the candidate runs the risk of crossing the line into Whakadoo land, and alienating the mainstream voter, which is where I think McCain currently finds himself.

Let me look at a few of these briefly.

First, Obama’s birth certificate. Many news sources have verified Obama’s birth certificate from the original file copy. There are photos of it everywhere. The amount of doubt that this has created has led some people to cross reference their own to claim that it is not legitimate. I saw a youtube video of one of these, a guy from Ohio comparing his Ohio birth certificate to Barack’s Hawaiian birth certificate and saying it isn’t legit because his has folds. Well, maybe Ohio folds theirs, or Ohio parents fold theirs. Maybe the file copies in Hawaii are kept in, you guessed it, file cabinets, which hold papers more efficiently when they, you guessed it, aren’t folded.

There are conservative wing claims that there is a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack, and a newspaper, which I can’t find the name of right now, claims to have a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama, but won’t produce it until after the election. Of course, why would you produce the holy grail of evidence in this controversy when it could do some good instead of turning the country to chaos in the aftermath of an election if it isn’t to create doubt in the face of a non-issue? The answer is, they aren’t holding, they just want you to think they are. They didn’t even ante up the bribe it would have taken to get a Kenyan forgery of a birth certificate.

Barack’s term paper. Again, there isn’t a shred of evidence to indicate that he said anything controversial, and since there are likely no extant copies of the original document, anybody could say anything they want about it without having to stand up to the burden of proof, and so we have another little thing that can be used to create doubt.

If you want a couple of good articles on the usual tactics of deception, check out these two pages from the skeptoid podcast:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4073

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4074#

Only a party that engages in these activities so regularly would be so paranoid of these types of issues. Do they really think that one of the two largest political parties in the nation wouldn’t check on the constitutional eligibility of its own nominee? Of course McCain was born in Panama…

Barack made a poor choice of words when he said he wanted to spread the wealth around. In reality, he isn’t doing this at all. This implies that he would Robin Hood some money from some rich people, and spread it to some poorer people. What he meant to say is that the wealthy should pay a larger portion of the tax burden. This is in fact the economic plan, not the systematic redistribution of weatlth. He isn’t the only person who has said this. Take this quote from John McCain from an October 2000 recording of Hardball.

[T]he very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do when you just look at the percentages. […]

So, look, here’s what I really believe, that when you are — reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more. … And frankly, I think the first people who deserve a tax cut are working Americans with children that need to educate their children, and they’re the ones that I would support tax cuts for first.

Of course, his plan is opposite now. This grpahic shows who get’s McCain’s tax cuts. I think this came from CNN.

Sarah Palin, by comparison has called Barack directly a socialist and a communist, however, her state is the most socialist in the nation. This is from the New Yorker.

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Yes, the pot really does call the kettle black.

One of the strangest things this cycle has been to watch the Republican die hards show their true colors, and they are anything but red, white and blue. Instead we have been treated to a parade of paranoia, an accusation of anti-christ, a tantrum of terrorists, a clutch of conspiracy theories, a rash of racism, a mishmash of Muslim fears, even a hint of homosexual allegations. In short, the Republicans have let their ugly out, and the end result of this is that John McCain, as a headline on Fark put perfectly, has been forced to show the minimum amount of human decency, which he has done begrudgingly again and again. That minimum of decency was to say that his opponent is a decent man.

The event that spurred that headline in particular was a little old lady at a campaign stop who said she did her research, and knows that Barack Obama is “an Arab.” McCain could hardly pull the mic away fast enough to blurt out “No ma’am, [Obama is] a family man, citizen…” My particular favorite was the guy with the monkey which had an Obama sticker for a hat. There was a brilliant moment of self-realization there that only comes when you’re being exposed as a racist prick for the whole nation to see.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/11/161149/03/790/627718

But there’s been lines of people yelling racist comments, the guy who may or may not have yelled, “Kill him,” but certainly yelled similarly offensive curses. The most recent was the McCain worker who lied in a claim that a tall black man had mugged her and carved a backward “B” into her face. Turns out she was…wait for it…mentally unstable and lying. Meanwhile, an Obama campaign worker was going door to door and was assaulted by a McCain supporter who is facing charges, and that hasn’t received any media coverage, and the conservatives still claim a media bias.

These claims are not isolated to simply Barack, but are now filtering to the Democratic machine and to elections officials.

http://tpzoo.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/ohio-man-charged-in-making-death-threat-against-election-official/

It is sad, really, that McCain has courted these crazies so much that he is now often seen on the campaign trail defending his opponent from his own followers. He has to do this because he realizes that as the mainstream, which he must win to turn this campaign around, sees these rabid followers on youtube, they don’t want to be associated with them. How often do you see a politician defending his opponent so often as this?

What happened to force him into this position? He did it to himself. We can start at the RNC, where Palin attacked Obama as a community organizer. McCain and the rest of the Republicans began aligning Obama with terrorists by saying that if he is elected, terrorists will attack us here, but provided no reason to believe this. The case for this statement had far less evidence than the case for WMD’s in Iraq. Once they took these steps, it was a slippery slope.

McCain got a bump from the convention, the Palin effect, but as she proved to be more and more an Alaskan Red Parrot that was more adept at repeating talking points than competently answering questions, his bump returned to a valley.

Things started looking dire, and the campaign turned Palin into an attack dog with an attractive shade of lipstick, and a fancy new ($150,000) collar. She had brought the absent until this point religious conservative vote to McCain, which he desperately needed.

The Obama train began gathering steam, and McCain’s campaign did the Republican thing, which is to promote fear tactics, spread misinformation, dig for skeletons, and keep attacking.

In the category of misinformation, we have seen numerous examples. The most issue-based bit of misinformation is Barack will raise taxes for most Americans. In terms of the comparison of tax plans, though, Barack gives more money to the middle class. But we see more than this in back channels. I have seen so many it is hard to recall them all. Barack is Muslim, Barack is only out for Black people, Barack is gay, Barack was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, His mother had five Muslim husbands, Barack is the Anti-Christ, he associates with terrorists, Obama is a socialist, the list goes on and on. Sarah Palin fans the flames of many of these fears day in and day out, either blatantly or obliquely.

Here’s the tax plans compared. I don’t remember the source on this. CNN maybe.

As they dig for skeletons, they bring up William Ayers, ACORN, and keep Jeremiah Wright waiting in the wing for a special guest appearance. In the case of Ayers, a former domestic terrorist, the relationship was minimal, and any claims of greater relationship have only enough substantiation to convince Fox News. In the case of ACORN, there is the claim of voter registration fraud which has a couple of isolated individual instances of fact, but no widespread veracity. The claims of registration fraud have little bearing on the election, and could actually hurt Obama by providing small scale overconfidence in new registration numbers. The Republicans contend that Obama has given them money, but he hasn’t. Of course, McCain also spoke for ACORN.

Meanwhile, I see voter intimidation efforts designed to reduce the Obama turnout, a technique perfected by Republicans. Here’s an example:

When none of this worked, McCain turned to 100% attack ads. These ads were cited even by Karl Rove as stepping over the bounds of credibility. As they continued, more middle ground voters were alienated.

The internet helped stop these. My own conservative family member backed off some of her claims after she read my responses to them (score one for Johnny). The Republicans didn’t expect the fact-checkers to be so responsive on this one. The internet is also responsible for spreading the robocalls to Obama supporters from McCain via the same firm that had helped sink McCain’s 2000 campaign. Usually these things remain contained, but these are now all over the world, showing McCain’s ugly bits.

Meanwhile Obama has been maintaining a fairly high road. He has done a small amount of negative ads, which the McCain camp quickly labeled as the dirtiest campaign in history. He has ignored the swift boat attacks that embroiled Kerry, and this rendered those types of attacks largely ineffective.

We also notice that McCain’s attacks are based on character, not issues, and so this cycle appears to be a bright light for people actually being informed and deciding based on political views, and not personal value judgments.

So now McCain is left trying to defend himself from the crazies he courted, and his VP is out, reportedly being a maverick even to her own campaign. Seems her ego is being fed by these crowds of crazies, and she thinks she is above the campaign line. The campaign itself denies this, but in this stage of the game, if she were seen as a rogue element, it would completely sink the whole ship. It’s the old spin, deny, and deflect play card.

I don’t think that McCain went into this race wanting this. I think the lunatics took over the asylum, and he’s powerless to do anything about it at this point. We’re at the two minute warning, he’s down and he just has to push forward and hope for the best. As a character study, I see him a victim of his own strategy. It’s sad really, but kind of nice to see karma in action like this. All of the negativity he put out has been coming back around to bite him in the ass. He is going to have a hell of a time of self-reflection after this thing is over.