Or, A McMania Named Desire
“Wonder if he’s going to have her go compete in the ‘Miss Buffalo Chip’ contest?”
– Comment by jfredmuggs at Common Dreams, Aug. 29, 2008.
It was highly entertaining to watch the Pundit Crews on cable news work themselves into a case of the vapors Friday morning, frantically trying to figure out which human sacrifice McCainiac would condemn as his Veep. Some of the Big Media Brains went agog for Tim Pawlenty; others assured the viewers Mitt Romney would probably emerge as The Choice, even while admitting that the hulking shadow of Tom Ridge continued to lurk in the wings. By later in the AM, Pawlenty and Romney were pushed overboard, leaving Ridge or – could it be? — the ‘maverick’ pick of McCain toady Joe Lieberman, still standing.
Yep, even Your Intrepid Tattler thought it would likely be Ridge carrying Johnny Mac’s coat, but that was because, like the Punditocracy, I gave credit to the Old Gluehorse for a residue of sanity, not recognizing McCain is no longer functioning in that psychological state – he’s been driven stone crazy by his own blind ambition to be president, and perhaps a touch of incipient senility. (After all, this is a man who has publicly contradicted himself twice in one day, embraces those who viciously slander him, occasionally goes blank on simple questions, and now opposes most everything he stood for in 2000.)
Seen in that light, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin makes perfect sense. You can imagine the sludgy gears of cynicism turning in McDuffer’s head, or, more likely, one of his Rove-trained staff: “We aren’t exciting the GOP base or doing that well among independents, and that damned Obama just cleaned our clock last night in a speech where he looked like the second coming of JFK – we’ve got to dominate the next news cycle so the Talking Heads don’t have time to praise him, and pick off those millions of Hillary voters we’re convinced will vote for us. What to do, what to do? Hey, how about that gal from Alaska? She’s a good-looker — might sucker in the young studs — and women are so dumb they’ll vote for any female over a young black guy and an old white fart – uh, you know what I mean – any day of the week. Ha, ha, we’ll call her a ‘feminist’ just to confuse ‘em! Plus she’s got that whole conservative family values stuff going on – Jesus, FIVE kids and she’s only 44! — so that can’t hurt. She’s tight with Big Oil, too, another plus, and she’ll do what she’s told, just like Alberto and Harriet. Get that Sarah what’s-her-name up in Alaska on the horn!”
The Tattlesnake – More GOP Goop: Deaf Con 3 Edition
Random Notes Summing Up the End of Summer Bummer in St. Paul
“Fight with me! Fight with me!”
– John McCain in his acceptance speech at the GOP Con, Sept. 4, 2008, so desperate for combat he invited the audience to throw a punch at him.
The 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was entertaining and credible if you happen to have that happy zealot’s mindset indistinguishable from serious brain damage, or you’re a member of the Inner Party with a large Memory Hole nearby and a strong stomach. Indeed, George Orwell could have written the script for this GOP Con and you could hear echoes of the boot-heel patriotism of Oceania ringing in its blaring signage and loudly repeated declarations – “Country First!” “Service!” “Character Counts!” “War Hero!” “Reformer!” “Maverick!” “USA!” “Surge Working!” “NO-bama!” — simple themes for simple minds marinated in the bottomless pit of Big Media Infotainment Newspeak and endless wars against shifting enemies, buttressed by increasingly irrational rationales.
Yet never was heard a discouraging word against the Bush Administration and the avaricious corporate-Republican values for which it stands that have promulgated and prolonged the various disasters sinking us on every front – instead, Frank Luntz’s cheesy framing word “Washington” was employed so that the top-of-the-ticket ‘reformers’ had something to ‘change’ other than the guiding precepts of their own party and Sarah Palin’s prominently-displayed infant son. The unasked question that hung over the convention like a cloud from Hurricane Gustav: ‘Yes, Washington is even more corrupt than usual and we are descending into utter catastrophe – and who is responsible for causing all of this misery?’ He That Must Be Obliged But Otherwise Go Unmentioned appeared on the Jumbotron screen early in the evening on the first day, his embarrassing video endorsing McCain stuck into those hours of the evening when, presumably, small-town America was still having dinner and would never see the Bush Boy and think of his Unmentionable PNAC Partner-in-Crime Dick Cheney, the True Author of our rampant economic and global woes.
McCain and Palin both exhibited signs of having an out-of-party experience as they berated the soulless suppurating boils and abscesses populating the Potomac Swamplands in the form of Big Money lobbyists and Special Interests that have brought the country so low, without ever hinting that most of them had an RNC elephant logo on their money clips and the rapacious Jesus of Mammon in their born-again hearts. For that matter, most of the larger fish work in McCain’s own campaign. But perhaps the most comically surreal moment of the three nights came when Mitt Romney, formerly McCain’s dedicated primary foe, erupted from the podium with this public hallucination to the cheers of the damned and deranged:
“We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals.”
– Mitt Romney, Sept. 3, 2008.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/08-2
That’s the essence of the snake-eating-its-tail message emerging from St. Paul to unite the party – let’s toss out big-government liberals Bush and Cheney and start anew.
We’re Not Out of Touch – We’re Republicans Without Issues!
“This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
– Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, quoted by the Washington Post’s The Fix blog.
To the party leaders and McCain’s campaign staff, ignorance is strength, and really the only strength McCain has left. If the public can be allayed by clever rhetoric, bamboozled by slick video bios, befuddled by down-is-up deceptions, or baffled by calculated bluster from determining the bitter truth about the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate for just two months, the GOP believes they can seize the White House for the third time in this new century.
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