Jealousy Thy Name is McCain: The GOP and the Punditrocracy are livid over Obama turning his world tour, which was supposed to expose his bumbling inexperience as he committed an endless string of gaffes, into a victory jaunt, the images sent back to America showing a confident and relaxed Obama at home and presidential on the world stage. As anyone who has studied Ronald Reagan’s campaigns knows, the successful image is often more important than what was said in the speeches, especially to those with the TV sound muted or who only catch a part of the news, as so many Americans do. Obama, I think intentionally, wanted to show himself as ‘The President,’ getting white America comfortable with the idea of a black man as their leader, and in that he has succeeded beyond expectations. Another aspect is the palpable tinge of jealously displayed by the McCainiacs – they well know that their withered and dull candidate couldn’t attract an adoring crowd of that size overseas and it preys on them to no end. The McCain campaign was out-played and outclassed on this one, as Globetrotter Obama vanquished the amateurish McCain team in their home court.
A Campaign Metaphor? Barack Obama goes to Berlin, Germany, and is greeted by over 200,000 cheering Germans waving US flags; John McCain goes to the German Village neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and chows down on bratwurst and cream puffs. (Did Ron Fournier of the AP pick up the tab?) Isn’t this pretty much the prevailing zeitgeist of both campaigns: Obama’s large and in charge and McCain’s left sitting there forlornly chewing on a sausage?
Speaking of the Out-of-Touch Punditrocracy: Following Obama’s spectacular Berlin appearance, many of the cable news pundits oddly obsessed, as did NBC’s Brian “Broadcast Newshawk” Williams, on Obama admitting that McCain’s ‘surge’ in Iraq had been right and Obama had been wrong. Obama wouldn’t play their game and correctly attributed the current less violent conditions in Iraq to many factors, so they pouted that he was evading the question. As Eric Alterman at Media Matters wrote the other day, “Why is the surge being reported as an undeniable success when it still has not accomplished most of the things it was promised to do and has likely accomplished nothing that will last once its unsustainable numbers are drawn down?” But that’s the kind of question that our infatuated Big Media somehow never gets around to asking McCain. Gee, it’s a good thing we have a liberal media – imagine what they would do to Obama if they were really McCain sympathizers at heart?
The Tattlesnake — Wolf Woman On the Prowl and Other Howlers Edition
Is There a Full Moon?
– Hawaii Jive-O: Cokie “Larry Talbot” Roberts just can’t get over Barack Obama going on vacation in a – gasp! – “foreign, exotic” locale like Hawaii, where he was born and raised, and where his grandmother still lives. It just “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever,” she blathered dementedly on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, even though she reluctantly admitted that she knows “Hawaii is a state” and all, but it seems in Cokie’s World it’s not a real blood-and-guts American state like, say, one-time secessionist Louisiana, her birthplace. (It’s a uniquely dumb angle of attack on Obama, especially considering that the audience for Cokie’s Sunday morning entrail-readings on ABC generally have intact frontal lobes and go on vacation there themselves, and a flip-off even the rest of the Punditocracy apparently thinks is too goofy to echo.)**
Then the very next day on NPR’s Morning Edition, the radio network’s Senior News Analyst “Two Hits” Cokie — part of the Steve and Edie Roberts power couple who no doubt vacation in the blue-collar Indiana Dunes when not busy traversing gossipy Washington cocktail parties, primping for TV appearances, and regurgitating David Broder’s latest conventional wisdom — reiterated her batty babblings regarding the “exotic” and “odd” vacation spot of Hawaii, but omitted her ABC suggestion that Obama instead go to mundane Myrtle Beach, SC, for his down time. Gee, if he had, I wonder what she’d be carping about then? “It’s incredible to me that Obama, who grew up in Hawaii and still has his 85-year-old white grandmother living there, would take this opportunity to politicize even his vacation by going to Myrtle Beach – why, he has no family or connections to that area! Is he ashamed of his white grandmother, afraid it might put off some black voters by reminding them of his mixed racial heritage? He should have visited her in Hawaii – I mean, it is a US state, after all!” And that’s the way the sausage is made these days by our ‘Obama-friendly’ Big Media, folks.
**(Correction: <Today’s New York Times features an article by Michael Falcone that repeats Cokie’s nonsense.)
– They Like Me; They Really Like Me! Check the people surrounding McCain at a real public event, as opposed to those green-screen Berlin beer hall meetings with the obvious party-hack GOPbots cheering as one at his Talking Points and giggling at his lame jokes. I saw a clip just the other day on MSNBC from a factory in Ohio, and the ‘average workers’ standing behind McNasty all looked like they just ate wallpaper paste. The moneybags Republican factory owner, drooling over paying no taxes under the GOP, no doubt ordered his wage slave proles to provide PR window-dressing for Johnny Mac’s eruptions, but they just couldn’t force themselves drag a smile along. ($100 bucks to gas up the beast and losing your home will do that to you.) Reminded me of the facial expressions of real combat troops in Iraq when the loathed Rummy came calling – “You can order me here to greet him, but I don’t have to look like I enjoy it.”
– Unprecedented: Speaking of the military, Jack Cafferty reported on CNN on Aug. 15th that, for the first time in many years, the military is donating more money to the candidate without military experience than the veteran. Obama’s campaign is apparently racking up the bucks from our people in uniform, nearly twice as much as the Republican ‘War Hero.’ Perhaps they’ve realized that the screwy GOP doesn’t know how to fight a war or take care of the troops.
– What does it say about McCain’s integrity that he’s willing to take money from this slick pile of money-humpin’ Christopublican offal? Read on:
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