The Scream Machine
GOP's only strategy, since they can't win on the issues
by Eugene Robinson
There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year — lacking ideas, programs or values — John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.
I hear McCain's amen chorus screaming, "Lipstick on a pig! Lipstick on a pig!" But they're well aware that Barack Obama was unambiguously talking about McCain's economic ideas, not his running mate. It seems incomprehensible that the McCain campaign would make so much noise about an allegation that clearly doesn't hold a drop of water — until you realize that the noise is the whole point.
As long as people are talking about barnyard beauty tips, they're not talking about substance. Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say.
I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
“I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can,” he told the Republican Party faithful gathered in St. Paul, Minn. “My opponent will raise them.”
That argument is repeated in various McCain-sponsored ads that attack Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s tax plan, including statements that Obama backs “painful tax increases on working American families” and that Obama and the Democrats are “ready to tax, ready to spend.”
But a nonpartisan analysis of McCain’s and Obama’s tax proposals show that McCain is simply repeating a lie over and over. Obama will not raise taxes on the middle class and working families, as McCain alleges. But he will raise taxes on the wealthy.
According to the GOP, lower-middle-class voters with minimal educations really like it when people who thinkk they can run the most powerful nation on the planet and steer massive military juggernauts and immense economies and affect the destinies of millions, don't actually speak like they have any idea how the hell to do it. Honey, if the Bush years proved anything, it's that the dumber you sound, the more effective you are at leading the country. Into the sewer. Did you know this already? Typical elitist.
I realized three things tonight. For one, if you are a McCain/Palin/Bush voter, you and I do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in brain power. Two, she really is as ignorant as I feared. And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to "first wipe off Palin's tranny makeup." I married well.)
Today's Quote:
"There are no stupid questions, only stupid people."
America is no longer the home of the free and the brave. It's now the home of cowards who have surrendered their freedom to fascists offering vague promises of "homeland security."
GOP's only strategy, since they can't win on the issues
