For John McCain:
As voters have gotten to know Senator Barack Obama, they have warmed up to him, with more than half, 53 percent, now saying they have a favorable impression of him and 33 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. But as voters have gotten to know Senator John McCain, they have not warmed, with only 36 percent of voters saying they view him favorably while 45 percent view him unfavorably.
I think a heavy dose of Rev. Wright should fix that, boys. And before anyone blames the Obama campaign for their “negative attacks,” there is a difference between character attack ads and issue attack ads. A reminder who is doing what:
It’s not so much that McCain’s campaign has been purposefully sleazy as they’ve been meanderingly, pointlessly sleazy. It’s the “fuck it, whatever” guide to Republican politics, with no particular focus except putting anything out there to win a daily news cycle. Obama was a conspirator in voter fraud for a weekend, a terrorist for about three days, until he was a socialist because some plumber in Ohio said so. Before that he was a celebrity and presumptuous, a race-baiter, a shady community organizer, sexist, inexperienced, a baby killer, a sex predator and a dozen other things. You wonder why McCain/Palin supporters feel like they can go to rallies and talk about Obama being a Jew-bought Islamic radical cokehead forced abortionist communist? Because it’s the standard that the campaign’s set by having ridiculously drawn out public conversations designed to draw full attention to the charges while laboring under the pretense that they’re “debating” over using the smear.
The entire McCain campaign has been a bad joke.
Colonel Danite
You mean good news for McCain, right? After all, hasn’t McCain been running around saying that he has Obama right where he wants him?
By the way, why did you choose to ignore the real good news for McCain? He apparently has the toddler vote all but rapped up. McCain closes gap with tots
Comrade Jake
Sorry for the hijack Cole, but this post from Sully is really worth a read. A former hedge-fund manager wrote a Jerry-Maguire-esque letter to the world, in which he tells people that marijuana isn’t such a bad thing.
He also slams the idiots who went to the best schools on their parents’ money, and were stupid enough to take his trades. Truly, it’s a thing of beauty.
Charity
Off-topic, but my husband just hipped me to this in the American Conservative magazine: psychotherapist wonders if McCain’s famous temperament is a result of brain injury and PTSD.
Ted
other post broken.
Punchy
I find it amazing that McCain’s new strategy is to flip/win PA. In two weeks, turn a dub dig deffy into a red state. Either he’s delusional, or he knows about something the rest of us wish we did. Something doesn’t smell right.
eyeball
McCain’s campaign boils down to this:
Scary reasons not to vote for Obama.
Imagine this in a voting booth … 2 names:
Obama – seems to want to make the world better
McCain – says the other guys sucks.
on a more cynical level — pretty clever of obama to counter the GOP’s coming Rev. Wright weekend by visiting his sick WHITE GRANDMA.
Eric U.
Obama didn’t win the primary in Pa because people here remember the Clinton era as being good for them economically. They are going to take Obama over McCain for this reason. I think the republicans are misreading the Democratic Primary totally wrong. Biggest mistake being Palin, but coming to Pennsylvania is a big mistake too.
Napoleon
While I am sure spending 5 1/2 years in a prision camp is not good for anyones mental state I am pretty sure that I read stories that McCain exhibited that kind of temperament from his child hood.
Atanarjuat
This is a no-brainer, lefties.
The reason why all these issues raised by Senator John McCain appear to be so disjointed and incoherent is because the liberal media is completely in the tank for Nobama.
The jaw-flapping pundits on TV feverishly deride every valid concern brought forth by John McCain and Sarah Palin, yet approvingly clap like circus seals any time your cargo cult leader and heir apparent to Jim Jones, Nobama, picks his nose.
The newspapers and magazines are no better, in which they give short thrift to legitimate reports of liberal voter fraud scam via ACORN, all the while penning glowing essays that heap praise on the smug Chicago Machine socialist who doesn’t even bother to hide his wealth redistribution Ponzi schemes.
Indeed, if the liberal media were any more in the tank for Nobama, they’d have to wear snorkels or even SCUBA gear.
Country First.
MattF
Not the Bush/Rove "Yeah, we’re slime, but we’re competent slime".
There has never been any evidence that McCain knows how to run a political campaign– McCain was crushed by Bush/Rove in 2000. Obama has shown how to beat a smear campaign, but this sort of basic political ability has been absent from the current McCain campaign.
jvill
Atanarjuat, I see we’ve moved on to the "it’s the media’s fault" meme for the week.
Thank you for cleverly proving John Cole’s point in the original post.
Unless you’re a secret double agent troll, in which case… Very nicely done…
Cassidy
@ atanarjuat
Don’t blow your wad so early. A talking point here, a talking point there…. Now you’ve gone and expended all rounds before the fire mission was called.
Josh Hueco
@Atanarjuat:
I definitely call spoof. That’s too close to wetsuits to be legit.
Napoleon
I would guess they think that they have a larger percentage of the population of the state that could be scared into not voting for a black person. You can see that is their stratagy just from their ad buys here in Ohio. I grew up near Youngtown Ohio (on the PA border) which is traditionally one of the most democratic cities in the state. But it also is blue collar, eastern european (with appalatians tossed in), catholic and definately have a streak of not being real friendly to blacks (think Mayor Daley or Boston under, if I recall corrrectly, Kevin White). About a month ago or so I saw a city by city breakdown of McCain’s ad buys and Youngtown was one of his heaviest ad buy markets in the nation. If you didn’t know any better you would think that one of the only 6 counties in the state (out of 88) to vote for Mondale against Reagan (2 other counties were Clev and Toledo and 3 rural mining counties on the river practically in WV) and has been represented in Congress by a Dem all but 6 years since 1932 you would think the buys were insane, until you consider the African American factor.
I think that is what they are banking on with PA. They think demographically there "scary negro" stratagy will not fly in Colo, but it may just in PA.
Cassidy
@ Josh
He’s pretty good, though.
demimondian
You’re assuming that McCain’s campaign is both grounded in reality. I’m not sure of that.
I think his campaign is off in the bubble, at this point. For what it’s worth, I imagine that Obama’s is, too — but the bubble of self-serving delusion is close enough to the eventual reality (that is, that Obama actually is going to win) that nobody cares about the internal distortions. As a result, I think that McCain and his advisors have reached the point that they are saying "in order to win, we need to win PA. Since we know we’re going to win, it must be that we will flip PA, double digit deficit or no." Ironically, the syllogism is completely logically sound — but logic is the ultimate GIGO machine.
If they didn’t have complete faith in their ultimate victory, they’d be pursing a two-track strategy — pushing their own envelope, while also spending a lot of money on robocalls and radio attacking down-ticket Dems. That would be better for the Republican party, as it would tend to back stop the bleeding in the periphery of the party’s base region, and it would probably be better for McCain and Palin, both of whom would like to have future’s in national politics.
Colonel Danite
@ eyeball
I’m sure the wingnuts are already preparing talking points about how Mrs. Dunham has arranged for her own demise in order to help her grandson win the election.
demimondian
@Josh Hueco: Yes, our Inuit annoyance is a spoof troll. If you look through the archives, you can even narrow the possibilities down to a very small number of us. (No, he’s not me; he doesn’t have my tell. He’s also not TZ.)
And, yes, Cassidy, he’s *very* good.
The Other Steve
Ken Adelman endorses Barack Obama
Walker
This is a brilliant mixed metaphor. Either that, or our new troll has no idea what the word cargo cult means.
demimondian
No, no, no. They know that she didn’t arrange her own demise.
The truth is that Obama’s Muslim animist witch-doctors have been storing the life force of millions of aborted fetuses for years, though, and they (cruelly) used that to keep her breathing long enough that they could then poison her this weekend in order to give Obama a boost. Even better, they kept her alive long enough to cast a vote for him before she died.
Comrade Jake
Anyone catch the McCain interview with CBS this AM? TPM has a clip. I love that he keeps getting asked about the robocalls, and now how even Sarah Palin disagrees with them. The clip is full of win.
Comrade Some Guy Named Mattski
@Atanarjuat: I can appreciate a good troll/spoof. On a Troll/Spoof Scale of 1-10, where 10 is the best your trolling rates right below fucking horrible. Go practice somewhere else and come back when you are better at it. You’ll be much more amusing then.
The Other Steve
To future spoofers. If you want to play the game, you’re really going to need a website to back it up. Really I suggest looking at Brick Oven’s work. Not only does it sound crazy and disjointed, he’s got a website with a whole year of content to back it up and support it. He really gives an air of being authenticatlly crazy.
Could be his mother dropped him as a baby.
SGEW
Bingo. I’ve made calls to a hell of a lot of "Red" states during the last few months (CO, WV, SC, TX even) and have also spent a lot of man-hours calling and canvassing Western PA. The racism and xenophobic fears there surpass anything I’ve seen anywhere else. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent more time in total interfacing with PA, or if people are somehow more comfortable opening up to me with their racist fears face-to-face (I am "ethnic," but not "black"), but my personal impression is that the fears and smears have real resonance amongst the Western PA white population.
Not enough to tip the state, as far as we can tell*, but I bet McCain’s internal polling shows that PA is responding more positively to the negative attacks than other states.
Also:
Well, yeah. And now McCain has hired the Bush/Rove team.
*Still lots o’ work to be done! Call PA! Canvass there, if you’re in traveling distance. It’s great early fall weather there too.
Cassidy
@Mattski
You’re missing the subtle brilliance. The coherent thoughts, multiple metaphors, etc.
dmsilev
No, that’s not it either. The fact of the matter is that Obama’s grandmother *was* fine, but he cruelly poisoned her with a slow dose of something timed to do her in just 7 days before Election Day. The sympathy vote of "his grandmother just died" will put him over the top. That was the real purpose of his Hawaiian "vacation" over the summer. Well, that and touching up the details on his "birth certificate", of course.
The scary thing is that I’m sure some people on Free Republic have *already* posited this as an actual theory.
-dms
Blue Raven
Atanarjuat, thank you for the giggle to start my day. You’re even better here than you are on FARK. Must be the different standards.
Poopyman
Only in America could a scary Negro have a Rebbin’ Wright problem and be a "Muslin" at the same time.
God, I love my country.
Atanarjuat
Hey, Comrade Mattski, I’d tell you to go f@ck yourself with a rusty girder, but given the San Francisco values of the Ayers-approving left, you’d swooningly think I was coming on to you. In your dreams, parasite.
Meanwhile, I see none of you cowardly traitors bothered to address my point with regard to the in-the-tank-for-Obama liberal media. The reason is fairly obvious: inexorable truth simply can’t be denied.
But keep prancing limp-wristedly about trolls and spoofs, lefties. Your sundry collection of drooling japes is no substitute for cogent thought or well-reasoned rebuttal.
Country First.
The Moar You Know
@Atanarjuat:
That last post of yours was pretty fucking stupid. Now I know who you are.
bago
That’s because Biden is puttin them in the tank.
Svensker
But then they’d be Republicans.
AkaDad
Why are Liberals always bashing pro-America patriots like Atanarjuat? Just because he lives in a real state, it doesn’t make him a spoof.
I bet you all think I’m a spoof too.
bedlam UK
This sites comments are getting harder and harder to read.
Is AkaDad being sarky?
Is Atanarjuat being snarky?
I got that NoIq was being Trolly
And yesterday we had Quantum Physics.
My brain hurts. I’m feeling all American.
Comrade Some Guy Named Mattski
@Cassidy:
I stand corrected, the quality of the trolling\spoof is a little better then i originally thought. But it was such an akward start for Atanarjuat. A good troll should always start out as almost believable before going full crazy. You get to suck more people in that way.
I’ve now critiquing trolls. Maybe it’s time for me to go out and make some new real friends.
tavella
My guess is: hold down the vote in the cities by every means necessary. Challenge every vote, try to jam the system so as to make those 3am Ohio lines in 2004 look mild. Combine with scaring the shit out of the Alabama part of Pennsylvania and rolling them out to the polls.
It’s going to be ugly. Hopefully the Obama campaign can see this as clearly as I can and is planning to have an army of lawyers and pollwatchers.
Soylent Green
Agreed, it’s hard to tell if it’s real or spoof, which is the point. But his shtick is getting kind of boring. The prose is peerless but its content limited, just random talking points generation and snide rejoinders wrapped in wingtard speak. Can’t you come up with something more original?
Jess
I notice he’s recycling himself as well–a lot of those phrases have been used in previous threads. As spoofing goes, I’d say high marks for entertainment value, but not ultimately not convincing. Good start, but needs new material.
Atanarjuat
Hey, Soylent Green and Jess, don’t you True Believers have anything positive to say about Rasputin… er, I mean, Nobama?
Since you guys are so absolutely in the tank for the currently Hawaii-surfing dude, you should have a few platitudes you’d like to share that don’t involve "I hate McCain" or "go home Caribou Barbie," right?
Rating alleged trolls and supposed spoofs is what’s really the coma-inducing boring shtick. Just a word to the (hopefully) wise.
Country First.
Soylent Green
I’ll give you this, Atan, you do stay on your game, and you do get other people to bite. So enjoy your run here at BJ’s Laugh Shack, you’ll be here all week, tip your waitress….
Atanarjuat
My shift is over.
Atanarjuat
Operator #34582
Republican Troll Center #3
Bangalore, India