Over the past couple of days, there’s been a good bit of attention towards the change in tone of the presidential campaign, more specifically, the McCain campaign. “McCain Denounces Pitchfork-Wavers”, announces the Time Magazine blog. And “Obama Thanks McCain for Admonishing Reporters”.

The incident in question is a campaign rally in which McCain told his supporters to “be respectful” of Obama, reassuring one man that Obama is nothing to be “afraid” of, and correcting one woman who described Obama as an “Arab.” The shift is being described as the McCain campaign’s backing off from fear-mongering and personal attacks; even Palin has been reined in and is now just calling Obama a baby-killer. Even the most cynical sources are describing it as a good gesture, but performed too late; “McCain Tries to Tame Flames He Earlier Fanned.” My reaction was the same, “thank God; maybe we’re pulling back from the brink, although they shouldn’t have taken it that far in the first place.” (Once again: this is the campaign that compared their opponent to the Antichrist).

So I was surprised that of all the reports on the rally I’ve seen, only one article, in the New York Times mentions this:

But moments later, Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, renewed his attacks on Mr. Obama for his association with the 1960s radical William Ayers and told the crowd, “Mr. Obama’s political career was launched in Mr. Ayers’ living room.”

Which is odd, because the supposed “connection” to Ayers was already beaten out and invalidated long ago, and the only value it had to the Republican side of the campaign was that they could call Ayers a “terrorist.” Take advantage of the fact that people don’t read past headlines, and you can link “terrorist” and “Muslim” with your “Country First!” slogan, and plant the idea that the first step of Obama’s administration would be to bomb the Pentagon.

I want to believe that McCain’s admonishing the crowd was sincere, if only for this reason: when a woman said “He’s an Arab,” McCain replied with, “No, no ma’am, he’s a good man. A family man.” A gaffe like that would never be pre-scripted. That would indicate it was a case of the old McCain — excuse me, the earlier McCain, the one who said he wouldn’t allow a smear campaign — reasserting himself after seeing first-hand the depths his campaign had reached.

That’s the best case scenario, and it’s still not good. Because it indicates it’s not his campaign, assuming it ever was. He’s trying the underhanded guilt-by-association tactics of Joseph McCarthy, and the say-whatever-I’m-told-to-say tactics of Charlie McCarthy. When Palin goes on the offensive with whatever crap she’s expected to dredge up, you have to feel a little bit of sympathy for her, because she’s an idiot. (I so wanted to believe that she was more than the vapid moron the press was making her out to be, and she repeatedly proved me wrong). A senator with McCain’s experience shouldn’t be parroting back whatever the party tells him to say.

The worse case would be that it’s completely insincere, just another tactic to convince undecided voters that they’re not evil, even as they’ve got their hand in the Big Cookie Jar of Evil, grabbing another Evil Cookie after we’ve already told them not to spoil their Evil Dinner.

I suppose the only thing worse than that would be that they’re completely sincere, and they really believe there’s something to the Ayers connection, and it’s not just code language for “Guys, he’s black and his middle name is Hussein! Are you blind?!?”

Holy crap, that’s the scariest thing of all. What if they really do believe everything that they’re saying? Their catch phrase is “Who is Barack Obama?” What if that’s not just an attempt at McCarthy-esque fear-mongering, but they really don’t know?

I’d feel better if they were just plain evil, than that stupid. “Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice.” Luckily, there’s a lot more evidence of evil: in that New York Times article, McCain’s campaign manager and aides once again reveal themselves to be The Worst Living Americans. John McCain is at his core an honorable man, and it’d be hypocrisy to demonize him just as the GOP has tried to demonize all opposition for years. But seriously, I want to do everything I can to make this an internet meme: Rick Davis and Nicolle Wallace are The Worst Living Americans. They are irredeemably evil, and they should never be allowed to work on anything ever again.

Great video from The Jed Report blog, where Obama predicts the McCain/Palin smear campaign.

It’s downright calming if you’re like me, and you’ve been watching both the far-left and far-right get increasingly hysterical, and getting worried that we’ll never be able to climb our way out of this nonsense.

(Link from David Eggers, no, not that one).

The worst thing about you liberals (if I have to pick just one) is the way you’re commandeering our language. With your political correctness, you appropriate words to suit your own political purpose, instead of just saying what they really mean. What happened to using words as they’re supposed to be used, instead of trying to redefine them? Good, solid, American words: Patriot. Maverick. Eltist. Liberal. Madrassa. Folks. Nuclear. Pakistan.

Now there’s all this hullaballoo about John McCain calling Barack Obama “that one” during the presidential debate. What is with you people, thinking that there was something dismissive or disrespectful about that? McCain was just straight-talking, telling it like it is. There were like a million people in that room, and he had to make sure you knew he was talking about Senator Obama, and not one of the other candidates for President.

This is yet another example of the Democrat party running “the fussiest campaign in American history”. In a moment of national crisis, where the economy is on the minds [sic] of every single person, the liberals are trying to make this a campaign about race.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are focused on one thing and one thing only: making this the most specific presidential race possible.

Instead of tackling the issues, the liberals are taking quotes out of context, mocking people’s religious beliefs, and trying to manipulate language.

The Republican Party is having none of that. No vague fear, no uncertainty, no mistrust; just hard, straight, and brutally specific talk. They’re not campaigning against any Barack Obama, it’s Barack Hussein Obama. That’s the kind of honesty, integrity, and specificity I can believe in.

So what if John McCain called a three-million dollar planetarium projector an “overhead projector.” The man’s 72 years old! He’s still getting used to not calling the TV remote a “clicker” and CDs “tapes.” If you liberals are mocking him for his age, your hearts must be as cold as my icebox. How dishonorable. Everybody knew what he was really saying.

(P.S. Sometimes I look back on stuff I’ve written on this blog and just laugh at how naive I was. “Finally an American presidential race that isn’t racist or sexist!” What a dumb-ass!)

According to a report from Reuters (bolding mine):

“There is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now,” Palin told thousands of supporters at a rally in a sports arena in Carson, California.

Earlier at a fundraiser in Englewood, Colorado, she departed from her usual speech to question Obama’s character.

“Our opponent though is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” Palin said of Obama, also calling him an embarrassment.

Palin cited a New York Times story on Saturday that examined Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam War-era militant Weather Underground organization who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Times concluded they were not close.

I’m now deeply regretting what I said earlier about Palin’s not being an idiot.

She should’ve stuck with the stereotype of the backwoods former newscaster who got in way over her head. Since the GOP is betraying its own supporters, rotting out the core of its platform in favor of Fox News-worthy talking points, you could feel some small degree of sympathy for her getting swept into that betrayal. And getting turned into a hot by horny conservative standards* mannequin parroting back the inflammatory nonsense the party orders her to.

But you have to be a special kind of idiot to be spreading crap like that. If she is actually “departing” from her usual speech, then she’s an idiot for believing that will fly. And if she’s not, but merely tossing in another attempt at muckraking her GOP handlers have given her to say, then she’s an idiot for not saying “I’m enough of a maverick to rattle off your prepared statements when they’re vague meaningless sound bites and empty promises, but not when it’s perpetuating a baseless smear, bless your hearts.”

This is the material of cowardly forwarded e-mails filled with the kind of stuff the GOP wants you to think, but they’re not allowed to say out loud. (“Hasn’t everyone noticed how he’s black? And his middle name is Hussein? How can we possibly be losing?!? Put our redneck uncertainty staff on full alert: give us everything you can to link him with Muslim extremists, stat!”) When somebody forwards you one of those e-mails, it’s kind of hard to get too angry, because they’re just gullible saps who’ve been horribly manipulated. But the person who writes the e-mail in the first place deserves your full scorn.

I think Governor Palin was better off just being an embarrassment.

* When considering the concept of “hot by horny conservative standards,” you have to remember that the desiccated husk that is Ann Coulter got all the attention she has by marketing herself as a “hot conservative,” and mysteriously, it worked.

I had to watch the repeat of the Vice-Presidential debate tonight, which means I got to see all the people a-twittering about it first. Based on what I was reading, I expected something very different from what I saw.

But then, I’m about as politically ignorant as you can get. (Without using the word “repug” or spitting out complaints about “liberals” like it were a dirty word, of course). My vote in the 2008 election was already decided back in 2000, so the only reason I’ve been following the election at all is to make sure neither Obama or Biden is exposed as a baby cannibal (and even then, I’d want to get more details on the baby and its tastiness before I rush to judgement). I’m ignorant partly out of laziness; partly out of a misplaced optimism about the “representative” part of “representative democracy;” and partly because whenever I watch unprocessed “news” I get the urge to punch, kick, and stab things, and it doesn’t go away until I change the channel to cartoons.

So I was surprised to see anything other than the images the headlines and pundits have been creating for me over the past month: Palin didn’t trip over herself or start babbling completely incoherently or pull out a gun and shoot a moose, skin it, and make a rape kit out of it. And Biden didn’t plagiarize someone else’s speech (I’ve still got residual punditry from the last few campaigns running around in my brain), yell at her for being an idiot, or pull out his gun and threaten to shoot Obama if he tried to take it away. Instead what we got were two reasonably well-spoken adults going on television in front of millions of people and delivering their parties’ talking points.

That’s not to say that it was “close.” There was only one person in the debate who proved himself qualified to be Vice President, much less President. If I were Biden, I’d have been insulted at even the implication it was a contest — my estimation of the man went up 100 times, if only because he never stopped and said, “Seriously? I’m supposed to be responding to that?” But he wisely chose to take the situation for what it was: simply another opportunity to campaign for Obama. The only ones who could consider it “close” are those who’ve become so cynical and numb to the political process that they’re simply analyzing the analysis with their responsometers, abandoning any pretense of actual government and simply paying attention to marketability and watchability, like the crassest of TV executives.
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We’re now two and a half months into the End Times, and of course here I am, still writing “Living in a Righteous and Just Society” on my checks. As I’m sure you’re all aware, what’s brought about Imminent Rapture is the California Supreme Court ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

Of course, San Francisco made a big hoo-ha about it, trotting out their first married “couple” in an act of political showboating and promoting the gay agenda — nothing epitomizes the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle like two women in their late 80s.

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of a ballot initiative that will allow California residents to vote on the legality of these so-called “marriages.” And I say November can’t come soon enough. It’s not that I’ve got anything personal against these “couples;” I just think that the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds. If we have judges taking it upon themselves to interpret laws, what’s next? People having sex on the streets with dogs and shoe trees, that’s what. Last I checked, we live in a democracy. And who better to make life-altering decisions about individual couples than thousands of strangers living hundreds of miles away?

As a concerned citizen, I’m doing my part to get ready for the November vote. I’ve already decided on a bunch of “marriages” I’m going to vote against:

1. First is the Coens, who live in the condo behind my building. Nice enough people, but you know, Jewish. Marriage is a religious institution, after all, and that means Christian ceremonies where we have enough sense not to waste a perfectly good glass by stepping on it.
2. Then there’s that couple who just moved in down the street. They’re Pakistani or Iraqi or Indian or something with some name I can’t pronounce, and of course you know what that means. “One Nation Under Allah?” I don’t think so.
3. The McAllisters are a tough call, since they’re a really nice couple. Unfortunately, one or the other of them is infertile — I never could find out which. Marriage is about procreation and raising children, and it has been for millennia. We can’t go changing the basic definitions of words just because a couple of people claim to be “in love.”
4. Jessica Alba and that dude she married, because we all know she can do better, am I right, guys?
5. Then there’s the Brown “family.” Peter, Sarah, and their daughter Julie, but there’s a problem: it’s their first marriage. And we all know it wasn’t “Adam and Eve,” it was “Adam and Lillith, then Eve.” I just feel sorry for the children.

And that’s just to start. It’s not going to be easy to make decisions for millions of people, but it’s our duty as Americans to decide these things. Not to leave it up to the couples themselves, and definitely not to put it in the hands of some “judges” who were “trained” to “interpret” the “law” on a “rational basis.”

Update: I’ve just been informed over e-mail that the November ballot initiative won’t let us vote against all marriages, just same-sex marriages. That doesn’t seem fair at all! How am I supposed to make decisions about the lives of people who don’t share all of my personal beliefs?

[Via John Scalzi's blog]

I admit I’ve been out of the loop, politically, for the last 36 years or so, but were y’all aware that two of the three people most likely to be the next President are not white men?

Even with all the time since the Democratic primary to let it sink in, I’m still finding myself pleasantly surprised by that fact. For the most part, in the most mainstream media that I’ve been exposed to, it’s been treated as a non-issue. Sure, I’ve heard cracks about Clinton’s getting weepy at press conferences, and that’s not cool; and there’s the whole bit about Obama’s name, also not cool; and then the allegations that a vote for Hillary Clinton is really just a vote for Bill Clinton, which is insulting, but not much more insulting than the comparisons made between George W and George HW Bush. (And look how well that turned out!)

I’m sure there are pundits I don’t pay attention to who are getting lots of mileage out of people’s racial and gender insecurities. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the big news outlets have a full-time staff who tries to come up with tactful ways to discuss the “Holy crap are we really ready for this?!?” question. But for the most part, the election has concentrated on the issues and kept the surface stuff to a minimum. It’s not a non-issue, but I can still remember the Mondale/Ferraro ticket, and how people just would not shut up about how bizarre it was to have a woman running for vice-president.

So just as the country is having a moment, who should come in but Edward McClelland of Salon.com, to tell us that we should all be ashamed of ourselves for not being liberal enough. Men are split between McCain and Obama. The only reason to oppose Clinton, apparently, is misogyny. We have such a deep-seated unease at the idea of having a woman in a position of authority, that we’re willing to do the unthinkable — vote for a black man, or worse, a Republican! — to avoid it.

One of the facts he uses to make his point:

Antonio Campbell, a 42-year-old political science professor at Towson University in Maryland, saw the gender gap in his own classroom: Most of his female students backed Clinton, while his male students split between Obama and McCain.

McClelland’s take-away from that is that guys are overly averse to voting for a woman. I have to wonder why the conclusion isn’t that women are overly inclined to vote for another woman. From the results of the Maryland primaries, I’d expect “most” of his female students to back Obama; he won 60% of the Democratic vote in a predominantly Democratic state, where a significant majority of the Democratic voters were female.

Are we supposed to be taking the Michael Moore approach to this election, and saying that anyone who’s not a Rich White Male is automatically a good candidate? Am I supposed to applaud, for instance, Tina Fey’s endorsement of Clinton, which as far as I can tell is based solely on how empowering it would be to have a woman President? Or are we really going for votes not based on race or gender, but on issues and facts?

Like, for instance, the fact that Hillary Clinton freaks my shit out. I can honestly say that it doesn’t matter one bit to me that Clinton is a woman, and it only matters slightly more that she’s married to my favorite President of my lifetime. What matters to me is that she strikes me as a vapid career politician. I don’t trust her to take a genuine stand on any of the issues, without caving to political pressure. And I don’t trust that her administration would be anything other than More of the Same, but this time pandering to the slightly-left-of-center instead of the far Right.

McClelland claims that the aversion to Clinton as President is as shallow as the “beer buddy” mentality that got Bush elected over Gore. I say that it’s a memory of the worst aspects of the previous Clinton administration, but without Bill Clinton’s charisma to smooth everything over and make everybody feel better about caving to an opposing Congress. Sure, it’s still politically ignorant, personality-based voting, but it’s not gender-based.

And although it gets muddled in the midst of Lethal Weapon references and calling Obama “your hip black friend,” McClelland’s main point boils down to this: don’t be so afraid of a woman President that you’d be willing to switch parties just to avoid it. Fair enough; as charming and personable as McCain is on “The Daily Show,” his ideology isn’t something I can support. Just don’t assume that the reason I’m tempted is fear of a woman President. It’s just a fear of that particular woman as President.

The two big stories on Yahoo news today:

The Chinese executive in charge of a company that distributed lead-tainted toys to the US has killed himself.

Whereas Karl Rove just resigned.

Just sayin’.