The Base, Debased

Dana Milbank provides an up-close-and-personal look at Palin-McCain supporters:

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Palin’s hatespeech doesn’t always work:

The angry GOP vice presidential nominee even found a way to blame the market decline on the yet-to-be-enacted tax policies of the yet-to-be-elected Obama.

“If you turn on the news tonight when you get home, you’re gonna see that, yah, this is another woeful day in the market, and the other side just doesn’t understand — no!” she said at an afternoon fundraiser at the home of mutual fund giant Jack Donahue. “Especially in a time like this, you don’t propose to increase taxes. The phoniest claim in a campaign that’s full of them is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes.”

Of course, Obama never promised to cut taxes for people at $10,000-a-plate lunches in air-conditioned tents on waterfront compounds. And the crowd — among them New York Jets owner Woody Johnson — reacted without applause to Palin’s Joe Six-Pack lines. After they didn’t strike up the usual “Drill, baby, drill” or “USA” chants, Palin, rattled, read hurriedly through the rest of her speech.

Josh Marshall reports Palin-McCain rally attendees yelling “terrorist!” and “kill him!” at mention of Obama’s name, “though it’s not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn’t seem to matter.”

“These are dangerous and sick people, McCain and Palin,” Josh says. Yes. As are the mobs who support them.

13 thoughts on “The Base, Debased

  1. I’m not sure if Obama can get the focus of tonite’s debate on economic policy, given McCain’s intent to keep up an attack on the Democrat’s personality and character, but it is certainly the issue that ought to be discussed. I say that as I contemplate the almost $13,000 my retirement fund went down last quarter (I’m trying to get it moved to insured savings today) and figure I’m only one of millions of Americans who are realizing the mess we’re in.

    After hearing McCain’s claims yesterday that Obama was “lying” when he called the Republican a Deregulator (the thing he built most of his political career on), I started researching the past 25 years and found enough evidence to pinpoint the real liar.

    Arthur Blaustein wrote a long article in Truthdig yesterday on the problems with Republican economic theories. He summed up McCain as follows:

    Claims of being a maverick aside, McCain has emerged as nothing more than a supply-sider in the mold of George W. and Reagan. Since George W. took office, corporate profits have soared, while workers’ wages and benefits have been flat. That shows just who is the object of Bush’s conservative compassion. The Bush administration, supported by Republicans on Capitol Hill, pushed through a sweeping tax cut in 2001, under which the wealthiest one percent of Americans reaped 43 percent of the gain. In less than a year and a half, the federal government’s 10-year projected budget surplus of $1.6 trillion had vanished. In 2000, we had a surplus of $236 billion. In 2004, we had a deficit of $413 billion. This dramatic reversal is the direct consequence of Bush’s tax cuts. Since then, the Bush/McCain answer for the nation’s economic woes has been deregulation and more tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, who by no coincidence contribute heavily to the McCain campaign. It’s “trickle-down” economics with a vengeance.

    The history of Democrats and Republicans as to who has had the most positive effect on the economy is pretty clear. As Blaustein notes:


    Which president produced:

    1. The highest growth in the gross domestic product?
    2. The highest growth in jobs?
    3. The biggest increase in personal disposable income after taxes?
    4. The highest growth in industrial production?
    5. The highest growth in hourly wages?
    6. The lowest Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment)?
    7. The lowest inflation?
    8. The largest reduction in the deficit?

    The answers: 1. Harry Truman, 2. Bill Clinton, 3. Lyndon Johnson, 4. John F. Kennedy, 5. Johnson, 6. Truman, 7. Truman, 8. Clinton. In the Economic Sweepstakes, Democratic presidents trounce Republicans eight times out of eight!

    Pretty impressive! (And I didn’t notice the “great” Reagan anywhere in the list.)
    ____Article continues at:
    Under The LobsterScope

  2. We can only hope that McCain/Palin keeps growing whackier (to be charitable), so Joe Six Pack sees the danger in another Republican administration of ego-driven maniacs.

    Slightly OT, but the pessimist in me can’t help wondering what fresh BS we’ll see as the Bush administration scurries to cover its tracks and get out of town. Interesting times, indeed…

  3. “Sit down, boy”…”attendees yelling “terrorist!” and “kill him!” at mention of Obama’s name” That stuff is making it way around the world today. The brazilians will take special note as well as all those spanish speaking brown people. The top folks in China might let the general chinese public in on the scoop. The muslim world…I dare not guess how that plays there. Does it give Maliki a reason to put off negotiations for a few days??? Africa, what the Kenyans did yesterday to the Obama hate book writter may be the start of something very ugly. If mccain/palin keep it up…its bridge buring on a global scale.

  4. 2 jerri, it will be just like it is here. Anyone that wants to use something like that as leverage in their favor will, and anyone that knows anything about America will know their are people like that, and many more people not like that. I work with people from all over the world and we have all seen people do great things and not so great things.

  5. Lord, have I despised Joe Klein in my day… but not today. From his current post for Time, entitled “Embarracuda”:

    It is appropriate that the prime vessel for this assault is Sarah Palin, whose very presence on a national ticket is an insult to your intelligence. She now has “credibility,” we are told, because she managed to read talking points off notecards in the debate last week with unwitting enthusiasm.

    If you all have time, please read the whole thing. It will go a little way, at least, to restoring your faith in American political discourse.

    http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/10/embarracuda.html

    HuffPo also has a lot up about how the hate campaign is only hastening McCain’s slide into the coal cellar.

  6. Hatred does a bang-up job of shutting down human thought processes, exactly what Palin/McCain intend to happen.

    Bush is a member in very good standing judging by what he’s accomplished during his reign of an American dynasty called Bush – an economic dynasty tied to finance, oil, the military-industrial complex. Electing McCain will merely result in seating a dynasty called McCain.

  7. One of the most frightening things I saw at the Palin/Biden debate came at the end, when Sarah looked directly into the camera and with sheer 100% certitude she spoke about the Goodness of America, and by extension the Goodness of her cause. Bush was the same way, incapable of seeing the evil in his own heart. So was Adolf Hitler.

    This is the pathology of the right, they cannot see their own evil. It’s affirmed by the we-versus-them religious beliefs these people hold, which are infantile versions of what figures such as Jesus Christ actually taught.

  8. moonbat, I don’t see pathology in sarah…she is an actress. The tight clothes, fake accent, and obvious ability to do and say whatever she is told…its a talent. For me there is no sole in that woman. She possesses the stupid wingnuts have so successfully relabled evil.

  9. jerri – 9 – I was wondering about that, does she really believe the stuff she is saying? There’s no doubt that she’s a good actress, even if her act is repulsive to many. But it’s the ability to subordinate her conscience – in other words, the inability to acknowledge her own evil – that enables her to put on the act.

    Found somewhere on another site, McCain/Palin = Johnny Drama and Bible Spice. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  10. Check this out, from HuffPo:

    The Secret Service is following up on media reports today that someone in the crowd at a McCain/Palin event suggested killing Barack Obama, according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley…. Wiley says the Secret Service did not begin looking into the matter until press reports, namely Dana Milbank’s article in the Washington Post, surfaced today, because no agents at the event heard anything. “The Secret Service did not hear any threatening statements directed at targets under its protection and no threatening statements were reported to us by law enforcement or citizens at the event,” Wiley told Radar.

    Apparently selective deafness is required to enlist in the U.S. Secret Service. Time to take out those earpieces, kids, and do your frickin jobs.

    And as for “law enforcement,” hell, a local police chief was on the stage as a speaker, when Palin was rousing the rabble.

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