Ashley Todd, the McCain volunteer who falsely claimed she’d been attacked because of her McCain bumper sticker, probably is a troubled young woman trying to get attention. What’s more pathetic is the way so many on the Right seized her story either as proof of the depravity of Obama supporters or vindication of their hatred of the Left.
To their credit, some rightie bloggers suspected the hoax from the beginning, and today the ones who were fooled are printing retractions. But what’s most pathetic is that the McCain campaign itself seemed poised to make Ashley Todd into a campaign icon, Ã la Joe the Plumber. Ashley the Victim?
McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director dressed Ashley’s story up even more to feed to the press. The same communications director said that Sarah Palin called Ashley. The national campaign took interest. Then it all went poof.
We’re going through the same poor-little-victimized-Right nonsense we went through in 2004. There are overheated jerks on both sides who have gone out of bounds. In Rightieworld, however, only righties are victims. When McCain supporters cross a line, by definition it’s “just a prank.”
This may sound hard-hearted, but I’m not buying the “history of mental problems” excuse.
The hoax began to fall apart last night, when those wonderful, nosey bloggers (doing the work the MSM should do but won’t), tracked Ashley Todd’s rather sizeable Internet footprint. If you check out her presence on MySpace and YouTube, you’ll find clear signs of how she thinks: telling lies is cool; black men are scary.
Shortly before the alleged time of the mugging, she left time-coded Twitter messages describing, step-by-step, how she was “Stubbornly looking for my bank’s ATM so I won’t get charged fees…. Whoopsie, I seem to have wandered into the wrong part of town,” etc. She didn’t merely black out and scratch a “B” on her face in a mirror, like she’s now telling police; she also painted on a fake black eye. She invented a detailed scenario for the mugging, and stuck by it until she was exposed by those pesky blogger kids.
Ashley Todd is no more “mentally ill” than Sarah Palin, imo. At least Ashley is spending tonight in jail.
I didn’t say she was psychotic; it sounds more like plain old emotional neediness.
Ashley the Victim and Joe the Plumber have at least one thing in common: they are both hoaxes.
The real Joe, not the fictional character now a key member of the campaign, was NEVER going to be hurt by the Obama tax plan, except in some anti-Democratic fever dream he had. He’s even admitted he would benefit from Obama’s plan.
The McCain campaign is now down to hoping that they can stimulate pre-existing prejudice and bias in the electorate, using the classic GOP myths that ‘Democrats will raise your taxes’ and the even older slander ‘Black men are coming for the white women’.
The sad part of the past week has been seeing how many people still believe in those old lies, and how much of what drives the right is the thrill of telling them to each other over and over.
maha, I meant to say she’s the one playing the mental illness card. I don’t think she did it for attention as much as to stick it to the political opposition, locally. After all, that was her job– she went to PA from TX to work for McCain. Nothing those poor kids were doing had helped their candidate very much. Meanwhile, Palin’s getting traction with race-baiting, and McCain’s got his fake plumber, so…? Ashley, she surely thought, you’re a genius!
Afterward, she complained to the cops about how the media jumped on the story. Didn’t confess until the attention got out of control, and all her premeditation became clear.
Typical dumb conservative.. If dopey Ashley would have carved a O for Obama in her face the police would have never figured out that it was a hoax.