There were two funny stories yesterday.
First, after sliming Obama for the entire week with the worst kinds of personal attacks, and riling up rabid crowds of right wingers, McCain was forced to tone things down at a campaign event, asking his supporters to be "respectful" towards the Democrat, adding that no one needs to be afraid of him, and that he is a "decent person". This is welcome, of course, though the fact that McCain's pleas for calm met with boos can't be too encouraging.
As always, you reap what you sow. I realize McCain is desperate. But inciting hate and violence is a lot worse for your legacy than losing a presidential campaign. As badly as he clearly wants to win this thing, I doubt he wants to be remembered as a racist hate monger. And that was the trajectory that his campaign was headed on.
The second funny story was that after numerous attempts at derailing the investigation and lying about her role in the affair, Palin was found guilty by a bipartisan Alaskan legislative panel of abusing her power in Troopergate. The panel found that she had abused the power of her office in pushing for the removal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire Palin's ex-brother-in-law. The firing itself was lawful, as Mongan served at the Governor's pleasure. But like the US Attorneys scandal, just because something is technically legal does not make it ethical. And Palin (motivated primarily by her husband, it seems) clearly acted unethically.
Is this vetting we can believe in? For their part, the McCain campaign is predictably claiming that this was a partisan witch hunt (despite it being a bipartisan panel mostly composed of Republicans), politically motivated (even though this investigation had begun before McCain chose Palin as his VP), and even that the report vindicates Palin, since it shows that she had legal authority to fire this guy. Of course, that was never in question. We already knew she had the authority. The question was whether she had abused that authority.
In any case, while honest conservatives like Christopher Buckley continue to jump ship, the Right-wing meltdown continues. Michael Barone wrote a column today entitled The Coming Obama Thugocracy. Thugocracy? Well, he's from Chicago, you see.
And Andy McCarthy (such an appropriate name...) wonders today whether Bill Ayers wrote Obama's book. Seriously.
These people are batshit insane. In fairness, a Barack Obama Presidency could be pretty bad:
The time has come to ask: What might happen to our country if we elect a black Muslim terrorist president?
Dave and Hilzoy have noted some concerns on the part of our friends on the Right that Barack Obama may not actually be what he appears to be -- a centrist Democrat with the most mild of reformist impulses -- but rather a secret radical Manchurian monkey boy, who has spent decades hiding all of his actual beliefs and allegiances, in order to better destroy our very way of life.
This is an interesting theory, which it seems to me they are far too quick to dismiss as barking paranoia, of the classic American style. In the alternative, I'd like to suggest what some might consider a worst-case scenario for an Obama administration -- but one that will seem all too plausible to anyone who is familiar with the ideology and techniques of the Left.
Predictions: Within a few months of Obama's election, a couple of major U.S. cities will be the sites of a huge terrorist attack that kills thousands of Americans. The Obama administration will use this as an excuse for violating our civil liberties on an unprecedented scale, by setting up Gulag-style detention centers, where people will be held for years without any access to the legal system. Some of these people will be, I predict, actually tortured, as we all know the Left is completely dedicated to the idea that the ends justify the means, and that it has no respect for The Rule of Law.
But this will only be the beginning. Being a radical black militant, Obama will simply ignore any legal requirements that interfere with doing what he deems necessary to "protect" America. Indeed, I predict this power-drunk Negro will carry out secret and illegal spying operations against Americans on a scale Richard Nixon could only dream of. Then, in a veritable Maoist orgy of contempt for the very idea of law, he will demand that the legislature legalize his lawbreaking after the fact.
Moreover, Hussein Obama will have no trouble finding radical law professors and other viral strains of anti-Americanism in our institutions of higher learning, to justify whatever totalitarian theory of a "unitary executive" he might want to deploy. The argument, you can safely bet, will be that the Constitution grants this dusky interloper with a funny name UNLIMITED AND UNREVIEWABLE CONSTITUTIONAL POWERS to "protect the nation," and there won't be a thing our rump Congress and impotent courts will be able to do about it.
Furthermore, I predict an Obama administration will distract the public from its own treasonous incomptence through the oldest dirty political trick in the book: war. Obama will simply deem some nation to be our mortal enemy and a threat to our very existence. He will then invade it.
How can he get away with that you might well ask? The answer is all too predictable: such a war will be justified to the public on the basis of Maoist-Stalinist-Democrat-Nazi-style propaganda, fed to the public by a cowed and complacent Mainstream Media (MSM). And, because the administration will be riddled with neopotistic incompetents, appointed only because of their previous connections to the Great Tribal Chief, this war will be waged with maximum ineptitude, leading to hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths and trillions of dollars of wasted wealth.
After years of the sort of shiftlessness and corruption we all know is the trademark of certain kinds of people, That One will have undermined our entire economy to the point where the financial markets are crashing -- creating an opening for the nationalizing of banks, insurance companies, government-backed mortgage agencies, and anything else the inner city street gang that will be running what used to be America can manage to get their thieving socialistic bongo-playing hands on.
A paranoid nightmare you say? Just wait eight years, and get back to me then.
Brilliant snark.
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