So not terribly shockingly (for Santa Cruz) but very lamely someone apparently roughed up a trick or treater who was dressed up as a Fox News reporter. It took me a few minutes to remember. But when I heard this I thought, wait, this sounds familiar. Well, it goes back to 2008 when my wife and I dressed up for Halloween as Joe the Plumber (me) and Ashley Todd (her).
Don’t remember Ashley Todd?
Well, this is one of the great moments of campaign derp in modern American campaign history. Ashley Todd was the one who carved that Backwards B on her cheek, eyelinered herself a faux black eye and claimed she’d been attacked by a gang of crazed pro-Obama gang-banging hoodlums.
In some ways, the Todd incident is an important artifact of proto-Crazy, a seminal early individual effort before the full cavalcade of New Black Panther/Obama black man militia and all the rest became full blown and familiar and seemingly normal.
Alas, Todd, a McCain campaign worker in Pennsylvania, was also a bit of a doofus and failed to reckon that if she stood in front of a mirror and scratched a B into her cheek that it would be a backwards B from the point of view of her fantasy assailant and anybody looking at her. So Todd’s doofusry ended up exploding her hoax and after a day or so as the toast of Drudge and the rest of the right-o-sphere, she confessed, was later charged with filing a false police report and got probation in a program for first-time offenders.
In any case, back to our story.
It’s Halloween 2008 and my wife and I are dressed as Joe the Plumber and Ashley Todd. And as part of her costume, my wife had various McCain/Palin stickers and paraphernalia draped around her. And for reasons I don’t remember, we were walking from our Chelsea apartment down into Greenwich Village on Halloween night, amidst big crowds of revelers. And I think I’d have to say that in late October 2008 aggressive advocacy of the McCain/Palin ticket was not popular among (mainly drunk) Halloween revelers in west side lower Manhattan. So my wife was reduced to repeatedly clarifying to hecklers, no, no it’s a costume! Remember, the backwards B woman!?!!?!
Once everyone was clarified, we were again welcomed into the Manhattan liberal festivities bubble. But it happened again and again.
