John McCain plays simple answers to simple questions.
Reporters: Why did the RNC spend $150,000 on clothes and accessories for Sarah Palin and her family?
McCain: “She needed the clothes.”
An analysis of TV ad buys in key swings states shows McCain cutting spending, sometimes dramatically, in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Colorado while increasing spending in Virginia and Florida. TPM Election Central has the details.
For all the news coming out of the self-inflicted Michelle Bachmann ‘anti-American’ trainwreck, we still haven’t gotten any polling data out of the district to tell us who’s actually head. But we will tonight when SurveyUSA releases the first public poll of the race since Bachmann’s boffo Joe McCarthy impression on Hardball last Friday.
Not even becoming violent and disruptive during deliberations can get you thrown off a DC federal jury.
Not worth noting, except that it’s Sen. Ted Stevens’ jury.
Late Update: TPM Reader JM points out my failings as a humorist: “Attention David Kurtz! You’re missing a “jury of his peers” joke there.”
Every cycle it seems there’s one numbskull pol who comes up with an out of the blue unforced error which takes them from safe reelection to top on the endangered species list overnight. This year it’s Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), execrable congresswoman from Minnesota. And in today’s episode we tell her very, very sorry tale …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Career staff in the Office of Special Counsel had been begging the White House for months to fire their boss, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch. Why did the White House finally fire him (sub. req.) only three days after Bloch announced his intention to resign in January?
My dear, departed father, a biologist to the core, loved the phrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny‘, which is a perfectly deft but utterly inscrutable way of saying that the stages of growth of a fetus in the womb mimics the evolutionary history of the species itself
And yesterday I had an political epiphany. As the McCain campaign staggers toward its conclusion, with electoral columns and pediments standing since 1966 buckling under their weight, the party seems to be cycling back through its history of character assassination, McCarthyism and wedge politics flimflam, only now with an desperate and parodic impotence taking the place of punishing rhetorical violence.
Southern strategy race-baiting, check! Hyper 9/11ist ‘the Dems are terrorists’ character assassination, check! Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s neo-McCarthyite manifesto and call for a new HUAC, check! ‘The Democrats want to bring socialism to America’, check! Who lost Georgia? Aspirational neo-Cold Warism, check! Mix these in with a general stew of 70s-90s soft-on-crime, Dems are pedophile weirdo-freak-loser wedge politics and we’ve basically got the full ground covered.
I don’t doubt that anti-tax politics retains a potent, if diminished resonance. And perhaps I’m just naive. But does ‘socialism’, as a cudgel in the context of a national political campaign, not simply sound archaic? It is one more reason I sense the GOP’s and perhaps the conservative movement’s dying regression into its ideological infancy.
I’d started writing this post two days ago before setting it aside to work on other tasks and projects. But tonight I saw that the situation had become so farcical and grave that TPM Reader BH was moved to genuine concern for future Republican prospects …
I have been a long time reader, propably since sometime on 2001. Anyway I just wanted to pass a thought along that I have been having lately. I’m *concerned* that this McCain Campaign could cause some long term damage to the GOP in a few ways, but here is the most interesting angle to me.
I don’t why its happening right now but it seems like the long used divisive attacks from Republicans that declare some of us real Americans and others not are finally being widely exposed as the pathetic rhetoric it is. It seems like a lot of it might have to do with the position they are now in, ploys like these came off as tough and macho when the GOP was on top but now that they are on the ropes its starting to look pretty desperate instead. Part of me thinks the Republicans should just throw in the towel because as they step up their attacks its starting to look like a parody and they may never be able to effectively use some of these classic attacks in the future if they are too widely mocked during and after this election. In future elections democrats will be able to point to similar campaigns and compare them to the McCain campaign which conventional wisdom will likely soon be viewed as frenzied and pitiful. But I’m even more hopeful the sun is setting on this style of politics, dividing the country up into states that were truly part of the homeland and others that weren’t worked alright but as demographics shift their more nuanced arguments about real Virginia vs fake Virginia expose the true silliness of it all.
David raises the question: has the GOP bag of tricks simply lost political traction and resonance or does the audacious slime that is so bracing and outrageous from the politically powerful simply seem pitiful from the hapless and impotent? For me the two trends are too deeply woven together to distinguish. But I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.
We noted earlier in the week part of CNN’s interview with Sarah Palin in which she was asked about a National Review article that the interviewer clearly took out of context. Today, CNN offered on-air what I guess you would call an explanation:
All in one place! In one mighty cauldron of fetid McCainite sleaze!
Don’t miss our newly updated, interactive “Map of GOP Sleaze“, with all the mailers and audio of the latest robocalls.