The real lessons of Ashley Todd and the chronically sick campaign of John Sydney McCain
There are two telling lessons that the pathetic and dangerous Ashley Todd episode informs us regarding John McCain's campaign. They are not new observations but they will be his epitaph and it leaves the Republican Party further mired in confusion as it limps to what is now an embarrassing concluding thrust to maintain the most important political office on our small planet.
It is clear now that the Republicans no longer consider a McCain victory plausible. McCain isn't bothering to show up in person at his final 'victory' event. Far right 527s are running Palin ads that mention not one word about either Bush or McCain. Starting November 5th we will witness an all out bloodletting among the disparate groups in the Republican Party. The true believers want to go further to the radical right and the economic, security and establishment conservatives wonder if these people can count.
John Lewis's historical lessons on the problems of inciting hatred. This is what Lewis actually said,
"During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
We are lucky that no one showed a mug book to Todd, that she didn't pick out some fellow's picture, that police didn't try to effect a false arrest and that an angry innocent man did not resist arrest. We are fortunate that resisting that arrest didn't cause a firearm to discharge resulting in either a policeman or citizen slumped dead in a pool of blood and an angry mob inciting a 16 block incineration.
That mob is not going to form this time because unlike 1968 or many other years people can see that change is 11 days away.
Many of us were stunned to find out that George Wallace never believed any of that segregation stuff that he was just spouting nonsense to enrage the population for political purposes. And that is exactly what John McCain is doing when he and his running mate incite their true believers with "pals with terrorists" and "socialists". It is meant to push their people to extreme action. Poor Ashley Todd didn't know that it was just a puppet show.
John McCain and Sarah Palin are fully responsible for the jail sentence that Ashley Todd will be serving. They are the un-indicted co-conspirators. Parents should be warned about stranger danger and politicians like Wallace/McCain/Palin. Oddly it even seems that the rhetoric and hate filled rants are even below George Bush. Is that possible?
John McCain's Attaboy Brownie It also shows that these folks have an embarrassing inability to read people. Couldn't see Brownie fake it on the hurricane. Couldn't see that Palin was just talkative pageant runner up. Couldn't see that Ashley Todd was an obviously troubled pathetic individual who was giving us a breathtakingly obvious example of Munchhausen's Syndrome in Political Theater.
These quacks hang around politics. In the middle of a plumbers budget meeting G. Gordon Liddy brought the assembled conspirators to a halt as they looked on with open jaws as he said that if the operation went south all they had to do was tell him what corner to go to and he would stand there and await the car to come and crumple his body in a hit and run. Ms. Todd must have fantasized about how the whole campaign we hold her up on election night as she was able to give the country a reason to choose McCain and save the country from an 'Islamic Socialist Terrorist'.
John McCain and the half brained staff he is assembled did not see that this was an obvious fake. They didn't caution about getting the facts straight first. It is the same hair trigger reaction that McCain had on Georgia. He immediately bought into the obvious propaganda from Georgia that they had no idea why Russia invaded them.
When it was shown that Georgia had lobbed some artillery shells into South Osettia and that Russia had over reacted to a provocation, McCain then overreacted to that provocation. This is the essential dynamic needed that takes little incidents and escalates them into wars and world wars. Sarah Palin was asked if it would be the United States obligation to enter into a war against the rather well armed Soviet Union if they compromised Georgia's boundaries. "Perhaps So" she responded.
I mean honestly 98% of DU figured this one out in half of a New York Minute and the other 2% would have if they had been sober.
The Ashley Todd incident shows clearly that McCain/Palin has played with incendiary rhetoric without caution, and that they have especially poor antenna when it comes to evaluating incidents or people. It is quite simply very much like watching a child play with fire in the middle of a wood pile. Fortunately we have the nation's largest fire extinguisher returning from Hawaii to put the last embers of their dying campaign out.
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