The Shark Is Barack
By Jay D. Homnick
Published 9/19/2008 12:07:15 AM
The old joke has old Mrs. Jones being beaten up by four muggers. A neighbor looks out her window and sees the scene. Before running to call the cops, she yells to a bystander, "Hey, why don't you go and help out?"
When he turns and looks up, she recognizes Mrs. Jones' son-in-law.
"Oh, no," he responds. "Four is enough."
The classier politicians try to abide by this convention. Their surrogates, proxies, representatives, go-betweens, bagmen, cronies, cohorts, fellow travelers, mouthpieces, hatchet men, henchmen, running dogs, gophers, spinners and handlers all trash the opposition. These middlemen are there specifically to cut out the beginning-man. In fact, they will tell you that their principal would never say the things they are saying because he is such a downright gentleman. He likes to look only at the positive side of things. He believes that his positions stand for themselves. He regrets that other campaigns have waded into the gutter. He believes that America needs a new kind of politics, a politics of affirmation, a politics of vision, a politics of idealism. None of that slime for a man of his supreme gentility.
Barack Obama initiated his campaign advancing this premise. Let Axelrod wave the axe and Brazile shoot the bazooka. His hands were too full carrying the hope to be swinging the punches. His feet were too busy marching toward change to kick his opponents. That seemed to be working out pretty well for a while, when the tea leaves were signaling an herbal sort of bloodless victory. He took his victory lap around the Autobahn and returned from his conquest of Europe with nary a wilt in his laurels.
But a funny thing happened to him on his way from the Forum. McCain took an exciting running mate and the polls were dead even. And then... and then...
...the true face of Obama emerged. If Palin has accomplished nothing else, she has certainly done one thing. She has unmasked Obama as an angry man. Suddenly he is spewing bitterness everywhere. He runs ads mocking McCain for not using a computer. He blames McCain for economic conditions. He savages McCain for suggesting a commission to analyze the regulatory situation. He runs scurrilous advertisements in Spanish that distort Rush Limbaugh's words about immigration and then blames McCain for Limbaugh. (Kudos to Jake Tapper at ABC News for thoroughly debunking this two-tier fraud.)
No more Mister Nice Guy for Obama, and the difference is telling. His voice has a new snarl. Suddenly he is the commissar, the Kommandant, the drill sergeant: "Get in their faces," he exhorts his acolytes. The battle now takes to the streets, hand-to-hand, house-to-house combat. The Democrats are shouting that McCain has no honor, they are going after Palin's husband and daughter. This is what they used to call in wrestling a Texas Death Match with no holds barred. Or we might say, no bars held. The phony bar they set for the "new politics" was breached by themselves first.
Now we get to see how a community organizer organizes the community. Can Obama win as yet another angry Democrat, spitting against Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Swift-boat politics and the ghost of Lee Atwater? I would like to believe that the answer is no, that voters will recoil from the sight of the animus and the venomous, the odium and opprobrium. The burnished Obama has been tarnished, while Sarah Palin has furnished the varnish for McCain.
More Obama gangland tactics: Signs banned at Virginia rally today
By Michelle Malkin September 27, 2008 10:21 AM Reader Ron e-mails that the Obama campaign has issued a decree banning all signs at a rally today at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.
It is a public campus on public property.
The local newspaper, the Fredericksburg Free Lance Star is up in arms:
NOT ALL COUNTRIES guarantee their citizens the right to virtually unbridled freedom of speech. The United States does. Would someone please tell the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama? And the dozing guardians of liberty at the University of Mary Washington?
Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, is scheduled to speak at a rally at the university today. The public is invited to this forum, on property it, the public, owns. However, signs and banners will not be allowed, according to the organizers and compliant campus officials. Suddenly, UMW is a First Amendment-Free, or at least a First Amendment-Crippled, Zone, subject to the self-serving preferences of politicos. Why does an Obama rallyor a McCain rally or a Nader rallyjustify taking a little off the top of Americans' most fundamental rights?
A UMW spokeswoman says that the Obama campaign required the sign-and-banner ban. That campaign tells us that the ban is for "security" reasons. But a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting presidential candidates, says that the service has no objection to signs at rallies, provided that no "part of the sign could be used as a weapon"e.g., a heavy metal pole or a sharpened stick. Finally, the McCain campaign tells us, "We encourage people to make signs at our events."