Palin, Obama

Now here is a cartoon that I wish I had created.

I'm beginning to think that the GOP fanned the rumors concerning Sarah Palin's eldest daughter. Those rumors have only engaged the sympathy of Hillary's voters and made the progressives look like monsters. Did the progressives actually believe that they would win votes by beating up a girl?

(Remember, Michelle Obama once let slip that Obama's mother was unwed.)

Barack Obama has told his people not to add fuel to the fires of rumor concerning Bristol Palin. Children, he says, should be off-limits. This attitude is very revealing -- it implies that smear-mongering is quite all right if the target is over a certain age.

I say that Obama should have denounced the damnable lies told about Bill and Hillary Clinton as well. A smear campaign is a smear campaign, and deliberate smears directed against a 62 year-old former-president-turned-political-opponent are just as unjustifiable as are smears directed against a 17 year-old girl.

As the Howling Latina notes, Obama's "hands off Bristol" message...

...perfectly illustrates why Hillary supporters are still a tad pissed off at the Democratic presidential nominee. He could've easily made the same courtly gesture when Clyburn, Olby, Shuster, Matthews, the blogger boyzz and the rest of the gamy gang were busy calling Hillary and Bill racists and demonizing them and everything they had done for their country.

Yes, by his silence, Obama gave comfort to the atrocious lies.

The race is a dead heat. The Zogby poll, which often skews left, puts McCain ahead, 47-45. Gallup and Rasmussen have Obama ahead by seven. Did I or did I not predict that Obama would get a "concrete basketball" bounce?

Let us fan some controversy: Let us discuss the "He wouldn't be here if he were white" idea.

Geraldine Ferraro, I think, instinctively meant to compare Obama's chances to those of any female politician -- in which case, the polls bear her out. As we have noted in earlier posts, roughly twice as many Americans refuse to vote for a woman as refuse to vote for a black male.

That comparison aside, was Obama's race a net plus for him in the primaries? David Plouffe said that all the people who could never vote for a black candidate were already on the Republican side. (I bet that he was instantly sorry to let that comment slip out, since the Kos Klowns were, at that time, still pretending that Hillary was sending out racist "dog whistles" to her Klan fan base.) So the question comes down to this: Did Obama's background give him a aura of cool in liberal eyes?

I think so. The motivating factor here may not be white liberal guilt, but the corollary presumption that black is hip.

I once did some design work for a guy trying to start a line of t-shirts. He saw the $100 price tags on Affliction shirts, and said "I want some of that." He made one directive very clear to me: You want the shirts to appeal to young black males. Whites will follow. White kids want to dress like black kids. If (as an experiment) a couple of hundred young black men in key cities suddenly hit the clubs wearing Santa Claus hats, within three weeks young white men would be paying $100 a pop for Santa Claus hats.

Or so he said. I don't know if that assertion is true, since I know the apparel market about as well as I know how to conjugate verbs in Finnish.

But if that idea does hold water, then may we presume that political fashions operate in a manner similar to t-shirt fashions?

Added note: A few posts down, I said that the meanest line Shakespeare ever wrote was "Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee," from Henry VI, Part 1. What makes the quote cruel is the author's intent: Shakespeare wanted the audience to applaud the decision to burn a pregnant woman. Of course, it's not an applause line nowadays.

This reference seems particularly appropos now that we've seen the progs attack fair Bristol. Cruelty indeed.