Hazardous Duty Pay
Pity the African-American TV cameraman assigned to cover a Sarah Palin brownshirt rally. He should be getting hazardous duty pay.
From Jacksonville in the northeast to Pensacola in the Panhandle, the fiery crowds gathered to jeer at any hint of liberalism, boo loudly at the mere mention of Senator Barack Obama’s name and heckle the traveling press corps (at a rally in Clearwater, one man hurled a racial epithet at a television cameraman).
If there were undecideds, independents or swing voters among them, they were awfully hard to spot.
Let’s be clear. Sarah Palin is not being employed to change the minds of “undecideds, independents or swing voters”. She is being used to rile up the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity base. The McCain campaign is playing defense when they are three touchdowns behind, late in the fourth quarter.
I work at USC and we know this is not a strategy for victory.
Everyone ought to view and forward this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyK-enrF1g
Dangerous duo, these two.
BG – I thought the comment about a ‘cool hand’ was especially funny / awkward / ill-advised coming from McCain, of all people – especially when he was sharing the stage with, perhaps, the coolest hand the Senate has seen in living memory.
And I don’t mean cool as in Miles Davis. I mean cool as in Clint Eastwood.
Hillary, I’m sure, would agree.
“If there were undecideds, independents or swing voters among them, they were awfully hard to spot.”
Tentative confirmation that, at these rallies anyway, the base is about all they can pull in.
“Fairness” and “mean spiritedness” have come up on this board lately. I’d like to point out that there are certain conservative principles for which I have a lot of respect:
Self-responsibility
Fiscal restraint
Reluctance to become entangled in foreign adventures
Deep distrust of the power of government
I may think that today’s Republican leadership takes an ala-carte approach to conservative principles, ignoring some while inflating others to absurd logical extremes, so that the net effect is that they very much violate the spirit of political conservatism as I understand it.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve lost respect for the principles.
In contrast, most talk from the right about the left is hissing contempt. The word “liberal” is usually spoken in the way you’d expect someone to say “cannibal pedophile axe murderer.”
And now apparently it comes as a surprise to some on the right that some on the left do not speak of them with what they consider the proper decorum, respect, and I might even say reverence.
But I repeat. In spite of the fact that I think Bush is a dry-drunk silver spoon hillbilly with two brain cells to rub together, and Cheney is an opportunistic crocodile who has used public office to enrich himself and his cronies, and many in the party went along for the ride, nevertheless I still respect many of the principles that underpin conservative thinking.
The word “conservative” is not a slur in my book.
What worries me is that one of these nincompoops, fueled by the McCain/Palin venom, might actually take a potshot at Obama, in the name of “saving the nation.”
How can Obama and the castrated media calm things down?
That’s my concern as well, MS.
A correspondent on The News Hour was just saying that there are people coming up to reporters in parts of Pennsylvania saying essentially “this is my name, this is how you spell it and I want it known that I’m not voting for Obama because I would never vote for a black man.”
Geez….