Keeping Score at Home

[lollardfish]

Just remember, for those voting, according to the GOP

Obama is - Muslim, Arab, Terrorist, Racist, Race-Baiting, Palestinian, Anti-Semitic, Messianic, Uppity, Elitist, Foreign, Dangerous, Risky, Socialist, National Socialist, Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Professorial, Presumptuous, Attack against American inciting, Most-Liberal, Radical, Inexperienced, Appeaser, Celebrity, Corrupt Chicago Politician, Promise Breaker, Liar, Big spender, Black, White, Half-Breed, Related to Kenyan who has killed 300,000 people, Related to Kenyan living in Poverty, Selfish to his family, and may be the Antichrist.

Did I forget any?

Edited to reflect suggestions.

Comments

From Talking Points Memo

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

A related point, nicely put, from http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/238740.php


"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 *. (If that's still not completely clear, see this.) But we also know, if not from science than from Science Fiction or at least Star Trek, that as organisms die they often cycle back through their own individual histories, tracking off their defining moments as they wind down into oblivion.

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.