McCain vs. Omaba about to get really ugly

By MICHAEL HALEY

I am almost embarassed to be a Republican right now they are doing such a hatchet job on Obama. Almost everything they are criticizing him for is either an outright lie, or a subjective reading of him in the most intentionally negative manner possible. Usually there is some truth to negative ads, this time it is hard to see it.

McCain is putting out the message that Obama is an arrogant out of touch elitist. It is a standard Republican charge right out of the Rove playbook.

Take Democrat name, fill in the blanks with charge. Smith is an elitist, Smith is a socialist, Smith is a Hollywood favorite, Smith is out of touch with the working classes, Smith will raise taxes, Smith is weak on terror, Smith is....yada yada yada.

No need to have any evidence, just stick Paris Hilton in an ad, call him an elitist, and broadcast it throughout the right wing echo chamber, from Rush to Hannity to Hewitt to Coulter, and back again. Each time the same trumped up charge runs through the echo chamber there is a contest to see who can twist it further and further out into hyperbole.

It reminds me of a group of adolescent boys daring each other to do risky things, all out to prove their manhood by going the next guy one shocking step further. If you guzzled a whole quart of beer, I will guzzle a whole gallon! If you say Obama is pro abortion, I will say he is baby killer! If you say he is a baby killer, I will say he is a baby eater!

Seriously, I am waiting for the cannibal charge, because I am sure some conservative somewhere can find some tribe in Africa that somewhere sometime practiced cannibalism, who can make up that Obama is related to them, and viola, Rush will be reporting today that there is some concern that Obama may have eaten babies! And within days it will be in a McCain ad. Republicans are proving there is no too low they can go, and the scary thing is a lot of them are convincing themselves that this stuff is true.

It is such trash. Obama is someone who came from a broken home, worked his way up on his own despite being black in a world where that still means it is a lot tougher to make it. He got into Harvard on his own, did not put down that he was black on his application, and became editor of the Harvard Law Review, undoubtedly the most prestigious spot for a law student in the country. Because he is that smart and worked that hard. And he is a solid family man to boot.

McCain was the entitled son and grandson of two Navy admirals that got a free pass all the way, graduated 894th out of 899 at the Naval academy because he refused to study–and why should he, being a child of such elites? He was a womanizer, dumped his first wife and married a multi-millionaire woman 17 years his junior with a drug problem, as George W. Bush’s campaign pointed out to us all so well.

McCain sounds a heck of a lot more like Kerry than Obama does, but since there is a D after Obama’s name, the GOP fills in his name in their tired script.

Or how about this? We see the clip of McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys "Barbra Ann", with an announcer saying "the only politician in Washington to want war more than George W. Bush was "Let’s bomb John" McCain. He was the first to advocate war with Iran, first to want to invade Iraq after 9/11, advocated the surge before anyone else, he is the biggest militarily hawk in Congress. A vote for "lets bomb John" is a vote for endless war."

End with nuclear bomb going off, voice over, "if you like trillion dollar wars, you will love "lets bomb John" McCain.

Image of Barry Goldwater fading to Dr. Strangelove to "lets bomb John" overlaid on atom bomb visual. Or you could even have the guy in Dr. Strangelove riding the atom bomb to earth whooping it up with McCain’s face superimposed over his.

Those would be terribly unfair ads for the Democrats to run on McCain, and I don’t think they will do it ,but after the scalding the GOP has delivered to Obama they are going to have to do something. The odd thing is when I look at these pretend ads I wrote against McCain and compare them to the real GOP messages on Obama, they are about as negative and dirty, but the statements about McCain are more objectively true.

I don’t think Obama is a perfect candidate, but McCain and the GOP have already gone so far over the line that anything goes for the Democrats at this point to counter that. Obama has made an effort to talk to the American people like adults, and because McCain is behind the GOP has thrown all pretense of adulthood to the wind. McCain will no longer have the right to complain about how Bush manhandled him in the South Carolina primary in 2000.

Things are about to get even uglier, and the GOP will forever carry the mantle of having started this.

Michael Haley is president of the Napa Valley Taxpayers Alliance. He writes as frequently as he gets an itch about local, state and national issues. He can be reached at napaeagle@hughes.net

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