« What’s Behind Russia’s Invasion Of Georgia? | Home | Another Failure In The War On Terror »
Mindless Fans: The Obama Camp Unleashes Weak Counter Strategy
By Billy Hallowell | August 12, 2008
Aside from being utterly hilarious, John McCain’s portrayal of Barack Obama as a left-wing celebrity who has traits and a following that are comparable to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears fetched an extraordinary amount of media coverage. The campaign ad also nabbed the attention of one of its main characters: Paris Hilton. She quickly released a “counter” ad, offering a fun-filled response to McCain’s banter; the video went viral, reaching well over five million viewers.
With so much attention being diverted from Obama, his campaign is desperately seeking publicity. While he’s vacationing in Hawaii with his family, the campaign is working feverishly to chip away at John McCain’s credentials. Instead of coming up with their own innovative counter-attack, his staff members are simply regurgitating McCain’s “celeb” routine. Perplexed at the amount of media coverage McCain was able to garner and clearly annoyed with the “celebrity” taunts, the Obama campaign is shooting back:
Aside from the fact that the “third-term” rant is getting old, the Obama campaign continues to mislead voters into believing that McCain agrees wholeheartedly with Bush’s polities. The fact of the matter is that McCain differs greatly when considering a number of domestic and international policy issues. Furthermore, wouldn’t it make sense that McCain would agree with Bush on some issues? McCain and Bush are both Republicans, no? Obama agrees with the boilerplate ultra-liberal selling points: universal healthcare, no offshore drilling, higher taxes for pretty much everyone — so why shouldn’t McCain share in some of the more conservative characteristics Republicans typically embrace?
Coincidently, it took the Obama campaign nearly two weeks to come up with a response to the McCain’s celebrity ad. And now, the campaign is hoping to dupe its supporters into helping it reach its maniacal fundraising goals. According to CNN’s Political Ticker,
Aside from the fact that many supporters of Obama’s campaign (unfortunately members of my generation) are a bit Lemnistic in their inclinations that Obama is going to literally and figuratively save the planet, it is important to note the inherent weaknesses in the above statements. First off, Obama’s campaign supporters may, indeed, respond by donating more money to push the campaign over its goal of two million individuals donors, but wouldn’t an infusion of campaign donations make Obama supporters look like Lemnings? The campaign has apparently admitted that it is hoping that the “backlash from that television spot” will push it towards its fiscal goal. Exploitation? I think so. And the campaign is actually admitting that it hopes to see supporters respond.
Secondly, I would think that a campaign that has reneged on its promise to accept the federal grant for general election spending would do everything in its power to not call attention to yet another flapjack.
Obama continues to act as though he is an anomaly — untouched by the corruption that is so vigorously wedded to the American political system. Simply saying that one is a champion for “change” is ineffective. Obama has yet to champion change; he simply uses the word to ignite a mistaken ideology that he differs from other Washington heavy-hitters. Look at his record. In 2004 he claimed that he did not have the experience to be the nation’s leader and today he is touring the country with an entirely different diatribe:
“You know, I am a believer in knowing what you are doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now there are some people that might be comfortable doing that, but I am not one of those people. ” - Barack Obama, November 2004
Don’t believe me about his politics as usual demeanor? Read about his initial state Senate run in Illinois. Obama’s campaign disqualified an incumbent and another potential candidate for office by invalidating signatories one by one. Dirty, though legal, Chicago politics as usual.
Obama sees himself as some soft of pseudo-messiahic character who has come to change American politics forever. But, simply reading his past political actions and his current contradictory statements shows that he is no different from the politicians he is consistently criticizing. Maybe McCain’s right:
Touché.
Visit Billy Hallowell’s official web site at www.williamhallowell.com.
Topics: 2008, Barack Obama, John McCain |
August 13th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
So Billy’s back at it with his goofball diatribes.
We can always depend on him to deliver a plenitude of malapropisms– but now he’s getting really creative. He’s invented a new species of mammals and even a new adjective to describe them– he calls them “lemnings“. We know this isn’t simply a typo because he calls Obama supporters “lemnistic“.
You have to give him credit for imagination– in his able hands ‘pseudo-messianic’ becomes “pseudo-messiahic”. Good one.
Billy leads his latest report from the front lines of his war on reality with a joyous celebration of a disingenuous attack ad that implies Senator Obama is as vapid and lightweight as Paris Hilton.
He seems confused, though, about her retaliatory ad which cleverly skewered John McCain. Reading Billy’s breathless report you get the impression that he thinks it was a salvo from McCain headquarters aimed at Obama.
Poor Billy– he’s so anxious to credit a feckless bimbo who dresses like a low-rent prostitute with stealing attention from a man who has more class in his little finger than she has in her sculpted trollop’s body.
John McCain’s campaign wasn’t going much of anywhere until he took on the Karl Rove acolyte, Steve Schmidt, to run day-to-day operations. Shortly thereafter McCain’s campaign ads took a decidedly negative turn to the classic Republican hit-job style of lies and distortion.
So like a political lemming with a self-destructive urge, as opposed to a suicidal “lemning”, Billy repeats the usual Republican lie that Obama favors “higher taxes for pretty much everyone”.
Apparently his creativity failed him when he wrote that one.
A McCain attack ad claims Obama voted to raise taxes on on people making just $42,000 a year.
The truth is that both Obama and McCain voted to extend tax breaks to lower and middle-income families. The non-binding budget resolution that Obama voted for raises taxes on no one.
Obama has proposed tax cuts for families or couples making less than $250,000 a year and $200,000 a year for singles. He would not raise their income taxes, their payroll taxes, or their capital gains taxes.
Small businesses, 99 per cent of which, by Senator McCain’s own definition, earn less than $250,000 per year, would NOT pay higher taxes under Obama’s plan. He would actually CUT capital gains taxes to 0% for small and start-up businesses, and provide a health care credit for them to cover their employees.
McCain is using the same tactics of lies, smears, innuendo, and character assassination that Karl Rove used against himself in the 2000 election.
However, it IS true that when McCain returned to the US from his captivity as a POW in Vietnam and discovered that his wife Carol had been disfigured and crippled in an automobile accident (she was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter), he became involved in several extramarital affairs. He has admitted this conduct.
In 1979 he began the courtship of his future wife Cindy, 17 years his junior and the daughter of a millionaire beer distributor. In 1980 he petitioned a Florida court to divorce Carol.
A month later he married Cindy.
This is Billy’s hero.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:19 am
We’re all prone to mistakes, no? I wrote this at 3 a.m. with no editor in sight. Secondly, McCain’s not my hero. You truly love your own pointless diatribes, no?
August 14th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Can’t take the heat, Billy?
You sure like to dish it out.
Pointing out that Republicans lie about Obama and his stance on taxes isn’t pointless.
McCain’s past makes Edwards look like an amateur in the adultery department.
Don’t you use Firefox’s ‘check spelling as you type’ feature?
You need more than an editor, dude, you need a fact checker.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Oh, take a nap.
The heat is more than welcome!
August 14th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Equally disturbing is the fact that the same clown that wrote the 2004 book attacking John Kerry’s military record (which was discredited heavily during and after that election) is now back at it again, citing Obama’s ties to Islam and other misinformation.
How anyone with an IQ over 100 can support a political party that assumes all of its consitutents are idiots beats the hell out of me.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Amen to that, Josh.
Things are certainly more entertaining around here since Billy came on board.
I wouldn’t have nearly so much to say if he wasn’t publishing his tin-eared balderdash.
If he’s not summoning Aunt Jemima’s pancakes when he’s talking about flip-flops, then he’s invoking ‘vigorously’ wedded politicians, in contrast to unvigorously wedded ones like John McCain.
Truly, Billy is an ever-flowing fount of malapropisms, as when he has Obama ‘igniting’ ideologies as if they were stacks of firewood, or his campaign insidiously engaging in ‘maniacal’ fund-raising.
Well, those maniacs aren’t doing so badly in Hawaii, where they raised 1.3 million dollars.
Perhaps Billy is envious, on behalf of his favored candidate, a politician Obama is “consistently criticizing”, and from whom, according to Billy, “he is no different”.
Hmm.
Do I have to say it, but if there’s no difference between them, then why bother to vote at all?
I must admit, when it comes to fuzzy logic, or tortured syntax, Billy is truly lord of the realm.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
What’s getting old, Billy, is the myth of John McCain as a “foreign policy expert†and the candidate with “the experience to lead.â€
Oh, really? As I’ve noted here previously, this is the McCain who:
Either lied about, or doesn’t understand the chronology of the Anbar Awakening and the Surge — the very centerpiece of his campaign!
Has confused Sunnis and Shia.
Referred to the “Iraq-Afghanistan border,†when in fact the two countries are not immediate neighbors.
Has accused Obama – that’s right, Obama — of being responsible for the high price of gasoline.
And has accused him of being “willing to lose the war in Iraq in order to win the election.
So not only is McCain consistently wrong factually, he has engaged in an outrageous and disgusting personal attack on his opponent.
So much for “Drill Here! Drill Now! McCain,†the man of “experience and character†who promised to run an honorable campaign.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Obama accuses McCain/Palin of attacking his record … what record? Obama is an empty suit who hasn’t done anything. That’s why instead of running on his record, he has to run a campaign based upon attacking McCain/Palin. Obama’s tactic has always been ‘the best defense is a good offense’. For example, Obama will make the pig/lipstick smear, just days after Palin scores points with the ‘pitbull/lipstick statement … then he disingenuously acts as if there’s no connection. He did it again with Palin’s community organizer is similar to a mayor, but with out the responsibility … which everyone knows was Palin’s response to Obama demeaning her experience as a small town mayor. There’s nothing wrong with being a community organizer, but being a community organizer is certainly not credentials for becoming President of the United States! Obama has done this, as well as playing the race card numerous times. The changes Obama wants would dramatically weaken this country, in terms of our economy and our national defense.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Gina,
I agree being a community organizer does not qualify you to be President of the United States but he was a state senator and a United States Senator after that.
Spreading our soldiers throughout the world in questionable military operations has done much more to weaken our national defense than anything Senator Obama has proposed.
Show me how more tax cuts for the wealthy and big businesses will help our economy. We have tried those tactics for 8 years and look where it has got us.
September 15th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Being a community organizer does not qualify one to be President. But then neither does being mayor of a small town in Alaska…or being a prisoner of war.
No one has demeaned her experience as a small-town mayor; what the press has done is seek background information about an unknown candidate who’s running for the second-highest office in the land.
An unknown candidate who was chosen by McCain to pander to the right-wing fanatics in his party…the same fanatics who warned him that there’d be a revolt if he chose Joe Lieberman or any pro-choice running mate.
If John McCain REALLY put “Country First,” he would have chosen someone with stronger credentials than Palin. It proves he’s willing to do anything to win this election.
McCain is a raging hypocrite. And a liar.
And I approved this message.
September 15th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Gina:
I may be guilty of wishful thinking, but I believe that if you were to consider the facts — and not just the tired distortions of the Republicans’ talking points — you’d see things more clearly.
You’d see that John McCain is NOT a “maverick,”…not when he votes with George W. Bush 90 per cent of the time.
That he’s NOT a maverick when he boasts that “no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have. And those are McCain’s own words.
That he’s not a maverick when he endorses tax cuts for the wealthy that have been Bush’s only excuse for an economic policy.
And I don’t know what McCain is — except stunningly wrong and out of touch — when he says that there’s been “great progress economically” under the Bush administration.
Equally as disturbing, McCain has become a practitioner of the very politics he once deplored. He hired a protege of Karl Rove to run his campaign, and has blanketed the airwaves with misleading attacks on Barack Obama, attacking his character and distorting his ideas.
I suppose if I had to defend the Republicans’ record of the past eight years, I’d also be at a loss for words, and would do everything I could to change the subject and make this election about everything BUT the issues.
I’m sure that explains McCain’s strategy of talking about lipstick and pigs instead of the economy and energy and taxes and matters of substance and importance to voters.
The McCain campaign continues to repeat a number of outrageous lies, even after watchdogs in the media called them “shamelessly misleading,” “thoroughly dishonest,” and “a toxic mix of lies and double-speak.”
So “John McCain campaigning on the high ground” has become as much of a myth as John McCain the maverick always was. It’s clear that he would rather lose his integrity than lose this election.
I would also ask you to keep in mind that John McCain is determined to overturn Roe vs. Wade and take away a woman’s right to choose.
Sarah Palin would go even further. She would prosecute and put in jail any woman who had an abortion, and the doctor who helped her — even in the case of rape or incest.
Is that the kind of society you want to live in?
For heaven’s sake, THINK before you vote!!!