Matt Taibbi: McCain's Playbook: Hate, Fear and Caveman Politics

[laststeamtrain]

McCain's Playbook: Hate, Fear and Caveman Politics
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on June 16, 2008, Printed on June 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/88211/

Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy -- who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?

You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"

The choice of New Orleans as a launching pad for McCain's national campaign is the kind of leadenly obvious move that people who do politics for a living are pleased to call "sound strategy": For a candidate supposedly desperate to avoid carrying the Bush label into November, this disaster-stricken city is about the only place in the country that offers a striking visual image of a Bush policy that McCain has actually criticized. So the candidate dragged himself onstage here, ostensibly to perform the dreary business of "distancing himself" from Bush by once again criticizing the president's response to Katrina. The Bush-bashing money quote -- "Americans have a right to expect basic competence from their government!" -- was featured prominently in media accounts...

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. What "failed ideas of the Sixties" is he talking about?

Medicare? Head Start? Oh, I know! The Civil Rights Act of 1964! :sarcasm:

I'm sure many of his fans would like to rescind all of them, especially the last one.

[laststeamtrain]

2. "Culture warriors" are never very specific are they?

I know why their hogwash works on dyed-in-the-wool right wing cranks.

Why does it work on "Reagan Democrats"?

Maybe because they're right wing cranks too.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. No, just ignorant of history

Talk to self-described conservatives today and its funny how they think Medicare, and Head Start are God-given rights, instead of benefits given us by Democratic governments. The racists remember the Civil Rights Act-but then they are racists, aren't they?

[miles 2 go]

4. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause.

Furious applause? Isn't this the same speech that we've all been making fun of with it's huge snore factor? What furious applause is Taibbi hearing?

[blogslut]

5. I can't get Alternet to load

I has sad

[laststeamtrain]

6. Me too. I got this one story & then couldn't load Alternet after that.

???

:hi: