Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Full Story »
Posted by Derek Hawkins
Hertzberg does a brilliant job compiling the long, sad string of outrageous campaign claims into an insightful display of the uninformed hypocrisy they reflect.
“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)
When campaign rhetoric is totally unencumbered by pesky facts, it is a pleasure to read such a brilliant counter-presentation of accurate information.
When did political mud-slinging completely cease being constrained by at least a nodding acquaintance with fact? Today's campaign rhetoric has devolved into more of a mud-wrestling match in which most of the grapplers are on the same side. I was a youngster when the McCarthy hearings were originally televised, and the tone of bitter, hateful accusation and suspicion of those days seemed nearly polite by today's painfully low standards. The insidious specter of a widespread return to that level of viciousness is truly alarming. Hertzberg's gentle-but-pointed humor is the perfect way to put this menace where it belongs. Kudos to Hendrik the Insightful.