VOTE FOR THE REAL MAVRICK [SIC]: Get one with your inner stupid

At one point during McCain's speech last night, CNN's camera zoomed in a poster-waving booster. The poster, hand-made, read -- "the real mavrick." [sic]

In a sea of official campaign signs, the fellow still couldn't get the simplest of things right. It was a good metaphor for eight years of Republican rule.

It reminded me of a moment from small town America.

Flashback to Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky, in the early Seventies.

The local high school cheerleaders had been prepping the spirit bus for a Saturday afternoon football game with Tri-Valley, in Hegins, known as the town in "the valley over."

The pep squad had painted a big victory sign, three feet high -- made to run the length of the vehicle.

The sign read, and I would never kid you: VICTOY!

The "VICTOY!" banner was mindlessly plastered on the side panel of the spirit bus. Too much time had been spent getting it wrong to waste any more making it right.

It was humiliating.

Our enemies in Hegins thought so, too. The athletes of Tri-Valley were not impressed and spent the remainder of the afternoon totally denying the Pine Grove High football Cardinals "VICTOY!"

There's a lesson here for what went on at the GOP convention.

The Republicans have won so many times during the last eight years while still getting everything wrong, why change now?

It's still US VERSUS THEM. If you're from a small town, you're salt-of-the-earth patriotic and hard-working. Your hands are dirty and calloused; you like to hear myths about your greatness, the ones your minders sing to you on TV. Only you have worked for an honest living.

The rest of us are lazy elites who earn all our crusts off your strong backs. We're secretly dealing with your enemies in foreign lands, too. The plan is to sell out the country to Iran or Russia as soon as our guy is in power. Our favorite leader from history is Neville Chamberlain.

If we went to school to better ourselves, they weren't the right schools. They were the schools for kids who sleep all afternoon and party all night. And when we deigned to learn something, it was evolution in biology, just so we could come back,
attack your faith and brainwash your kids in public school.

"We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco," said Sarah the Barracuda.

Yes, absolutely, snaggle-toothed fish. Don't forget, San Francisco is where all the homos live. Their sole purpose: To harass and plague the middle class of small town America. The aim is to get a cruising bar called the Manhole in every 'burg. And California -- let's not get started -- those homos can even get married there!

May you spend winter in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It needs the tourism more than we do.

The class war strategy is a good one. It frequently wins because the Democrats are too delicate to play it. One who was not was Hillary Clinton. And so now the Dems have had the opportunity to endure it twice in one election cycle: Once during the primary and now for the main course.

"Cultural affinities, which President Bush played on heavily to paint Democratic nominee John F. Kerry as elite and out-of-touch, are now central to the campaign strategy of of GOP presidential nominee, John McCain," wrote the Los Angeles Times on page 1, today.

In playing the part of the obvious hypocrite, "The Arizona senator appeared to float above the culture wars Thursday night in a nomination acceptance speech that criticized 'partisan rancor' and promoted his history of working with Democrats," the newspaper continued. "And he is an unlikely standard-bearer for the forces of family values, given his admissions over the years of his failures as a husband, or for the advocates of small-town living, with his millionaire wife and multiple homes."

"The word class is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit," said someone once, quoted in this blog a few months ago. In America, one can add the "cultural affinity" conflict -- a media weasel-phrase for the blunter class war -- enjoys a double standard. You can use it to club your foe in the opposing tribe. But if he employs class and culture war to paint you as the unwanted other, the enemy of the nation, he's scum.

The middle class, the demographic at which the "cultural affinities" war is aimed at, is a group which is not the critically-thinking bloc those trying to woo it paint it as.

It is a class identifiable as people who have things done to them:. "They are in bondage -- to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions ... " (See here.)

The McCain campaign is precisely about these things -- an exercise in rip-off advertising as well as an operation for the fostering of crazes and delusions.