IMPOSSIBLE TO PARODY
Many have noted it's almost impossible to satirize the GOP. Making up a story about McCain telling his audience the Great Cthulhu was going to be made tax collector in an Obama administration in order to collect treasure and and eat children isn't that far from some of the rant spilling out of the far right.
Take old Tetany and Co. at the Lehigh Valley Conservative. As it gets closer to the election, the more unfastened it is.
DD can't make up stuff better than this:
"As with anyone who would be king, Obama will take our money and our property in ever-larger amounts. Our children will be saddled with debt and beholden to a bloated government that will enslave the very people it promised to help. We will be at the mercy of our enemies. And no matter how bleak or desperate our own lives becomes, the leaders in Obama’s government will always thrive; such people always do."
"... since today is Sunday, I will take the liberty of making an observation with a more Biblical bent," the reader is told. And then one gets the story of Samuel and a wayward people who rejected God for a king.
Of course, the king is the other guy, one to be described with idiot savant metaphors taken from scripture, artlessly cobbled together to ram home the point that you've become a tool of evil. It's gold-plated intelligence-insulting stuff.
Since shortly after 9/11, DD has spent some time reading various jihadi terror texts, electronic documents the purpose of which is to describe the fashioning of a variety of weapons from materials found at home.
Rants calling Americans kuffars -- unbelievers, those who are to be condemned by god -- invariably accompany them. The foaming from John McCain's GOP is just like that stuff, only it doesn't use the word kuffar. Instead, the US kuffar is defined by his party and where he or she lives and exhortations to "pro" and/or "patriotic" America.
It's excrement, a manure to gag on which the Republican party has -- in the alleged name of country -- attempted to stuff down the throats of Americans.
If you're not with them, you're kuffar. You're damned, guilty of everything bad -- socialism, Marxism, disbelief in god, a collaborator with mortal enemies, a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is a rancid and sick ideology, one now inextricably entwined with the evangelical Christian belief that one can pick and choose who to condemn using your own special deli platter of faith, as long as that interpretation puts you up in Heaven, and those you do not care for down in Hell.
Get thee behind me Satan -- it tells ya. And if you don't believe in the Republican way, you're ...
And the devil is always capable of anything, which is why one reads, written dead serious, ridiculous and thoroughly rotten tripe like this:
"We have the makings of a dictator in Obama, since the MSM, the courts and the Democrat party will give Obama all the power he wants. The Republicans will be powerless! What are our options in a situation like this? A military coup?"
There's no civility, no room for belief that we face common problems to which we all would dearly love to find good solutions. There is just the enemy. And as it looks more and more like the enemy will triumph, the warnings get more dire, apocalyptic and shot through with irrational conspiracy theories.
If Barack Obama, for instance, has raised a lot of money, it is because it has been done through criminal enterprise.
"Just heard on the Fox news channel that most of Obama’s over 600 million in contributions came in from 'quicky' credit cards," rants old Tetany.
"These are credit cards that one can buy like a gift card at walmart. There is no name on the card, just a number that can be used by anyone and can also come from anywhere in the world. We know that foreign contributions are illegal, but using these cards, these kind of contributions are next to impossible to track. With over 600 million coming in for Obama, something has to be wrong!"
It never occurs to the writer that Fox might be just making it all up. DD has contributed to the Obama campaign through e-mail push-button debit card transaction. And there's nothing suspicious about it, the name's on the bank card. But if the Democratic Party has realized that it can raise money bombs through distributed contribution from ordinary citizens, who are all identified, on the Internet -- and the cash raised has crushed the Republican Party's own fund-raising by comparison, then there must be something wrong with it.
In the mind of the GOP loyalist this is not evidence of the fund-raising power of average Americans, but proof of something illegal, perhaps crime or foreign meddling.
"The fact that Obama received over 600 million should make all of us, democrat and republican, wonder where this huge amount of money came from," continues the writer, reaching into his pocket for a couple ball-bearings, which he begins to click together -- tink-tink, clickety-chink. That money might be from Chinese military intelligence he reveals!
Now, DD had an excellent dessert tonight, ice cream and frozen strawberries.
And an hour ago, I sent for another portion but got only the ice cream. There weren't any more strawberries. And pilfering is a serious offense in wartime.
I don't believe that you godless un-American socialist Democrat-Marxists and terrorists honestly consumed a gallon of strawberries without stealing some. So I've filled the empty strawberry canister with sand so that we can have a demonstration.
How many portions of ice cream and strawberries did you have?
Two?
I'm doling out a scoop of sand for each portion.
This tureen I'm scooping from holds as much sand as we had strawberries tonight.
How much sand is left? A quart, maybe? But the strawberries were all gone when I asked for them.
Have any of you an explanation for the quart of missing strawberries? Someone else finished them for us!
We will all investigate to find out who's responsible for this crime!
Wait! Wait! Got carried away there. We now return to our regular transmission.
"Public schools are encouraging children to vote for Obama, newspaper cartoonists drawing dispicable [sic] images of Sarah Palin and far right wing websites spewing vile hate speech 24/7," one continues to read, noting a Freudian slip.
Children, being encouraged to vote for Obama! That's illegal! And it has started to rain frogs, too.
While many participate in the GOP's encapsulated group delusion -- that they're the only true Americans as they redraw election maps and cherry-pick the polls for anomalies which deliver unto them victory, not everyone can be stone cold crazy.
And that explains why Obama will win Pennsylvania on November 4. The challenge was to not only make a good case, but to also get out voters capable of naturally offsetting any Republican advantage in the middle parts of the state.
Two accounts of the McCain rally in Pottsville, written by a Schuylkill County Republican are here and here.
They're good, refreshing, after the usual doses of stock enmity and conspiracy cant.
But in Pottsville, McCain preached to his choir.
The day before his arrival, the local newspaper wrote that registered Republicans enjoyed an advantage of 4,000 over registered Democrats in county, if it was actually true -- much narrower than I recall in the the late Eighties.
It's my hunch that while McCain will win in the county, he'll do so by a narrower margin than predicted and that this will be reflected throughout the normally more conservative mid-section of the state. Palin's stop in Hershey in Dauphin county was nationally publicized and while she did her usual thing, this time praising patriotic Americans, as opposed to pro-America Americans (it's still code for the other -- the kuffar), that region is far from a done deal. Dauphin County was one of only a couple in the hinterland which went for Obama in his primary loss to Hillary Clinton.
The Morning Call newspaper, always very careful with its editorials so as not to antagonize even a small portion of its readers, ran an editorial by a local prof stating McCain's "favorability among Pennsylvanians is sagging".
If such a thing had run in a think piece for the LA Times, it would mean almost nothing.
That it was published in the Call indicates the belief at all levels that McCain is almost certainly doomed in Pennsylvania. And one might conclude that the margins of victory in those parts of the state where he can win -- the area between Philly and Pittsburgh -- won't be particularly great, and in some cases, may flip from traditionally Republican in presidential elections, to Democrat.
Many have noted it's almost impossible to satirize the GOP. Making up a story about McCain telling his audience the Great Cthulhu was going to be made tax collector in an Obama administration in order to collect treasure and and eat children isn't that far from some of the rant spilling out of the far right.
Take old Tetany and Co. at the Lehigh Valley Conservative. As it gets closer to the election, the more unfastened it is.
DD can't make up stuff better than this:
"As with anyone who would be king, Obama will take our money and our property in ever-larger amounts. Our children will be saddled with debt and beholden to a bloated government that will enslave the very people it promised to help. We will be at the mercy of our enemies. And no matter how bleak or desperate our own lives becomes, the leaders in Obama’s government will always thrive; such people always do."
"... since today is Sunday, I will take the liberty of making an observation with a more Biblical bent," the reader is told. And then one gets the story of Samuel and a wayward people who rejected God for a king.
Of course, the king is the other guy, one to be described with idiot savant metaphors taken from scripture, artlessly cobbled together to ram home the point that you've become a tool of evil. It's gold-plated intelligence-insulting stuff.
Since shortly after 9/11, DD has spent some time reading various jihadi terror texts, electronic documents the purpose of which is to describe the fashioning of a variety of weapons from materials found at home.
Rants calling Americans kuffars -- unbelievers, those who are to be condemned by god -- invariably accompany them. The foaming from John McCain's GOP is just like that stuff, only it doesn't use the word kuffar. Instead, the US kuffar is defined by his party and where he or she lives and exhortations to "pro" and/or "patriotic" America.
It's excrement, a manure to gag on which the Republican party has -- in the alleged name of country -- attempted to stuff down the throats of Americans.
If you're not with them, you're kuffar. You're damned, guilty of everything bad -- socialism, Marxism, disbelief in god, a collaborator with mortal enemies, a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is a rancid and sick ideology, one now inextricably entwined with the evangelical Christian belief that one can pick and choose who to condemn using your own special deli platter of faith, as long as that interpretation puts you up in Heaven, and those you do not care for down in Hell.
Get thee behind me Satan -- it tells ya. And if you don't believe in the Republican way, you're ...
And the devil is always capable of anything, which is why one reads, written dead serious, ridiculous and thoroughly rotten tripe like this:
"We have the makings of a dictator in Obama, since the MSM, the courts and the Democrat party will give Obama all the power he wants. The Republicans will be powerless! What are our options in a situation like this? A military coup?"
There's no civility, no room for belief that we face common problems to which we all would dearly love to find good solutions. There is just the enemy. And as it looks more and more like the enemy will triumph, the warnings get more dire, apocalyptic and shot through with irrational conspiracy theories.
If Barack Obama, for instance, has raised a lot of money, it is because it has been done through criminal enterprise.
"Just heard on the Fox news channel that most of Obama’s over 600 million in contributions came in from 'quicky' credit cards," rants old Tetany.
"These are credit cards that one can buy like a gift card at walmart. There is no name on the card, just a number that can be used by anyone and can also come from anywhere in the world. We know that foreign contributions are illegal, but using these cards, these kind of contributions are next to impossible to track. With over 600 million coming in for Obama, something has to be wrong!"
It never occurs to the writer that Fox might be just making it all up. DD has contributed to the Obama campaign through e-mail push-button debit card transaction. And there's nothing suspicious about it, the name's on the bank card. But if the Democratic Party has realized that it can raise money bombs through distributed contribution from ordinary citizens, who are all identified, on the Internet -- and the cash raised has crushed the Republican Party's own fund-raising by comparison, then there must be something wrong with it.
In the mind of the GOP loyalist this is not evidence of the fund-raising power of average Americans, but proof of something illegal, perhaps crime or foreign meddling.
"The fact that Obama received over 600 million should make all of us, democrat and republican, wonder where this huge amount of money came from," continues the writer, reaching into his pocket for a couple ball-bearings, which he begins to click together -- tink-tink, clickety-chink. That money might be from Chinese military intelligence he reveals!
Now, DD had an excellent dessert tonight, ice cream and frozen strawberries.
And an hour ago, I sent for another portion but got only the ice cream. There weren't any more strawberries. And pilfering is a serious offense in wartime.
I don't believe that you godless un-American socialist Democrat-Marxists and terrorists honestly consumed a gallon of strawberries without stealing some. So I've filled the empty strawberry canister with sand so that we can have a demonstration.
How many portions of ice cream and strawberries did you have?
Two?
I'm doling out a scoop of sand for each portion.
This tureen I'm scooping from holds as much sand as we had strawberries tonight.
How much sand is left? A quart, maybe? But the strawberries were all gone when I asked for them.
Have any of you an explanation for the quart of missing strawberries? Someone else finished them for us!
We will all investigate to find out who's responsible for this crime!
Wait! Wait! Got carried away there. We now return to our regular transmission.
"Public schools are encouraging children to vote for Obama, newspaper cartoonists drawing dispicable [sic] images of Sarah Palin and far right wing websites spewing vile hate speech 24/7," one continues to read, noting a Freudian slip.
Children, being encouraged to vote for Obama! That's illegal! And it has started to rain frogs, too.
While many participate in the GOP's encapsulated group delusion -- that they're the only true Americans as they redraw election maps and cherry-pick the polls for anomalies which deliver unto them victory, not everyone can be stone cold crazy.
And that explains why Obama will win Pennsylvania on November 4. The challenge was to not only make a good case, but to also get out voters capable of naturally offsetting any Republican advantage in the middle parts of the state.
Two accounts of the McCain rally in Pottsville, written by a Schuylkill County Republican are here and here.
They're good, refreshing, after the usual doses of stock enmity and conspiracy cant.
But in Pottsville, McCain preached to his choir.
The day before his arrival, the local newspaper wrote that registered Republicans enjoyed an advantage of 4,000 over registered Democrats in county, if it was actually true -- much narrower than I recall in the the late Eighties.
It's my hunch that while McCain will win in the county, he'll do so by a narrower margin than predicted and that this will be reflected throughout the normally more conservative mid-section of the state. Palin's stop in Hershey in Dauphin county was nationally publicized and while she did her usual thing, this time praising patriotic Americans, as opposed to pro-America Americans (it's still code for the other -- the kuffar), that region is far from a done deal. Dauphin County was one of only a couple in the hinterland which went for Obama in his primary loss to Hillary Clinton.
The Morning Call newspaper, always very careful with its editorials so as not to antagonize even a small portion of its readers, ran an editorial by a local prof stating McCain's "favorability among Pennsylvanians is sagging".
If such a thing had run in a think piece for the LA Times, it would mean almost nothing.
That it was published in the Call indicates the belief at all levels that McCain is almost certainly doomed in Pennsylvania. And one might conclude that the margins of victory in those parts of the state where he can win -- the area between Philly and Pittsburgh -- won't be particularly great, and in some cases, may flip from traditionally Republican in presidential elections, to Democrat.
posted by George Smith at 3:36 PM
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