Assmissile’s hagiographic rendering of the life of the inarticulate, inept W continues:

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

Assmissile should add: Bush’s flatulence smells like roses and his stool tastes like ambrosia. Saying that Obama should pattern his public speaking after George Bush is like saying Kobe Bryant should pattern his basketball game after Mark Landsberger.

Where the hell was this idiot when Bush said this:

Or this:

I could go on, ad infinitem.

Of course, Hinderaker is the myopic who once called Bush a man of “extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” And referred to W as “our Churchill,” and in doing so managing to miss some critical distinctions between the two men, starting with the fact that Churchill likely wrote more books than Bush ever read.

Right wing tool and War Pimp Ledeen is suddenly concerned about the “ignorance” of the American electorate.

What makes me angriest: that there is no outcry against election fraud; that the media have become pure political instruments; that our “educational system” has produced an ignorant electorate.

Years and years ago, during Watergate, Barbara and I were living in Rome, and we had lots of journalist friends (I was then a correspondent for The New Republic, so…we saw lots of Italian journalists). They were all openly jealous of America, because they saw American journalism as clearly superior to theirs. American journalists reported, while they, the Italians, were doing politics. “We could bring down our entire Political Class,” they would say, “we all have information so devastating that no politician could survive,” but they didn’t publish it, because they didn’t see an acceptable alternative. We would tell them that their job was not to make political decisions, but to report the news, and let the people decide. But they couldn’t; they were doing politics. And we felt superior, because American journalism, we thought, just reported the news and let the people decide.

Well, that’s over and done with now. Never before has the ignorance of the electorate been so intensely cultivated as in this election. We all know that major publications and broadcasters have simply refused to report news, and what they did report was spun politically. And among the stories they are not reporting, is the massive electoral fraud, from the “where is all that money coming from?” to the “how dare state officials refuse to verify the identity of voters?” one, to the refusal to report, day by day, on Joe Biden’s scandalously inept, incompetent, and often meretricious campaign. Instead, they obsess on every real and imagined misstatement by Sarah Palin, who for me has been the most attractive of the four candidates.

In Ledeen’s world, “ignorance” equates to the refusal of the American electorate to be distracted by all the peripheral bullshit the Right threw against the wall, and the unwillingness of the Press to follow the lead of Judy Miller and astroturf Republican bullshit straight onto the front page any longer, somehow marks its demise as a worthy institution.

He scorns the American electorate for not being susceptible to the Right’s stream of ACORN-Socialist-Ayers-Voting Fraud-Islamofacism-fear, the way GOP-crafted memes dominated previous electoral cycles. In his mind, it was the “ignorance” of the American people which made them unwilling to swallow the foreign policy by osmosis crap, whereby Palin gained foreign policy experience invisibly wafting across the Bering Straight. They were concerned with the actual statements of a candidate, rather than the imagined conspiracies of brown people illegally voting fabricated by GOP propagandists.

The American people were understandably unwilling to buy into 4 more years of the same old neocon bullshit, not willing to buy into the fatuous crap that the Ledeens of the world dished up as a kind of intellectual dessert the last 8 years. That’s not ignorance, that’s survival instinct.

Donald over at the American Power has lost his mind with grief. Obama isn’t a communist or a Muslim, he’s just, well, the Devil or Beezleobama.

Yes, that’s right … if you meet him, look out, give him some sympathy. Bow down low, “The One” is here, and you must pay due penitence for the sins of your fathers, your white fathers. If not, he’ll lay your soul to waste with the phenomenal power of the American state - a state structure now to be captured - more heavily than ever before - like nothing James Madison envisioned - by the largest radical left-wing interest group contingent in U.S. history.

~~~

This I believe of Barack Obama: Not imminent physical destruction of our nation (though not completely discounted), but destruction nonetheless. Destruction of the moral light that never lets the malignant growth of evil roll across the land. No, America’s enemies will get a respite, where they can regroup and reconsider what they want from America. There will be a reckoning, at some point, of course. Because even those who have been hoodwinked by the hope-i-ness of change will not long tolerate the yoke of Third World despotism and terror over this proud nation. A despotism seeking to behead the American individual, and the culture that bore him - all of this, dearest Americans, faster than you can say Madrid 2004.

My masthead is now black in mourning for the missed opportunity of victory in John McCain’s moral right and history. This change is permanent, at least as far as my current [ed: exceedingly fragile] state of mind dictates.

Like I said, Right Blogostan is having a collective stroke. A continuation of Republican misrule represented salvation to them, and a change in course during a gale away from the lee shore, a form of damnation.

From the shrieking harpy/author of “Obama is Malcolm X’s Love Child” and winner of this year’s Oscar for Batshit-Crazy, Pam Geller:

Exit question: Assuming even a very small fraction of all this [wildly insane, unsourced, and completely fabricated] dirt [shit I just threw against the wall] is true, do we really want to put the fate of our country in this guy’s hands?”

Pam Atlas, for “Barack Obama is the secret son of Malcolm X.”

No, I’m not kidding, and neither is the new poster child for Batshit Crazy.

Proving once again that to the Batshit Crazy, all negroes look alike.

As people like George Will and Francis Fukuyama bail on McCain, lunatic people like this are the ones left to support him.

Via Balloon Juice and Ezra Klein

The phony, non-existent “African Press International” responsible for the Michelle Obama interview hoax is at it again, claiming that it is going to air the tape of the fictitious interview (despite failing on repeated promises to do so earlier) and also claims that Obama’s campaign has offered the ersatz press agency an imaginary bribe in order not to air the non-existent tape of its never-happened interview, fittingly on FauxNews.

Needless to say, the wingnuts at Macsmind are impressed and all atwitter with anticipation:

This won’t seem to die, but here we go. Remember that African news site that stated Michelle Obama called them to cry “racism” in reference to the detractors of Obama? Well they say now the agreement with Fox News has been reached and the tapes will play any day now.

I would just counsel these poor saps to remember the immortal words of George. W. Bush:

Immediately afterwords, Larry Johnson is going to air the “whitey” video on O’Reilly and Confederate Yankee is going to produce a copy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Foreign Islamic Birth on Hannity & Colmes.

Per the Associated Press: McCain says Obama will ’say anything’ to win

Republican John McCain, taking a cross-state bus tour aimed at keeping vote-rich Florida from swinging to the Democrats, on Thursday accused rival Barack Obama of saying “anything to get elected.”

You mean like making crazy statements about ACORN stealing the vote for the GOP and McCain palling around with terrorists? Like claiming his clueless Vice President Candidate who doesn’t know what the Vice President does or what constitutes the Bush Doctrine is ready to be President? Like suspending his campaign to save the world and claiming credit for passing a finance bill that doesn’t pass, only to later claim he killed it? Like telling Dave Letterman he has to cancel his appearance to return immediately to Washington, then going to an interview with Katie Couric — which Letterman can see via internal feed?

What next? Maybe McCain can accuse Obama of being a rich elitist with 8 mansions and a beer heiress wife? Or complain about how Obama grimaces and grunts while he’s speaking during a debate? Or rudely refers to his opponent as “that one!”

Or maybe McCain will call just Obama short, old, and ill-tempered.

Anything can happen once a candidate crosses the rubicon of batshit-crazy.

As polling shows McCain falling farther behind and his campaign’s message floating farther and farther off any track which resonates with the American Public, Wingnuttia is awash in cognitive dissonance. Wizbang:

The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition. I wrote earlier about the fact that of the major polling groups handling national and state polls, all of them are based deep in pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative territories.

~~~

What I think is happening, is this - the polls’ headquarters were based deep in liberal territory, where the assumption was that Obama’s candidacy would actually create a groundswell of pro-democrat voters unseen in the country since 1932. That McCain is more experienced with the key issues than Obama was ignored, that the historical significance of the debates shows that the effects appear several weeks later was also ignored. That the economy could be as reasonably blamed on the democrat-controlled Congress as on the republican President was never considered. That character would be a salient factor in the decisions of voters was rejected out of hand.

The polls are wrong. Make your own mind up, because your vote will matter.

From the Wikipedia entry for When Prophecy Fails, the classic study of emerging cognitive dissonance in a UFO cult where its belief system grew stronger even as massive evidence of the failure of the cult’s belief system and all it’s predictions accumulated.

Festinger stated that five conditions must be met, if someone is to become more fervent in a belief even after its disconfirmation:

* A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.

* The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.

* The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.

* Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.

* The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.

* The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

The Batshit Crazy Right has had 8 years to indulge in the various fantasies of Republican neoconservatism: a) ushering in pro-Western democracy in Iraq via military intervention, b) defeating al Qaeda decisively by expanding military conflicts in the Middle East, c) making America’s economy prosper beyond our wildest dreams through deregulation coupled with tax breaks for top income levels, d) the unbridled triumph of American militarism and neo-colonialism abroad, and e) the decisive capture of power by a permanent majority of radical social conservatives in American national politics.

None of the above things have occurred or are even remotely likely to occur under neoconservative policies, and yet the BCR cannot admit the failure of its ideology, even amid a Tsunami — or a category 5 hurricane — of disconfirmatory evidence.

Even as the McCain campaign degenerates into fit of off-message name-calling, robo-calls and $150,000 Nieman Marcus/Saks bills for its putative middle-class hockey mom of a Vice Presidential candidate, the mounting evidence of epic failure — the growing disaster looming in polls — has to be somehow refuted by the flimsiest of arguments: if the large polling companies, even those largely funded by Republicans, would only move their offices from New York to Wasilla, the polls would all show the impending McCain victory and reaffirm the efficacy of patently disastrous Neoconservative policies.

In a world class display of batshit crazy wingnuttery, Fraulein Konzentrationslager takes up the cause of faux-plumber, faux-independent, faux-undecided voter Joe the Plumber and his battle against the urgent phoniness of his story being reported by the Evil Em Ess Em. . . .

. . . . While simultaneously patting herself on the back for her stalking of sick child and S-CHIP advocate Graeme Frost. She could have reached an all time high in Wingnut hypocrisy by posting self-congratulations for getting hundreds of death threats issued against some college kids in Santa Cruz, but sadly wasn’t up to the task.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker is still, and always has been, an idiot.

After all, it takes a special aptitude for teh stoopid to call George W. Bush “a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.”