In the spirit of Randi Rhoads, for the second time linking Republicans and violent death as part of her on air “entertainment”, claiming Romney fans will go on a killing spree if McCain is nominated, we offer this version of the November Obambi Hunt.
Its ok to do a controversial parody if its actually funny and has resonance. This makes our cartoon hilarious and valid and in wonderfully campy bad taste, while Rhodes’ “humor” is merely boorish, offensive and divisive, as well as unfunny. Therefore, no one can criticize this PhotoShop in any way, shape or form, because its ironic self-referential post-modern political observational commentary and therefore immune to censor.
Well, Dick Morris was about week behind me in admitting he was wrong about Hillary definitely winning the nomination:
Since 2004, I have predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. But, given the consistently amazing performance of Obama, his superior organizational and fund-raising skills, his inspiration of young people, and the flat and completely uninspiring performance by Hillary, it looks to me like it will be Obama as the Democratic nominee.
The latest narrative is that Obama has the momentum to beat Clinton and then take the election from old man McCain. But Obama has yet to face a viable Republican opponent in his political career. Hillary can’t attack him on the issues because they are virtually the same on 99% of issues.
That’s why Bill was forced to take cheap shot personal attacks on Obama. McCain, unconstrained as Hillary is with having to fellate the far left nutroots, will not have this problem. Voters are largely unaware that Obama is the most left leaning out of 100 Senators. McCain’s team will soon advise them of this fact, and much more.
A lot of the shine elitist urban whites and middle class blacks see on Obama’s halo will be lost on working class whites and Hispanics, who currently back Hillary.
The best case for the Dems would be Hillary at the top of the ticket and Obama as Veep, but he may either refuse to take it when offered or she may refuse to offer it. After all, why would Obama want to be 3rd in line in Hillary’s White House?
Weirdly, now that everyone is getting on board for Obama, I feel a contrarian urge to bet that she will come back. After all, counter intuitive results seem to be the norm this nomination season.
So now I’m starting to lean back toward Hillary.
Hacks like Matthew Dowd are falling in line:
In doing the math on delegates, it looks highly likely that Obama will end up with a pledged delegate lead when all this is finished by June. Even if Hillary wins some big states along the way, Obama will score enough delegates to keep his count moving.
The super delegates (those 796 party folks who can decide on their own who to vote for and change their mind along the way) will be in an unenviable position when all is said and done. They will be getting unbelievable pressure, especially by the Clintons and their establishment backing, to “pledge” to one or the other.
But here is the deal: how does a party who has protested and screamed and yelled about counting all the votes, that the popular vote matters most, that an election was stolen by the Supreme Court in 2000, go against the votes and participation by voters in the Primary process???
The answer is: I think it’s impossible for the Democratic party establishment to go against voters in the Democratic primaries and caucuses.
So the bottom line is: Obama wins the plurality of pledged delegates, then the super delegates really have to go along with what the voters want. Otherwise, what kind of authenticity would the Democratic party have if it is not about counting the votes and it becomes the decision of the Democratic version of the Supreme Court???
That tired narrative that the Supreme Court “selected” Bush when what they did in actuality was stop the Florida State Supreme Court from inventing post-facto rules. The legislature, long before the election, mandated a recount if the election was within 2 percentage points; the recount was done and Bush confirmed the winner. That’s the end of the line, legally. What the Florida Court did was illegal, changing election rules by judicial fiat when the Constitution plainly states that electoral votes will be delegated in a “manner chosen by the legislature”, not the courts.
Ted Olsen has a nice column up about how Obama might have to use Olsen’s arguments against post facto rules changes if Clinton goes to court to try to seat Florida and Michigan delegates (via Captain’s Quarters).
How ironic. For over seven years the Democratic Party has fulminated against the Electoral College system that gave George W. Bush the presidency over popular-vote winner Al Gore in 2000. But they have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000: a winner of the delegate count, and thus the nominee, over the candidate favored by a majority of the party’s primary voters. ….
We all know full well what could happen next. The array of battle-tested Democratic lawyers who fought for recounts, changes in ballot counting procedures, and even re-votes in Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 would separate into two camps. Half of them would be relying on the suddenly-respectable Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision that overturned the Florida courts’ post-hoc election rules changes. The other half would be preaching a new-found respect for “federalism” and demanding that the high court leave the Florida court decisions alone.
Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore order in the Florida vote-counting in 2000? And, would Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the dissenters in Bush v. Gore, feel as strongly about not intervening if Sen. Obama was fighting against an effort to change a presidential election by changing the rules after the fact? Will there be a brief filed by Floridians who didn’t vote in their state’s primary because the party had decided, and the candidates had agreed, that the results wouldn’t count?
On another note, I’ve been reading a lot about how Obama would be a lot more vulnerable to Republican attacks than people are thinking right now, plus there is a hidden race factor, complicated by the Hispanic voting patterns that have been giving Hillary enough close wins (CA in particular) that have so far kept her in the race and make her a favorite in TX. Will they vote in the same numbers for Obama, or might they be actively hostile to his candidacy?
A pollster for Mrs Clinton said recently that the Hispanic voter had “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates”.
The CW seems to be he’d be harder to beat, but he has some REALLY liberal and out of the mainstream votes that R’s will pound him with. So far no one has said much about his actual record.
I’m stiil confident both of the Dems are flawed enough for McCain to eke out a victory. And it will help if he ignores “compromising” with the racist nativist Hispanic haters who are still unreconstructed Romney supporters vowing to sit the campaign out if he doesn’t. I hope he calls their bluff, the party is better off without the Malkinite wing, which is as reactionary, racist and retarded historically as the old John Birchers. A Sister Souljah moment repudiating Rush, Hannity and Mann Coulter would win him a lot more votes than it would lose, and the votes lost would be a plus for the party.
Next, a version of how not to do Photoshops: don’t include offensive ethnic stereotypes, pidgen English attempts at ridiculing a Mexican accent, and presenting Mexicans as filthy criminals.
Here is Townhall’s version of “humorous commentary”, an offensive, racist attack on Mexicans is every bit as bad as Jane Hamsher’s Lieberman in Blackface and it damages the party. Nice work, Townhall.
Obambi, hees my gut friend. Heee wants to open the border for us. Si.
With offensive crap like this to alienate the Hispanic vote Republicans might pick up from Democrats disaffected with Obama, its little wonder most Townhall nativists lined up with Romney. Working together they would have put together a coalition of anti-immigration obsessives and voters who either refused to vote for a woman or those who refused to vote for a black, and the Troglodyte Bloc with Mitt as its leader would have managed to lose all 50 states.
Our PhotoShop cartoon (at the top of the post), on the other hand will sparkle as a shining beacon of well-executed and incisive, intelligent political wit.
Bush and McCain understand, as pander-bear Romney could not, since he was trying to position himself as the far right candidate, that outreach to Hispanics will be essential to the Republican party if it is to have success in the next several decades. The nativist hostility to McCain is rooted in their hatred and venom for Hispanics. The party doesn’t need these guys, and the sooner it jettisons them so as not to be smeared with their bigotry the better.
The nomination of McCain also reinforces another theory of mine: that we are going to have a 50-50 Dem-Republican split for a long time, with neither gaining a decisive edge because whenever one side or the other starts to lag behind public opinion, they tack right or left: vis: Republicans nominating the candidate arguably best positioned to appeal to moderates and Hillary’s tacking to the center and even unapologetically hawkish on Iraq and Afghanistan (at times).
With advanced polling and focus group analysis, the two parties will tweak and adjust their platforms and candidates so as to maintain virtual parity between the 2 parties. This also cuts out the room for 3rd party candidates, who do best when running in the center (Perot) than running on the fringes (Jesse Jackson or Pat Buchanan)
Obama’s hard left voting record doesn’t conform to this trope and might kill him with moderates when they actually look closely (aided by McCain’s ads) at Obama’s votes.