1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Makoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Makoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues - and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US - are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews - and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel - a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism - to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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Climate change, on the other hand . . .

It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow - except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.

In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens - trees who normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn - covered in snow.

We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.

Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.

I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.

1. Hit him in the neck with a brick.
2. Take his space helmet away at the last minute.
3. Set him on fire.
4. Wait about a century.
5. Nail him to a tree.
6. Shoot him often enough.
7. Shoot him too often.
8. Keep his hospital from treating his cancer.
9. Hit him near the neck with a brick.
10. Break him with a wheel.
11. Put him in a gas chamber for being a Jew.
12. Let him eat nothing but brass.
13. Delegate it to a mob het up by his honoring his Iraq-casualty sibling’s lack of faith.
14. Bombard him with a fatal level of radiation after his grip on the screwdriver holding you away from the other plutonium hemisphere slips.
15. Keelhaul him.
16. Break him without a wheel.
17. Put him in a gas chamber for having a shitty lawyer.
18. Find a way to give him kwashiorkor.
19. Hit a brick with his neck.
20. Pulp up a McSweeneys and feed it to him with arsenic.
21. Put him in Lyndon Johnson’s way.
22. Carve out his heart and eat it with chili to make sure the sun will rise next year.
23. With kindness and a dirk.
24. With just the dirk.
25. Get him and his idiot friend drunk and have them reenact that pencil thing the Joker did.
26. Wait until he’s black and about to use the phone and then shove him in front of a NYPD officer.
27. Put him in between fundamentalist oil warlords and wait.
28. Give him a blood transfusion before the vector for HIV is fully understood.
29. The same way that one guy did in that urban legend.
30. Use the brick again.
31. With a laser.
32. Provoke a nuclear war with needlessly aggressive military maneuvers just inside of Warsaw Pact radar.
33. Rob him of his manhood in the worst war in modern history and wait for machismo to take its course.
34. Refuse to heed warnings about the cold weather on Cape Canaveral.
35. Rend him asunder with a series of dogs.
36. Fill his uterus with air.
37. Botch any surgery you like.
38. Sandblast him.
39. Tell the Don about his wire.
40. Convince him to punch the President.
41. Leave him to the mercy of savage explorers with foreign germs.
42. With a .22, but don’t kill a mockingbird - they bring nothing but joy to the world.
43. Charge the stage and gut him with a katana.
44. Encourage him with likeable teen-oriented characters to regard a dangerous, addictive, and expensive habit as cool and desirable.
45. Grenade up the ass.
46. Get your running mate to convince a bunch of terrified wingnut cowards he’s a Muslim.
47. Too much or too little water.
48. Rip out his gonads and his head.
49. Treat his clearly suicidal behavior as part and parcel with his avant-garde literature.
50. Just keep shitting on him until he stops moving.
51. Bury him face-down in the sun.
52. Anthropomorphize large predators, render him retarded, and put him in the zoo.
53. Fire him from a cannon.
54. Just shoot him with the cannon.
55. Work him to death.
56. Literally throw him under the bus.
57. Pay him so much money to engage in highly competitive ceremonialized bloodsport that he is essentially forced to use performance-enhancing drugs, and wait for him to die of either injury or cirrhosis.
58. Go for the soft spot.
59. Use him as a pinata.
60. Manhandle him until he winds up in front of the third rail and pisses himself.
61. Paint him a completely unrealistic picture of ‘natural’ childbirth and let him exsanguinate a fifth of the time.
62. Fuck his brains out in a slasher pic.
63. Fuck his brains out anywhere else.
64. Drop a sledgehammer on him from a great height.
65. Really, anything that gets his brains out will do.
66. Throw a brick at his face.
67. Miss and hit him in the neck with a brick.
68. Have him help sign up and protect black voters in the 60s.
69. Convince him you need to practice your chainsawing.
70. Throw a series of switches after he has bade his heartwarming cinematic farewell.
71. Make sure he’s an Anne Rice character.
72. Punch a bunch of holes in his scuba gear.
73. Shoot him with a neurotoxin-tipped dart for invading your isolated clan’s territory.
74. Tell an important Russian he’s a communist / kulak.
75. Wait until September 9, 1976, assuming he’s Mao Zedong.
76. Tell your friends specific details about his ship’s route and cargo for no real reason.
77. Hook him on drugs and keep them illegal.
78. Get one of the other Minutemen to find the water they leave out for him and salt it.
79. Drive a wooden stake into his heart with a stout hammer.
80. Paint him with gold paint all the way and shiv him repeatedly.
81. Syphilis.
82. Marry an even older one and you won’t have to.
83. Keep on pistolwhipping him - it’s not as easy as the movies make it look.
84. Order the opposing gladiator to kill him.
85. Make him pretty and leave him in prison or the Eastern Front.
86. Keep air away from his brain.
87. Deliberately ignore him as you bulldoze Palestinian homes.
88. Piss on him, assuming you piss hydrofluoric acid.
89. Leave him unsupervised in his crib.
90. Participate in a culture of perfection which encourages him to out-pretty the other girls by starving himself.
91. Teach him the Method and film a Howard Hughes biopic with him.
92. Leave him to fend for himself in the cold ruins of American industry.
93. Get him to catch your darts.
94. Convince him that communism poses a grave threat to his homeland that can only be averted by surrendering his civilian life and killing things in a South Asian jungle, then wait until he falls onto a bunch of sticks with shit on them.
95. Cut him up and leave him in the refrigerator purely to screw with his husband, your superpowered nemesis.
96. Beat him to death with a plastic explosive.
97. Put him in Thunderdome until the law of averages wins out.
98. See to it he has incriminating information on the Clintons, then, with a solid axe, break open his ribs from behind and pull out his lungs.
99. Have a blacksmith forge him by mistake.
100. Tee him up to kick the football, and then - in an oft-repeated and soon-iconic moment symbolizing to a generation of Americans the caprice of luck, expectations, society, and the opposite sex, hit him in the neck with a brick.

There is a distinct area which many characterize as ‘Appalachia’ that emerges distinctly when you look at the counties that voted for McCain in 2008 by a higher margin than for Bush in 2004. The strong temptation is to write this off as ‘racism’, but I don’t think that’s technically accurate.

What must be remembered is the regional divide between what in Virginia were known as the ‘tuckahoe’ and ‘cohee’ - between the early Baptist Scots-Irish subsistence pastoralists and later primary truck-workers and the largely Anglican planter aristocracy which wound up decaying and then modernizing into what we know as the Deep South.

These areas were electrified and linked firmly to the outside world in living memory; except for the areas overlapping with the Rust Belt they’ve never had a major stake in American exports or the global economy, and - most importantly - they were never host to any serious attempts at slave-holding plantations, were subject to only extremely sporadic and occasional black migration from the Deep South, and have never seen significant immigration and only very rarely have even seen internal emigration (the large exception being the initial wave of Scots-Irish settlers moving inward as usable tidewater land became valuable for cotton production and the pre-Revolutionary strictures on westward movement disappeared - and those largely settled the westward leg of the Cohee boomerang).

As Tim Krieder suggested in The Pain - When Will It End’s America’s Scum Belt, the motto of the area could well be ‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ - not exactly hostile, but far from friendly, and a gentle and constant reminder of the area’s fundamental resistance to outside influence. The post-Civil War mainstreaming of pro-Confederate opinion in the area spawned the secondary, ahistoric rallying cry of the secessionist and states’ rights movement - ‘We just want to be left alone’.

Clinton’s campaign, which faced after Super Tuesday a primary map which was nothing like as favorable as she would have needed to cinch the nomination before the convention, realized that there was one reliable way to get the whites of the South, who had (with few exceptions) gained little from racism and didn’t hold the oppression of blacks as near and dear as the Republicans had hoped - pointing out Obama’s exoticness.

Not in general terms, either - he was an elitist! a bold young man, in stark contrast with the region’s tradition of political lifers! Maybe possibly just could be gay, certainly not a member of their church, and by God, a black- just like they have in Richmond!

This was a sound strategy for capturing the region, but the problem is that even coming from a campaign with reasonable liberal bonafides, the entire exercise stank to outside observers of racism. Clinton won Pennsylvania but lost the Carolinas, which should have been clear evidence that she wasn’t going to smash Obama in the border South so badly that the convention would decide anything.

Of course, there’s nothing the Republicans like more than other people’s ideas, and sure enough the McCain campaign decided to plagarize this one. They started drawing contrasts between the Democrats and ‘real Americans’, started calling the tidelanders Communists, started suggesting that Obama wasn’t just black but a dangerous radical.

This didn’t exactly endear him to the High Cohee - after all, they don’t believe they have a monopoly on being Americans, they were (witness Pogo, for Chrissake) pretty indifferent to red-baiting throughout modern history, and they had less objection to blackness per se than its presence in their lives.

But the fallout was incredible. In a moment, the flailing effort to capture the south of Virginia suddenly alienated everyone outside of its panhandle - he was clearly trying to pander to a group that everyone outside of Appalachia saw as ignorant hicks, and he wasn’t even doing it convincingly. You can excuse Clinton’s seeming race-baiting away on it simply being how things work in Appalachia, but a campaign comprising an Arizonan and an Alaskan couldn’t come even close to pretending that. It won him West Virginia, but it cracked the Republican hold on the Deep South - which knew and held in contempt the cohee opinion of their big-city decadence - and it’s probably opened a suppurating wound in the Southern Strategy.

In short: we can excuse away charges of ‘racism’ against the Clinton campaign on this basis. They knew the difference, in a way it would take someone from Appalachia to be familiar with, between hating blacks and holding everything outside the near and familiar world in a sort of sweeping contempt - but that difference never occurred to anyone on McCain’s staff. Huckabee might have been able to pull it off - but McCain’s dog whistle was never even close to inaudible. Heck of a job, Johnny.

With apologies to Scott -

“In 2008, we ran an angry geezer and a crazy moose-hunter, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2012, we ran the crazy moose-hunter and a plumber/country singer/professional bald man, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2016, we ran a doughy giggler who touched himself and made high-pitched gawping noises whenever he saw a woman, and a street preacher who screamed “HOMONUPS NEVER!” over and over during his speeches, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2020, we ran a clone of Adolf Hitler and a bucket of frozen embryos, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2024…”

First they elected a moderate paleocon,
And I said nothing, because fuck atheists.
Then they elected an angry old man,
And I said nothing, because fuck Clinton.
Then they elected a spic-loving nepotist,
And I said nothing, because fuck the poor.
Then they elected a hardline right-wing race-baiter,
And I said nothing, because fuck the blacks.
Then they elected a shrieking empty suit to whip up angry crowds,
And I said nothing, because fuck most of America.
And when the time came for me to say something,
There was no one left to elect.
I blame the liberal media.
Fags.

rapture - a phenomenon for which I have observed no existing name in which the President strategically appoints legislative opponents to desirable Cabinet positions.

Rapture works owing to an amendment and a convention: the amendment holds that the Governor of each state may be invested with the power to temporarily fill vacancies until the term ends and/or the seat can be filled permanently by special election - usually during the next biennial election, although there are exceptions to this. The state legislature has the power to regulate this locally. In three cases - AK, MA, and AZ - the governor has no such power and the election is to occur within a set period

The convention is that the Governor is anticipated to appoint acting senators by party. This means that there is no obligation on anyone’s part to elect a Senator from the same party as the preceding, although it is not particularly common for Senators who were elected comfortably to see the seat’s party change permanently after their absention.

See a map of potential raptures (Dem and GOP) here.

Assuming a Democratic administration (the alternative would require an unimaginable succession of deaths at this point), the following Republican Senators are eligible for rapture (colors indicate Presidential vote, and italics indicate leaders, whips, chairmen, or other essentially unrapturable senators)

Arizona has two GOP senators - John McCain and Jon Kyl - but appointments result in special elections immediately rather than following an appointment, making rapture impractical.
Iowa - Chuck Grassley.
Kansas - Pat Roberts; Sam Brownback.
Kentucky - Jim Bunning; Mitch McConnell.
Missouri - Kit Bond.
Maine - Olympia Snowe; Susan Collins.
North Carolina - Richard Burr.
New Hampshire - Judd Gregg.
Ohio - George Voinovich.
Oklahoma - Jim Inhofe; Tom Coburn.
Pennsylvania - Arlen Specter.
Tennessee - Lamar Alexander; Bob Corker.
Wyoming - Mike Enzi; John Barrasso.

In addition, several Democratic senators in states with Republican governors - Daniels Inouye and Akaka of HI and Senator Feinstein of CA - are old enough that there might be reasonable worry their seats will be lost to the GOP. This is especially true of the two older senators, both WWII veterans (and incidentally Asian-Americans, the former a Nisei and the latter a Hawaiian-born Chinese-American) whose replacements would be Republicans facing a relatively weak local Democratic party and historically low turnout for reelection.

Some of these raptures would be politically sound. (Grassley has been suggested repeatedly for Agriculture, for instance.) Others would be inconcievable - both Senators from Oklahoma have little experience outside of right-wing kulturkampf, and with the GOP in shambles it seems like a serious risk that even a fairly low-profile Senator might use the Cabinet as a springboard to an effective 2012 run.

As someone who agrees with the broad strokes of the argument that Wright was treated as an unacceptable radical for - the sentiment that the vicious inequity that America spent centuries promoting were a shame on us all, evidently only acceptable to believe if that inequity involves people enjoying their sex lives - I’m not that personally attached to America in and of itself. I find its ideals admirable and am often impressed with its people’s basic benevolence; what impresses me about the outcome of this election is the profound spirit of general amity.

As we sometimes have cause to remember - almost sadly, now that we have been made to swallow the bitter harvest sown by the blood-lusting Republicans - the reaction to 9/11 internationally was extremely similar to the reaction to 9/11 internally. While there were certainly some people who reacted with a sort of nasty, unwelcome, and almost always vicarious fury (I have never met among the ‘nuke Mecca’ crowd a man or woman closer than six degrees to a WTC casualty), the predominant reaction to the day’s tragedy was sorrow and support. It’s worthwhile to compare it to the London tube bombings - the right had so fully coopted the basic idea of suffering that to express sympathy for the day’s victims of al Qaeda had been drummed and massaged into an informal referendum on murdering wholly unrelated people in Iraq.

We have, for the last six years, been convinced for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy military-industrial fuckwads surrounding Cheney that the world hates America, that we’re fundamentally incompatible with the people and values of Europe and England, and that there exists a foreign contingent that reflexively sneers at us and wishes us failure. Of course, the latter is only a simple case of misidentification; there is such a foreign continent. The problem is, they are - like Mark “The Human Jizz” Steyn and Christopher “Intefatigable Doughty Socialist Fag” Hitchens - cheerleaders for the current vile administration, eager to provide philosophical or psychological fig-leaves to the American neoconservatives’ comprehensive contempt for the Constitution, international law, and human dignity. Whether you’re a jack-ass whose contribution to socialist theory revolves around how awesome you are and how awful darkies are or a vile, race-baiting neo-Nazi who gleefully mocked the American victims of his intellectual cousins in Oklahoma, the Bush Administration had a warm spot in its heart and a soft spot in its brain for you.

The farthest fringes of the right have been conscripted to project a sort of gleeful, shit-eating hate to foreigners. The cowboy stereotype is a kind one compared to the one presented by Broder, Rice, and all the fuck-the-world gang - our cultural, political, and economic leadership has spent the last six years screaming hate at the world, insisting that we’re ignorant, bellicose monsters whose firepower entitles us to anything we want, consistently presenting the bare basics of humanity as limp-wristed Foreignese gibberish.

And the same people who had spent those six years in a desperate struggle to preserve civilization from our government - who have seen terrorism, global warming, and diplomatic tension spiral out of control as a direct consequence of us - have erupted over the last few days in joy.

Of course, the totalitarian freeper goons - and their beloved America-hating dancing monkeys - have all erupted into passionate hate, wishing death and destruction on Obama and the country and shrieking in impotent rage at a country in the throes of collective triumph, cursing at a people who would not put another of their angry, rotten old men in power.

It’s not sufficient to spoil it, though - the sense, among Democrats and Republicans, the left and right, and the great majority of Americans and people of the world, that we’ve stepped back from the brink. We told a pair of candidates - who shrilly berated us for liking a man who had not only grown up in Chicago but was clearly a ni, who called us Communists for favoring a tax policy common to the entire first world, and whose sole agenda consisted of a long, unbreaking stream of hate-objects up to and including the Earth itself - to fuck right off, and we elected the country’s first black President in the process, an intelligent and genuinely decent man.

After all this time, the world - and we - didn’t know and couldn’t but hope that we still had it in us, that we were even in the loosest sense the same country that destroyed fascism and tamed the atom. The Republicans figured we didn’t - and we weren’t - and in front of the entire world we showed them just how wrong they were.

And that is why the world wept for joy - in the words of Tim Krieder, like a happy 9/11. Not just our allies - but friends throughout humanity, people happy to see us prosper without seething in desperate eagerness to see our enemies destroyed.

There will be a time for cynicism - the inside-baseball stuff, like the high-level appointment of Rahm Emanuel, has been all too disappointing so far - but after eight years of Bush I suspect we’re all happy just to enjoy these high days’ international comity, and rest secure in the knowledge that none of the usual thugs is in a position to exploit it.

Nevada is one of those states, common in but not exclusive to the West, where conventional partisan politics often have more to do with local loyalties than political ideology. In broad terms, you can see this in returns from prior elections: even in relatively good years for the Democrats, looking back at county-level elections shows even sparsely-populated Mineral County returning better results than than urban Storey and Washoe Counties, and Clark voting for the Democrat come hell or high water.

In this election, this shifted massively; while Obama only did marginally better at the polls in Clark than John Kerry or Al Gore, even having one of the country’s strongest rates of urban growth couldn’t account for the 14-point blowout in what would normally be an intensely divided state - a state which had favored McCain in the polls for most of the year and which had never been more than five points out of reach.

It has been common to suggest that the Republicans stayed home or refused to stand by McCain, but did not actively support Obama. This, too, is seriously difficult to defend: states like Nevada and Montana (which saw a similarly dramatic shift this year without actually changing colors) would be a natural lock for the Barr campaign - especially Nevada, where Paul came in second to Romney in the Republican caucus well before Romney reinvented himself as Reagan Junior. But the third-party vote was minuscule.

What has happened in Nevada is twofold:

1. The fall of the house of Bush
Nevada is, with the exception of a few issues like gun control and taxes, extremely middle-of-the-road politically. This has created an enormous problem for the local Republican party, which lacks the tradition of local independence that kept the GOP alive in New England a generation after its time. Between that and the uniquely distant relationship the local theocrats have with the national religious right (oppose Utah, where the local Republicans are strong enough and have enough power over politics that they could push the electorate to vote for Jack Chick), the last four years have been absolutely brutal on the state Republican machine.

2. The Generational Swing
As far as I’m concerned, the factor in John McCain’s loss of the Reno metro is the incoming generation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they were born and raised in a Reno which played cultural and economic second fiddle to Vegas. The Faustian pact with the largely rural, right-wing and Mormon east no longer had the gravity that got it formed in the first place; Reno’s movers and shakers, who have been faced for the whole of their generation with the binary choice between fleeing the Carson City ship or going down with it, have accepted that the Democrats are much more likely to benefit them as members of the urban middle-class.

Between these factors, we saw not just a slight uptick in Clark’s Democratic margin, but a violent, sudden shift by Washoe and Story to the blue. What remains to be seen is whether a new coalition will form, producing a state governed by an urban cordillera in competition with its exurbs and rural hinterland - or whether this election is a fluke. In the latter case, a good Republican candidate might just get Nevada close; in the former case, it might just be as accessible to the GOP as Vermont.

The current raft of talking points being run against Obama by the McCain campaign indicate that McCain’s people had planned at some point on Israel being a major selling point. The belief that elderly Jewish voters formed a swing bloc in Florida was crusty when McCain’s running mate was up in the air (nobody who’s been in America long enough to see Arabs as implacable race-enemies to Israel would also automatically associate blacks with anti-Semitic radicalism), and as has been repeatedly documented, the choice of an evangelical kulturkampfist seems to be enough to push non-Democratic Jewish seniors away from McCain.

What we’re seeing now is the McCain campaign’s early September attack lines from an alternate universe in which the RNC opened with the selection of Joe Lieberman as a running-mate. Lieberman could and - disgustingly - probably would convincingly argue that Khalidi is a dangerous pro-Palestinian radical; the best Palin can do is shout - with increasing vehemence at an unhearing crowd - “The new President is a niggarab!” It’s one of a series of loud, shrill dog-whistles that was clearly planned for a different campaign; the Republicans are currently running McCain’s campaign with Schmidt’s tactics, a kind of nasty compromise that pleases nobody, makes the paternal autocrats look petty and the fascist parvenus look over-grasping.

I suspect the next attack line is probably going to be an effort by McCain to spin the disastrous campaign against Lebanon as a triumph of democracy, followed by most of Election Day spent shrieking about how Obama doesn’t care about Israel. Short of calling him a secret Chinaman, I can’t imagine what the fuck else the Republicans have left.

So McCain and Palin have been trotting out the asinine canard about Bill Ayers; the slur has always been a little ridiculous, appealing to a convoluted guilt-by-colocation hermeneutic and a kind of racism which is politically dead. ‘Barack Hussein Obama, ergo wooga-booga Mahometan’ aims for a relatively open and well-understood set of fears, but does so in such an obvious and malignant way that it’s actually impossible to do without it backfiring. The Ayers slur, as much as it’s racially charged, relies on associating any politically active black man with radical Marxism - a well-pedigreed bit of right-wing hysteria evolving from the converse, back when being black was regarded as inherently offensive and ’socialist’ wasn’t automatically abusive. It seems likely that Bill Penn, in pushing the Ayers-radical storyline, chose fairly shrewdly - it lacks even the most basic corraborating detail (the closest anyone can associate the two is sitting on a board together with Republicans, independents, and non-political figures to improve education), and it appeals to something far-fetched enough that someone would really have to be desperate to vote against a black man to connect the dots on it.

The Democratic caucus, owing to a hypertrophied sense of conservative perfidy and backwardness, is profoundly reluctant to accept people for a number of reasons. Feingold would face serious difficulties if he were the only challenger in the field; Frank would be turned down in favor of even some nonentity like Warner, and God forbid we found an actual Arab. The Bradley Effect seems to be much more prominent internally than externally.

But whatever people might think of black people in the aggregate - and it’s true that the conservative part of the electorate is fairly backwards about this - any but the most lurid racists have internalized the meritocratic idea central to America sufficiently that even groups who can be vilified in polite society could still make their way into office. Between that and its relative obscurity, attempting to prove that Obama was the devious protege of the Weathermen by pointing to a picture of him and saying “See? Black!” doesn’t work for anyone who could be expected to vote for a black man to begin with.

All of this has occurred to the Bush/McCain electoral team; what their using the Ayers meme indicates is that their opposition research has turned up nothing and they’re beginning to go into a shrieking panic. The slur, unsurprisingly, gains nothing by Palin’s usual half-baked country-frying; I’m not confident that ‘palling around’ is ever even used the way she meant it, but who knows.

At this point, McCain is down no less than 5 points and possibly as much as 12, he needs to win not only every state currently voting for him but every state leaning towards Obama - especially a seemingly unwinnable Florida and an increasingly hostile Ohio and Virginia - and all he’s got left up his sleeve is a shotgun wedding. This is what it means that he’s throwing shit like this up in the air - he’s having Palin shout about Ayers because it’s less embarrassing than anything else she could do, and that’s saying a lot.