Playing to the Base

I'm reading these stories this morning that leave me just wanting to wash my hands and walk away, but there's no place left to walk to. First, from WaPo, the Pit Bull on the stump:

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" said the crowd.

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Let's be charitable (although I don't know why I should be, but I'm basically a generous person): Palin's stretching it. Really stretching it. But this is the sort of thing we can look forward to for the next month, because the Republicans have nothing else to run on. But to have someone in your audience yelling out that a presidential candidate should be killed, and you go on and never bat an eyelash? Is this someone we want anywhere near the White House? (It seems to be beyond dispute that Sarah Palin is a compulsive liar, but the base doesn't care about that, because the lies are the ones they want to hear.)

Then you get a series of posts affirming Obama's wild-eyed radicalism from the Circle Jerk in the Corner, via hilzoy. This summation, by Andy McCarthy, is unbelievable:

"Obama's radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I'd suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about "change" but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability. With an enormous assist from the media, which does not press him for specifics, Obama has walked this line brilliantly. Absent convincing retractions of his prior radical positions, though, we should construe shrewd moves like the ostensibly reasonable Second Amendment position as efforts make him electable.

This is why Ayers is so important: it is a peek behind the curtain of Obama's rhetoric."

Hilzoy does a good job of taking this one apart, but what's instructive here is the caliber of the argument (I mean, lunacy isn't really all that instructive, in general, and McCarthy's summation is sheer lunacy): they all start with the assumption that Obama is, indeed, a wild-eyed radical, and then go through hoops to support it -- not with any facts, mind you (faith-based science doesn't use facts), but with really sketchy chains of "reasoning."

Barbara O'Brien came up with an insight that I think really gets to the core, talking about McCain's performance in the debate:

Last night and this morning some on the Right lambasted McCain for not bringing up Bill Ayers or Reverent Wright or the host of other red herrings the Moosewoman has been throwing lately. But he did not, and this shows us that at least some of McCain’s handlers make occasional visits to the real world.

The base can’t get enough of Ayers and Wright. The base is more interested in Obama’s alleged Muslim-terrorist ties than in the financial crisis. The base is out of its bleeping mind. But to Americans who are not lunatics, the sleazy allegations and hate speech the McCain campaign uses to fire up the base would have been shockingly out of place in last night’s debate. Think nude poll dancing at a church supper. It would have damaged McCain a lot more than Obama.

Put another way — the Right’s fantasy narratives and agenda cannot survive outside the Right’s fantasy world. Forced into a real-world context, they dissipate like smoke.

I'm in a discussion group with people who react this way -- any bit of dirt, even if it's not very dirty (and even if it's really about someone else), "proves" that Obama is not fit to be president, but any similar information about McCain is a "smear." They actually think that the Ayers "association" is relevant.

I'm hopeful, as O'Brien points out, that the vast majority, including independents, will see this for what it is -- desperation from a bankrupt ideology. They seem to.