Here Come De Sludge, Here Come De Sludge

It's actually no different from how the Republicans have run this entire campaign - using smear campaigns to make the case that Barack Obama is somehow risky, radical, a terrorist, a Muslim, exotic, not like you or your family. The latest is that they're planting these stories in the newspaper - literally:

Citizens United, the conservative group headed by notorious Whitewater scandalmonger David Bossie, is distributing hundreds of thousands of DVDs attacking Barack Obama's associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers in newspapers in Ohio, Nevada, and Florida this week, a group spokesperson confirms to us.

A reader in Ohio reports to us that she received a copy of the DVD, called "Hype: The Obama Effect," in her copy of the Columbus Dispatch this morning.

We checked in with Citizens United spokesperson Will Holley, who confirmed to us that the DVD was distributed in the Dispatch today, and will be disseminated in copies of the Cincinatti Enquirer and Plain Dealer tomorrow, followed by the Palm Beach Post and the Las Vegas Review Journal on Friday.

The wingers tried this before by shipping Obsession, a DVD designed to stoke fears about radical Islam. But this one is directly focused at Obama.

However, as ridiculous as the smears against Obama have been, some of the sludge being shoveled in the downticket races is even worse. Elizabeth Dole's desperate attempt to save her career is downright slanderous, not just to Kay Hagan but to atheists.

Dole's campaign has been calling attention to a Sept. 15 fundraiser that Hagan attended in Boston with author Wendy Kaminer and her husband, Woody Kaplan, who was on the advisory board of the Godless Americans political action committee and active in a group that promoted "secular" ideas.

The ad featuring Hagan airs a comment from one the organization’s leaders saying "There was no Jesus."

The announcer says "A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser in Kay Hagan’s honor."

"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?"

The best part of that story is the last line, "Recent polls have shown Hagan with a narrow lead over Dole." Well of course!

Kay Hagan is fighting back. She's a Sunday school teacher, for cryin' out loud. And the attack on "godlessness" evokes nothing so much as the 1940s. Apparently Liddy thinks she's running against Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Then there's outright assault.

On Friday, two Feder staffers approached Congressman Wolf in a public location to ask him some questions. Two different individuals who were accompanying Congressman Wolf (staffers? relatives? friends?) assaulted the Feder staffers, as you can see quite clearly in the video. The first Feder staffer was hit with a cane and then punched. The second staffer (as you will see on the video) was pinned to a wall and forcibly held there. All of this took place in the presence of Congressman Wolf, who stood by and did nothing to intervene.

The thug life has come to McCain-Palin rallies as well, but you knew that.

Fortunately, these clowns are suffering for their own attacks. Michelle Bachmann had almost a million dollars tossed at her from the netroots after her neo-McCarthyite rant. Robin Hayes in North Carolina said almost the same thing ("Liberals hate real Americans") and now he's losing to Larry Kissell. Scott Garrett connected his opponent, a RABBI, to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and now Mike Bloomberg endorsed Rabbi Dennis Shulman. Every attack is having an equal and opposite reaction.

And us progressives have long memories. In 2002 Saxby Chambliss ran one of the most disgusting ads in recent memory, making a connection between Sen. Max Cleland (a war hero who left 3 limbs off the battlefield) and Osama bin Laden. Now, six years later, Chambliss is threatened in a race against progressive Jim Martin, and VoteVets is hammering him.



Payback's a bitch.

Tweety Tricked Me!

If you get into an intellectual war of words with Chris Matthews, and you lose, that's a disqualifying event for public life. Michelle Bachmann is just such a loser.

Chris Matthews laid a trap, and I walked into it. […]

Chris Matthews was using the term over and over, and I should not have used it. […]

This was Chris Matthews. I made a big mistake by going on the show. I never should have. […]

I just didn’t recognize — I never watched the Chris Matthews show before. I should have before I went on. I didn’t recognize that he would lay a trap the way that he did.

He laid this trap by allowing you to say what you were saying instead of cutting you off. And by taping it.

The D-Trip has an ad on the air in the district now, hitting her CONTINUED love of deregulation and the Wall Street cash she's taken for her campaign. I'm a little befuddled why they're not hitting the McCarthyism, but maybe the free media is doing that job for them. The idea that "hyper-regulation" caused the crisis is nutty, too. I hear that the NRCC might not save her from this one.

Bye bye Bachmann.

UPDATE: And now, in friendlier media outlets, she's just rearranging the words.

BACHMANN: All I did on Chris Matthews is I questioned Chris Matthews and said, “look, if John McCain had friends like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers and Father Pfleger, you’d be all over him Chris, but you’ve laid off of Barack Obama.” And so, he was using the word “Anti-American” and I told Chris, what I question are Barack Obama’s views. Because Barack Obama’s views are against America. They won’t be good for our country.

It's all so simple. All she did is say that Obama's views are against America. Now if that makes him anti-American, well, you must be one a' them liberal elitez.

Annals Of Republican FAIL

The past few days have seen Republican lawmakers, now endangered in the harsh political environment, just making with the crazy and seriously damaging their re-election chances.

And I'm not just talking about the unholy merger of Katherine Harris and Joe McCarthy, Michelle Bachmann, who's now trying to wiggle out of responsibility for her own words. By the way, her oppponent El Tinklenberg used that bounty of campaign cash to put up a pretty solid bio spot that highlights his support for light rail!



Fantastic stuff.

But there's plenty more out there that that. In NJ-05, Chris Smith is a Republican from New Jersey who has decided he's from Virginia:

Rep. Christopher Smith, a Republican who has represented central New Jersey since 1980, probably didn’t realize he was walking into a political minefield when his family requested a break on his daughter’s huge college bill.

Smith’s daughter, who until recently lived with him in the family’s Herndon, Va., home, obtained in-state tuition privileges at a prestigious Virginia university — saving the Smiths $20,000 per year off the $29,000 tuition charged to out-of-state students.

But what Smith saved in cash could end up costing him politically – Democrats says the claim to Virginia residency shows that Smith is out of touch with the New Jersey constituents he’s supposed to represent.

These residency switches always come back to hurt the candidate (see Rick Santorum in 2006). And Smith's opponent Josh Zeitz is a great progressive.

Then there's Bachmann II (Bachmann Turner Overdrive?), Robin Hayes, another Republican in a tight race who claimed that liberals hate America at a McCain event, and is now denying that he ever said it. That doesn't work in an age of YouTube.



We have another great opponent in NC-08, former textile worker Larry Kissell.

And then we get into some real problems for the GOP. Mitch McConnell is tied in his race with Democrat Bruce Lunsford, according to a Survey USA poll. McConnell is the Republican Minority Leader, and has run rings around Harry Reid with procedural motions and obstructionism in the Senate. The Republicans become MUCH weaker without McConnell. And you know he's nervous when he touts his ability to bring home earmarks for Kentucky. I don't think voters give a crap about seniority when they vote for a representative. I had written this off, but McConnell is in serious trouble. I'm not a Lunsford fan but this would really hurt the GOP.

And then, there's Bill Sali. This guy is a Congressman and not a junior high student?

"Congressman Bill Sali and his campaign staff disrupted a NewsChannel 7 reporter and a representative for his opponent during an interview Tuesday in Downtown Boise.

KTVB reporter Ysabel Bilbao was interviewing Walt Minnick's campaign director John Foster Wednesday afternoon. During the interview, someone loudly yelled and was laughing during the interview at the Grove plaza.

Bilbao and Foster initially ignored the intrusion, but quickly noticed the source of the heckling -- Sali and members of his staff. (...)

Foster said he saw Sali making faces at him and holding up "bunny ears.""

It's statesmanship like that which has seen Sali trailing in the polls to his opponent Walt Minnick. Yes, the Democrat is winning. In Idaho.

It really is falling to crap for Republicans...

Famous Last Words

Even I didn't expect the avalanche of cash raised mainly by the netroots for Elwyn Tinklenberg, the candidate running against neo-McCarthyite Michelle Bachmann in MN-06 after her disturbing comments on Hardball. Tinklenberg picked up nearly a half a million dollars in a matter of hours. Wow.

Meanwhile, Bachmann is denying what she said despite the existence of a little thing called videotape.

This morning, Bachmann tried to undo the damage. Appearing on WCCO (Minneapolis’ local CBS affiliate), Bachmann denied she ever called Barack Obama’s views “anti-American”:

HOST: You do feel his [Obama’s] views are anti-American?

BACHMANN: I feel his views are concerning. I’m calling on the media to investigate them. I’m not saying that his views are anti-American. That was a misreading of what I said. And so I don’t believe that’s my position. I’m calling on the media to take a look at what his views are [...]

That’s a lie. Here’s what Bachmann said on Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: So you believe that Barack Obama may have anti-American views?

BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned he may have anti-American views.

It would be absolutely poetic to see Bachmann defeated.

UPDATE: The D-Trip is throwing down a million bucks, too. Way to nationalize your race, Michelle.

Like McCarthy, But Clumsy

If you put Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann together you still wouldn't add up to the stature of a Joe McCarthy, who was one of the lowest and most execrable figures ever to haunt the halls of Congress. Which tells you a lot about Palin and Bachmann.

Palin, who has now taken to using the Secret Service to cover up the hate rhetoric at her own rallies, went around today saying she was happy to visit the pro-American areas of the country (I don't think she was referring to my little patch of Santa Monica). In context, it looks worse. Apparently only small towns are pro-American. I guess that kind of spirit leads to pro-American behavior like assaulting journalists:

I sidled up to one of the Obama supporters and asked why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish.
As he was telling me a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia got in his face to yell at him.

"Hey, hey, " I said. "I'm trying to interview him. Just a minute, okay? "

The man began to say something about how of course I was interviewing the Obama people when suddenly, from behind us, the sound of a pro-Obama rap song came blaring out of the windows of a dorm building. We all turned our heads to see Obama signs in the windows.

This was met with curses, screams and chants of "U.S.A" by McCain-Palin folks who crowded under the windows trying to drown it out and yell at the person playing the stereo.

It was a moment of levity in an otherwise very tense situation and so I let out a gentle chuckle and shook my head.

"Oh, you think that 's funny?! " the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. "Yeah, that 's real funny…" he said.

And then he kicked the back of leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

By the way, Joe Biden was perfect talking about this today: "It doesn't matter where you live, we all love this country, and I hope it gets through. We all love this country."

On Hardball today, Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) was asked about the "pro-American" quote and she essentially called for journalists to investigate all liberal members of Congress.



I associate myself with Katrina vanden Heuvel's remarks: "Chris, I fear for my country."



These people have touched off something very deep in a dark corner of the American psyche. They aren't just demonizing their fellow Americans, they are calling them into question. They are accusing them of treason. They are inciting. They are delegitimizing. They are summoning hatred and violence.

Palin will meet her fate in the Presidential election. But Bachmann and her neo-McCarthyism needs to be repudiated as well. Elwyn Tinklenberg isn't exactly my kind of Democrat (he's been endorsed by the Blue Dogs) but he isn't a vehicle for hatred and factionalism like Bachmann, a parrot for the basest elements of society. He's not that far behind in the polls, either. If you want to put an end to this, you can help out Tinklenberg here.