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November 01, 2008

A last desperate grasp for power

"Sadly, this is what we've come to expect from a desperate, dishonorable campaign that will say anything in a failed attempt to win this election," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement to the Boston Globe.

Obama made a comment at a rally in Iowa saying that his Primary win there had "vindicated" his faith in the American people. McCain attacked Obama's patriotism by responding at one of his rallies that he has always had faith in his country and that America "has never had to prove anything to me." Which elicited the above response from Obama's spokesman.

Even more pathetic than McCain's attack is the fact that it's nonsensical. As Matt Weiss, the 5th commenter on the Globe piece, clarified,

Not only is the attack on Obama's patriotism pathetic, as Obama rightly says, it's also bad English.

When Obama says his faith in the American people was "vindicated," he's saying he was proven right to have faith in them. "Vindicated" doesn't mean "renewed" or "revived;" it means "confirmed" or "substantiated."

This campaign has been so historic and exciting, but the constant barrage of slime, inuendo, jingoism and irrelevance from the McCain side has made me long for the end of it, and for a rebuke of this kind of divisiveness.

McCain isn't the only desperate Republican who has discarded any sense of ethical or moral propriety. Dirty tricksters in Florida are robo-calling Floridians with the patently false assertion that they can vote by phone, in what can only be described as a desperate attempt to suppress the vote. Another faceless Republican group is distributing official-looking flyers in Virginia claiming that due to the expected heavy demand that Republicans would be allowed to vote on November 4th (election day) and that Democrats would be allowed to vote on November 5th. You can see a copy of the flier at the bottom of the Wired post about the robo-calls. Again, the the only conceivable motive is to suppress Democratic votes.

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the New York Times, both the robo-calling outfit and the phony flier group are operating in the Pittsburgh area too. Which points to both being major organized operations rather than the isolated acts of a few malcontents. It's takes serious money and organization to pull off multi-state operations, as these clearly are.

Posted by Kevin at November 1, 2008 07:05 PM