Race To The Love Shack

Remember how easily John Sith McCain provoked Barack Hussein Obama into launching a race war that everybody outside of the Obamanational bubble....

....was too busy ridiculing to attend?  Well, the end result of this particular episode didn't change, but for reasons beyond baffling, Team Messiah couldn't resist prolonging their lord's PR crucifixtion:

Hey, it was the Tingle Channel, so you knew it was going to be a handicap match for Mr. Davis, and "one lies and the other swears to it" with Axelrod - which is a hilarious name for a campaign that is so racially paranoid it sees "phallic symbols" everywhere it looks.  More on that later.

The conjured-on-the-fly strategy to smear McCain with "injecting race into the campaign" by defending himself against Obama smearing him AS a racist was tiresomely and predictably scummy, not to mention head-splittingly loopy given BO's previous racial attack on Lord Queeg, the Oreo Discourse, and the Wright/Pfleger/Trinity United eruption that so indellibly defined Obama as the acolyte of racists and Marxists.  But, apparently give credence to the old "If life hands you a lemon" axiom, that's the talking point the Left is running with.

It was debuted a day earlier in the New York Obama:

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women…

[Team McCain's] retort [to Obama's "dollar bill" comment] was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs [sic] up another loaded racial image.

The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

Except the McCain "celebrity" ad made no "racial attack," as the Slimes op-ed takes for granted.  It was Obama's retort to it that was racist, and contemptible.

Where McCain erred, it would seem, is in suddenly getting defensive about that rather than staying on message, perhaps with another ad tut-tuttingly observing something like:

Leaders need to be able to take criticism in stride, even listen to and learn from it.  John McCain has spent his years in Washington listening to and heeding the advice of the American people [Yeah, that's crap, but work with me here].  But when Barack Obama was criticized for being long on celebrity and short on substance, he fell back on the same old liberal politics: playing the old, reliable race card against a man who has spent his entire life fighting for equal rights for all Americans.

Only one candidate has the poise, experience, and humility [must...restrain...uncontrollable...gagging] to lead:  McCain.

That would have been the exclamation point on the debacle for Lucifer.  Instead Team Sith swallowed the bait, took the righteous indignation route, and while not bailing Obama out, afforded him the chance to muddy the water sufficiently to let the storm to blow over.

Unfortunately for his disciples, The One wandered away from the teleprompter again:

“I was in Union, Missouri, which is 98% white - a rural, conservative. and what I said was what I think everybody knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates. But that I think that what people are really concerned about, what they’re looking for is fundamental change on the economy, things that are going to help their families live out the American dream.

‘There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this. What this has become I think is a typical pattern from the McCain campaign, whether it’s Paris Hilton or Britney or this phoney allegation that I wouldn’t visit troops. They seem to be focused on a negative campaign what I think our campaign wants to do is focus on the issues that matter to American families.”

Translation: "I knew I could call McCain the racist bastard he is in front of those bitter, Jesus-worshipping, gay-hating, gun-toting hicks because they're too stupid to understand what I was telling them.  Just as I know you don't have the brains to figure out that I really did blow off the wounded troops at Rammstein and Landstuhl to play tourist in Berlin, and if any of you do and don't obsequiously accept and cheer every word I say anyway, your names are going on my list."

Barack Obama's ego-mouth connection: the gift that keeps on giving.

The aforementioned New York Bathroom Tissue evidently decided by the weekend that it was time to make a "strategic redeployment" and tried to provide their candidate with covering fire:

Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles [!!!], but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida. [emphases brayingly added]

"A man of few rhetorical stumbles" other than every time he opens his mouth.  "Race is a fire that could singe both candidates" in the sense of (1) Obama always being the aggressor and (2) not knowing which end of the race-baiting bazooka is which.  "Reacted most cautiously" by calling McCain a racist for defending himself from the charge that he's a racist.  And you think I'm hyperbolisizing when I refer to the Obamanational "bubble"?  How about "Obamanational parallel universe"?  You know, the one Bizarro is from.

Still, how is "a few of [Obama's] words opened a racial door" markedly different from "Obama injected race into the campaign" (again)?  Amazingly, this rhetorical question actually occurred to the Washington Post:

First, Obama campaign officials, lacking any example of McCain ever pointing directly or indirectly at Obama’s race as an issue in the campaign, have backpedaled rapidly away from any suggestion that their Republican opponent is using the very tactics Obama suggested on Wednesday.

Campaign manager David Plouffe was pressed hard during a conference call on Thursday for examples and could not point to any. An inquiry to the Obama campaign later in the day produced no immediate response and later no answer to a direct question asking for evidence to buttress Obama’s suggestion that McCain would try to scare people into not voting for Obama because he’s black....

Before all this happened, McCain advisers believed that the Obama campaign successfully pinned a racist label on Bill Clinton during the during primaries — for comments that drew protests from some leading African American politicians — and were determined not to let the same happen to McCain. Also, they take personally any suggestion from the Obama campaign that they are part of a campaign that would play the race card and are indignant about it.

Well, righteous indignation may not have been PR savvy, but it was, at least, honest.  And it did address the "hidden/unconscious racism" dodge that has become the libs' rhetorical currency of the racial realm precisely because they can never cite examples of "racism" or "bigotry" from their conservative opponents outside their own overactively malevolent imaginations.  There does need to be pushback against that despicable racial McCarthyism, and Team Sith made a substantial downpayment on that.

By the time Sunday rolled around, the Tingle Brigades were left to try and stir up the fading embers of the race conflagration that wasn't.  Leaving, somehow appropo enough, Jon Stewart to affix a fitting coda - until the next chapter, of course:

UPDATE: A slip incapable of being Freudian?