E-Minus (NOW) 15 Days

A deficit frozen in amber....

POPULAR VOTE PROJECTION: Obama 50.4%, McCain 47.6% (unchanged)

ELECTORAL COLLEGE PROJECTION: Obama 364, McCain 174

“McCAIN MAXIMUM” (Total Electoral Votes including states in which he is within five points): 261

The Rasmussen daily tracking poll brings McCain back to within four points (50-46).

McCain reflips West Virginia today, FWIW.  But until he can at least get his "maximum" back to 270 or better, he is, to borrow a sports metaphor, "mathematically eliminated".

Had a coupla thoughts that kept me awake last night, and insomnia, like misery, just loves company.

Do you want an excruciatingly relevant definition of despair?  Try David Zublick's post on the death of free speech at Pittsburgh's KDKA talk radio "blowtorch" in deference to not being "unfairly biased" against Barack Hoover Obama, and then recall the past eight years of vicious lies, slander, libel, defamation, and assassination fantasies the Left has hurled at George W. Bush, of which the description "unfairly biased" would be the daintiest and politest of euphemisms.  Yet not only did Dubya's mythical "police state" not shut any of it down, but he never once defended himself, his administration, or his policies as they needed to be - something I'm convinced is a factor propelling Barry O to victory in two weeks.  To call this unfair, to call this unjust, to call this hypocritical, is like having your ballsack run over by a tank and saying that it "stung a little bit".  Yet we are helpless to do anything about it because the vicious liars, slanderers, libelists, defamers, and character assassins have successfully demonized and discredited ALL Republicans and ALL conservatives in the eyes of the American people.

Which brings me to my second pleasent thought to take with you into the outer darkness.  You know how McCain is doing yeoman work in trying to "Joe the Plumberize" Obama, pointing out repeatedly that B.O. plans to raise both taxes and trade barriers in the midst of a recession, something that even Keynesian socialists acknowledge is economically insane?  You would think that truism would have an impact on at least a critical cross-section of the electorate that is drifting in the Chicago Cherubim's direction, wouldn't you?  The connection between higher taxes and job destruction would seem to resonate at a time when people are worried about losing their jobs and the opportunity to create their own.

But are they hearing that message?  Or is the message discrediting any messenger that would bring it?  Remember where this election campaign turned: Wall Street collapses five weeks ago, McCain and the GOP don't get out in front on defining which party is truly responsible for it, the Democrats and the Enemy Media mendatiously but successfully blame Bush, the GOP, conservatives, and conservatism - including supply-side/pro-growth tax cuts - unopposed, and Republican numbers from the top of the ballot to the bottom go south.

Consequently, when most Americans hear McCain's warning about Obama raising taxes in a recession, is their instinctive reaction, "Oh, crap, he wants to take away all my hard-earned wealth and 'spread it around' to his corrupt, indolent Donk constituencies," or is it, "Good!  Sock it to those Wall Street bastards, Barry, and those dirty, greedy, no-good Republican SOBs who bailed them out!  Take it all away from them and give it to 'real people' like us!"?

We may, in short, have come full circle all the way back to 1932.

Happy Monday!

UPDATE: Clark Judge reminds me of a middle-of-the-night waker-upper from a few days ago: How is it that we endlessly hear only of the "Right-Wing Republican Smear Machine," and yet the only smears in this campaign have come from Team Messiah and the Enemy Media?  They've called McCain a racist half a dozen times since June, they've tried to destroy not just Sarah Palin but her entire family, and now last week they even tried to ruin the life of Joe The Plumber, aka Joe Wurzelbacher.

Now in a pure, Darwinistically pragmatic sense, you can understand why they'd want to waste McCain and Palin - they are the GOP ticket, after all - but Joe The Plumber?  He's not a Republican (that we know of); he's not even a politician.  He's a guy on a rope line at an Obama campaign stop.  Heck, he's precisely the kind of "little guy" for which Barry O claims to be "fighting".  And he's certainly no threat to gargantuan left-wing ascendancy.  Yet no less than the New York Times does a hit piece on him this past Friday.  The New York F'ing Times!  On a guy nobody had ever heard of a week ago!

This is not just the very real Left-Wing Democrat Smear Machine in all its infernal majesty, but already run malignantly amok before False Messiah has even been elected.  Imagine the jackbooted thuggery to come when he's in power, with mammoth Donk congressional majorities behind him.  Joe The Plumber will be far from the only "bitter clinger" to never be heard from again.

UPDATE II: I thought that Colin Powell was one of the most respected figures in America.  That's not to say he should be, but most everybody thinks he is.  So how does one go about turning him into an irrelevant peon?  Have him endorse The Chosen One, evidently.

Hugh can spin all he wants, but it seems to me that the endorsement of the architect of victory in the first Gulf War and Bush43's first SecState nullifies McCain's lone advantage on foreign policy and national security.  It is the veritable coup de grace (and, apparently, quid pro quo).  Or salt in the wound, as that McCain advantage was irrelevant anyway.

What does that leave Maverick to say for the next two weeks?  Hint: nothing "honorable".  Which means the crickets in the graveyard are going to be deafening.